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Jbg oce strucnjak da igra from the back, da pasovima otvara odbrane, Lindelof je tu veoma vazan jer ima taj pas koji cijepa protivnicke odbrane, valjda je dovoljan golman da brani gol. A od tog tandema nema nista, Di Marzio je javio da ce se dogovoriti sa Romom oko Smolinga za 15+3 miliona eura, na opste odusevljenje Rominih navijaca, to je apsolutna kradja naravno ali posto je debil dao na pozajmicu najboljeg stopera kojeg ima, i sad kad prekucava treba da se vrati i igra za klub? Jedino ako je poludio, vise postovanja su mu pokazali navijaci Rome za mjesec dana nego toksicni debili koji navijaju za Mancester Junajted kojima su za sve krivi SMoling i Dzons bili, a zna se kakvo ja misljenje o Dzonsu imam, ipak on i takav kakav je trenutno je drugi najbolji stoper kojeg imamo. Dakle kupuje se na ljeto novi stoper za 50+ miliona, jer Tuanzebe je dijete i trebace mu vremena da igra za prvi tim, kao i svim mladim stoperima ne mozes se osloniti na njega, a mozes li sebi da priustis 3-4 godine Lindelofa u prvom timu? Tesko.
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Chris Smalling: ‘There have been times I’ve played well and yet still you see the same players picked on. It’s tough.’ [The Athletic]
Chris Smalling is a vegan who doesn’t drink coffee with milk, but he offers The Athletic one on arrival at AS Roma’s training ground on the southern outskirts of the Italian capital. It’s very welcome after an eight-hour journey through a national strike, but the defender returns 10 minutes later looking slightly confused.
It’s not because he’s still smarting from a last-minute handball-that-wasn’t in the previous night’s Europa League game against Borussia Monchengladbach which led to an equaliser. Nor is it because one of his dogs, who arrived from England the previous day, is being moody with him.
“I asked for a latte,” he explains as he sits down for an exclusive interview. “And they’ve poured me a cup of milk. So I’ve had to explain that a latte is a coffee, but latte actually means milk.”
Smalling takes a little time to warm up, but when he really starts talking he’s engaging and open, a man who got three Bs at A level and had the confidence to move to Rome when it would have been easier not to.
He reflects on the reasons behind his switch, how he hopes it will lead to an England recall, Manchester United’s “false” league position and the death of his father, when he was just five.
“I started to think about playing away from United quite late in the transfer window,” he says of his move to Italy. “I’d signed a new (United) contract six months before and was playing regularly when Ole (Gunnar Solskjaer) came in.
“Then there was talk of a new centre-back all summer. That was no problem to me, it’s part of the challenge and United have signed Victor (Lindelof) and Eric (Bailly) in recent seasons. I welcomed them, I welcomed the challenge, worked hard and by the end of the season I’d played more than many in the squad.”
This season was looking different, though. “Ole went with Victor and Harry (Maguire) in the first couple of games and put Axel (Tuanzebe) on the bench for some experience which is fair enough. If I hadn’t played so much in previous years, I might have been happy playing Europa League games and coming into other games depending on form and fitness, but late in the window, I felt I needed a clear picture of where I was at.
“I was in constant dialogue with Ole and he told me that I would play a fair amount of games. I would’ve played 20-25 games, maybe more, but then Roma made their offer. It was put to me and I felt I could play 40-50 games with Roma, maybe twice what I’d play at United.”
Staying at United would have been the easy option for the new dad. “I could have picked up my wages, I’ve just become a father to a little boy of five months, I was settled in Manchester with my family. Coming to Rome was a challenge that I liked, a big club with big expectations. The manager doesn’t just want to get back in the top four, he wants to win a trophy. Roma have had some great Champions League nights recently, but the Europa League is important here this season.”
After 323 games for United (52nd in the club’s all-time appearance table with more United games than Nemanja Vidic or Cristiano Ronaldo) Smalling had the backing of those closest to him.
“My wife has always been supportive. She said: ‘If you want to move, we’ll all move. We’ll do what’s best for your football.’ I knew she’d say that, which I appreciated. So I moved. I lived in a hotel for a month and we moved into a beautiful house last week. It’s 700 hundred years old, just outside Rome. It’s surrounded by greenery which is important with our dogs. Everyone is here now and that feels good. I’ve had to change my wardrobe because I’ve been living in shorts and t-shirts. It was 28 degrees at the end of October – that’s a perk.”
The weather is reflected in Smalling’s clothes — a Roma training kit and flip-flops — and he might not have been the only Englishman basking in the autumnal Italian sun. Smalling has heard that Jack Rodwell is in the building and Roma are interested in signing him, but the Italians pass on the former Everton player. Despite this, Smalling is not short of visitors. A Manchester United official has come to check on him, while some friends will come from England to see the forthcoming game against AC Milan. And now he has waited for The Athletic to arrive after his team-mates had gone home.
When he follows them out of the training complex, he’ll be greeted at his house by two dogs — the last piece in a jigsaw which is fitting together nicely. Minutes on the pitch are, of course, a key part and he’s played every minute of Roma’s last seven games, scoring his first goal for the club in Wednesday’s win against Udinese. InStat, the scouting system, put Smalling in their Serie A team of the month for September.
But why did he leave Manchester United on a one-season loan? “I wanted to play every game,” is the simple answer. “I spoke to [Roma manager] Paulo Fonseca and he explained that he needed a centre back with the attributes I had. No player can be guaranteed to play every game, but I knew that if I was fit and performing then I would be able to play regularly. I’ve done that and the reaction from the coaching staff and the fans has lifted my confidence.”
But, despite just signing for a single season, Smalling is having Italian lessons. Inspired by bad experiences of some imports to England, he feels he needs to embrace the language.
“It’s not easy,” he says. “It doesn’t help that so many people speak English. I could get by off the pitch just speaking English, though I need to speak Italian on the pitch. I know the key words already.
“But it’s important to me to make the effort to learn Italian. It’s not ideal when the foreign lads come to England and their English isn’t great years later. Speaking the language makes a big difference off the pitch. I’m not going to be totally fluent by the end, but I’ll try my best.”
He can lean on quite a support network, even if one of the dogs may not have taken kindly to the sudden switch of location. “My mother-in-law has got a camper van and she brought our dogs here. I got back home at 10pm last night to see them for the first time in six weeks. The little one was pissed off with me because I’d left her for so long, the bigger one was happy to see me.”
Eden Dzeko and Aleksandar Kolarov both lived in Manchester when Smalling was there and the centre-back reveals that, despite knowing them as Manchester City players, he was not comfortable enough to contact anyone when he first pitched up in the Italian capital.
“We were rivals and they’ve been friendly, but I didn’t know anyone well enough to pick up the phone to when I arrived,” he says in his soft Kent accent. I received calls though. The captain Alessandro Florenzi messaged me when I was about to join.”
Smalling shows the message, which is written in English: “Hi Chris. I’m Alessandro Florenzi. Welcome to the club. I’m very happy for your arrival. See you soon.”
“Roma have been welcoming, they look at every detail,” he states. “The training is similar to United. We’re playing every 3-4 days so we recover, then play a possession game the day before the match. I’ve also worked a little more on tactics and pressing the line during the international break.”
That is another intriguing line of conversation for Smalling, who at 29 is arguably in his prime as a centre-back. He hasn’t added to his 31 England caps since 2017, with Gareth Southgate citing his inability to play out from the back — a surprise to Smalling as the feedback he’d received was positive.
“I won’t close the door on England until I’ve hung up my boots but the chances seem slim under Southgate regardless of how well I’ve done at United or here,” he explains.
“That’s the manager’s choice but I hope that situation changes. Maybe he’ll look at me in a different light playing well in Italy where they know a thing or two about defending. I think I’ll be a better player when I go back to Manchester next May.”
With the extra time at his new club while England were losing to the Czech Republic and then hammering Bulgaria 6-0 in the Euro 2020 qualifiers, what did he work on tactically?
“The manager wants the defensive line to be a lot higher than I’ve played before,” continues Smalling. “He wanted a quick and aggressive defender — that’s me! I’ve been watching clips and find the tactics interesting. It’s more tactical here, too. In Italy, they play with three or five at the back and with two strikers up, with a lot of balls into the channels. Teams are harder to break down. Every time the ball goes wide the strikers shift inside – it’s channel ball, channel ball, channel ball."
It’s a different style for Smalling. In England, most teams play with one striker and two central defenders can cover. Now, he must adapt, and the Italian lesson is proving tough, though he is learning quickly.
“Here it’s two versus two,” explains Smalling. “I feel more on guard, that I have to do a lot more because the manager wants us to play a high line. I’ve played with Fazio who speaks English and also Mancini, who signed in the summer. We’re getting stronger with each game and giving the other teams very few chances.”
Roma are fifth after nine games, with only one defeat. Smalling still watches every United game and is in touch with the squad. “I still speak to all the players – I was there a long time, they’re my friends,” he adds. “Tough times there at the moment, but the manager drops me messages. He’s watching me, he saw I’ve been man of the match and congratulated me. I think that Italian football suits aggressive and quick defenders who read the game well. I want to be a nuisance to the strikers here, just as I did in England.”
It works both ways, of course, and Smalling admits there are some strikers that were a nuisance to him in England. “Jamie Vardy is always a pest; he doesn’t stop running. A lot of strikers will run for the good ball – strikers like (Sergio) Aguero who is very good, one of the best but he wouldn’t run for a ball he’s probably not going to get. Vardy would, but he finds me annoying to play against too.”
Smalling has often been a scapegoat. Criticism has not been short from United fans in recent seasons and the defender is one of many players who have found themselves under the microscope.
“It’s unfair at times,” he says. “There have been times where I’ve played well and yet still you see the same one or two players picked on. It’s tough. I’m mentally strong and I don’t go into my shell, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect you.”
He notices the vicious criticism from people purporting to be United fans on social media, yet stays engaged in the hope of getting something positive from it.
“Social media can be a dangerous place,” he said. “We have the beauty of being able to share our message or opinions, but people can get too drawn on it. I wasn’t on social media until three or four years ago. I’m quite private I didn’t want to share everything about myself, but I also felt I could use my platform to help some of the things I’m involved in like FBB (Football Beyond Borders), a social education charity which tries to get struggling kids to focus in the classroom. Maybe people can relate to what I’ve been through — growing up without a father or missing out on a trial because we couldn’t get there as there was no car in the family as we couldn’t afford one.”
“My mum felt she was letting us down because she couldn’t get us to trials. I was released from Millwall because I couldn’t get there to train. Good can come from social media as we’ve seen from Raheem (Sterling) who spoke well about racism or Danny Rose about mental health.”
People don’t know Smalling, the person. Or they don’t know the detail. He hasn’t really spoken about his dad, who died when he was five.
“I can’t remember him,” he says. “I have a few pictures and had he died in modern times I would have had a lot more.”
Smalling opens his phone and shows a picture of his dad with his brother. “I look at it and it fuels me,” he says. “Dad had cancer. Lung. Smoker. He died in his early forties. I was lucky to have my brother when we grew up. We could share our problems, even if we weren’t the most open.
“Maybe I wish I was more open when I was younger. Mentioning dad was almost a taboo subject. My brother and I lied in school to pretend dad hadn’t died. We said he’d moved away. Mum was trying to shield us so it wasn’t discussed.”
Smalling’s first years were spent in Greenwich, but when dad his passed away, the three moved to Chatham and a council estate in the working-class Medway town.
“Mum had family there,” he explains. “She didn’t marry again. She raised us two. My brother and I wanted mum to be more sociable, to meet other people and live a little bit. She did have one friend, but we always came first to her. She sacrificed her life seeing us both through to 18 and finishing our A levels with good results. Mum pushed and encouraged us. She would be the one on the doorstep before it was even dark shouting ‘Christopher! Jason!’ because she wanted us in to do our homework. It was so annoying and a bit embarrassing.”
Theresa Smalling instilled punctuality, the importance of homework, and humility, it seems. “My brother did even better because he’s a bit smarter than me,” adds Smalling. “He got two As and a B. I had school teachers like Mr Emilino helping me too. He put me forward for trials and drove me to them — which got me into Millwall.”
Smalling was six weeks away from going to university while also working, riding his bike to a nearby hotel where he was initially a kitchen porter, before graduating to waiter. But this childhood Arsenal fan, who’d idolised Ian Wright, played for Millwall and joined another London club, Fulham, instead. It went so well that Arsenal wanted to sign him.
“In my head, I was going to Arsenal. Then Manchester United got in touch. I was leaving the team bus at Blackburn away and [Fulham boss] Roy Hodgson said: ‘we’ve accepted a bid from Man United’. That threw me. I felt there were more opportunities to play at Arsenal, but I spoke to Fergie and he said: ‘I wouldn’t sign you if I didn’t think you could play games.’ Maybe his aura felt right, but I made the right decision because I was soon playing alongside great players and winning the league.”
Smalling sits in the boardroom of the Trigoria training ground under an AS Roma badge. It’s where he signed his one-year loan deal two months previously. Pictures of the players sit above their lockers, there are more Roma logos on display than in the club shop at a training facility which has been updated with new pools and gyms. It’s also a place where supporters have made him feel welcome.
“The fans are crazy here, the stadium is very noisy, especially the ultras. People come up to me in the street and say “Forza Roma” all the time. Someone came to the training ground and presented me with a picture they’d drawn of my son Leo. You feel the love and that makes you more confident.”
As one of the players who has bridged the disappointing divide between the post-Ferguson era and the current Solskjaer reign, Smalling is one of the few who has seen United try to adapt since the most successful manager in British football history stepped down. They are currently in seventh place in the Premier League and questions surrounding their form, manager and business off the pitch, but Smalling believes the club is doing the right thing by planning for the long-term, though admits fans want to see the side moving forward.
“We’ve had good spells, we’ve won all the cups since Fergie left,” he continues. “We finished second under Jose. We haven’t been far away at times and we’ve produced in big games, we’ve gathered momentum but then it has fallen away. We’ve not had consistency or stability to win titles and it’s difficult to get it when there are so many managerial changes, but it’s such a demanding place that you need to deliver all the time. I like the idea of a longer-term plan like now, but you also have to see progress.”
Clearly, there is still a long way to go until United manage to win the Premier League again — something Smalling achieved twice early in his Old Trafford career.
“The first was probably my highlight,” he recalls. “I’d joined a club that had Vidic and Ferdinand, Wes Brown, John O Shea and Jonny Evans. All were pretty much in their prime, yet I played 33 times in my first season. Fergie managed players well; he’d tell you which games you were to play weeks in advance. He’d explain which areas I would be working on in training. I was young, but he still played me in the derby when Wayne scored the overhead kick in my first season. I did alright in derbies myself too.”
“Doing alright” is being modest. Smalling scored three times against Manchester City, including the winner in the 2018 game when City were leading 2-0 at half-time and about to lift the league against United.
“Defenders might say they prefer a last-minute tackle, but to score a winner in the derby in front of the away fans is better,” smiles Smalling. “We came into the dressing room shell shocked at half-time, we couldn’t believe how poor we’d played. There was silence for a minute before the manager went off on one, shouting and raving. It was justified. Then the players started exchanging angry words.”
There were angry words between the manager and players, and among the squad too. “It was as bad as I’d seen it, it was messy. They were about to win the league, but once we’d said our bit we flicked a switch. We regrouped, we changed our tactics, but tactics are only part of it.”
“We’d been missing aggression and belief,” explains Smalling. “That changed in the second half. We put them on to the back foot, we started to believe. Paul (Pogba) scored and he scored again. Then I popped up after Alexis whipped in a free-kick. The feeling was similar to PSG last season. On both those occasions, I celebrated so hard that I felt dizzy. I was shouting so loudly in that corner at PSG by the away fans. We’d been written off, we had injuries — and we went through. We did those fans proud that night, we just needed to do it more.”
Smalling has his own explanation for the malaise that followed Solskaer’s good start. “We went into free fall. Before Ole came we knew it hadn’t been good enough. We were waiting to start again. We did that on a run after he arrived, but we dipped and went back into our previous ways. Our confidence was fragile. We took a lot of criticism — and justifiably so — but we had a lot of younger players and we weren’t strong enough mentally when things didn’t go our way. We were mentally shot at times.”
A 4-0 defeat at Everton in April comes to mind. “It was one of the worst,” Smalling agrees. “We’d got into the mindset that whoever we were going to play was going to be a tough game. Difficult times.”
Are there leaders in that dressing room now? “The beauty of United is that it’s a good dressing room. We can have frank discussions and then move on. They’re not personal. This pre-season was a good one, a fresh start. The last pre-season was not. We felt like we could kick on this season.”
And yet it’s been a worse season than last year. United have won only three of their first 10 games. “The league position is unacceptable and, in my opinion, false. United have a genuinely good group. Injuries haven’t helped and I really do think the league position will improve. Does the squad need additions? Yes, no doubt. But there’s a good core there. The changing room I joined in 2010 was full of strong characters. Gary Neville was the funniest. He’d sit in the middle of the dressing room. If you fed him a nugget of information, be it a minor gripe over a schedule or food, off he’d go to sort it out.”
“They were great players too,” notes Smalling, “but it was a stable dressing room. They’d been there for years and that’s what changed after Fergie went. We had a massive change of players and I’m not saying that as an excuse because United have spent a lot of money, but the stability went. New managers come in and want to make their own mark and impose their own style.
“That’s fair enough, but each wants to bring their own players in. Two years later the manager goes and it all starts again. Managers need time to get that stability, but at the same time United have to be a lot higher than where they are.”
Smalling saw some big-name players arrive, some more successful than others. Robin van Persie was one. “He came to win the league and he had an aura. He basically wanted us to feed him the ball — and we did.”
The Dutchman was a success in Fergie’s final season. Others, later, were not, though it came as a surprise to the defender — one forward in particular. “This might surprise you but Angel di Maria was one of best players I’ve ever seen,” says Smalling. “It ended sourly, but when he first signed he looked incredible. He did it on the field at the start too, he chipped a goal at Leicester and I thought he would take us to the next level. All of us watched him and thought: ‘We just need to get him the ball and he’ll do something special’. It’s a shame it ended for him so quickly at Old Trafford, that he has been considered a flop because he’s a great player.”
There were more. Radamel Falcao came with a reputation as world-class striker, exciting fans when he arrived on deadline day in 2014. “One of the nicest guys I’ve ever come across,” recounts Smalling. “He spoke good English, he was friendly. He spoke to everyone at the training ground. We all really wanted him to do well and he had a frightening goalscoring record, but he arrived after a big injury and it didn’t happen for him.”
“Sometimes when things don’t work out the players are largely to blame and you don’t feel sorry for them. Falcao was different. He just couldn’t deliver because of what had come before. A year or two later and he was scoring again for Monaco.”
“I got on really well with Daley Blind,” Smalling says of another post-Ferguson signing. “He was so easy to play alongside. I speak to him regularly.
“He’d learned football the right way at Ajax, he was selfless — he would play left-back, central defensive or in the middle. He never kicked up a fuss, never disrupted the team. I’ve seen other players be disruptive and not been good for team morale, though not in a full stink-the-place-out kind of way.
“But when you have a player thinking of themselves it doesn’t help at all, especially after a defeat.”
Defeat is something Smalling has only experienced once in Rome so far — in his first match against Atalanta in Serie A.
Since then, things have been improving on and off the field, especially now his wife Sam, son and dogs around. All are vegan.
“I’ve been eating in the same vegan restaurant and the staff think I’m a sad man by himself, so I’ll take my family there,” he says. “Mum still watches every game I play and messages me after. She’s never critical! She might say that the team were bad and insinuate that I was too, but that’s as strong as it gets.”
It’s time to go, time to prepare for another game at home to AC Milan. Roma win 2-1 and Smalling plays another 90 minutes. Things are going well for him in Italy.
Chris Smalling is a vegan who doesn’t drink coffee with milk, but he offers The Athletic one on arrival at AS Roma’s training ground on the southern outskirts of the Italian capital. It’s very welcome after an eight-hour journey through a national strike, but the defender returns 10 minutes later looking slightly confused.
It’s not because he’s still smarting from a last-minute handball-that-wasn’t in the previous night’s Europa League game against Borussia Monchengladbach which led to an equaliser. Nor is it because one of his dogs, who arrived from England the previous day, is being moody with him.
“I asked for a latte,” he explains as he sits down for an exclusive interview. “And they’ve poured me a cup of milk. So I’ve had to explain that a latte is a coffee, but latte actually means milk.”
Smalling takes a little time to warm up, but when he really starts talking he’s engaging and open, a man who got three Bs at A level and had the confidence to move to Rome when it would have been easier not to.
He reflects on the reasons behind his switch, how he hopes it will lead to an England recall, Manchester United’s “false” league position and the death of his father, when he was just five.
“I started to think about playing away from United quite late in the transfer window,” he says of his move to Italy. “I’d signed a new (United) contract six months before and was playing regularly when Ole (Gunnar Solskjaer) came in.
“Then there was talk of a new centre-back all summer. That was no problem to me, it’s part of the challenge and United have signed Victor (Lindelof) and Eric (Bailly) in recent seasons. I welcomed them, I welcomed the challenge, worked hard and by the end of the season I’d played more than many in the squad.”
This season was looking different, though. “Ole went with Victor and Harry (Maguire) in the first couple of games and put Axel (Tuanzebe) on the bench for some experience which is fair enough. If I hadn’t played so much in previous years, I might have been happy playing Europa League games and coming into other games depending on form and fitness, but late in the window, I felt I needed a clear picture of where I was at.
“I was in constant dialogue with Ole and he told me that I would play a fair amount of games. I would’ve played 20-25 games, maybe more, but then Roma made their offer. It was put to me and I felt I could play 40-50 games with Roma, maybe twice what I’d play at United.”
Staying at United would have been the easy option for the new dad. “I could have picked up my wages, I’ve just become a father to a little boy of five months, I was settled in Manchester with my family. Coming to Rome was a challenge that I liked, a big club with big expectations. The manager doesn’t just want to get back in the top four, he wants to win a trophy. Roma have had some great Champions League nights recently, but the Europa League is important here this season.”
After 323 games for United (52nd in the club’s all-time appearance table with more United games than Nemanja Vidic or Cristiano Ronaldo) Smalling had the backing of those closest to him.
“My wife has always been supportive. She said: ‘If you want to move, we’ll all move. We’ll do what’s best for your football.’ I knew she’d say that, which I appreciated. So I moved. I lived in a hotel for a month and we moved into a beautiful house last week. It’s 700 hundred years old, just outside Rome. It’s surrounded by greenery which is important with our dogs. Everyone is here now and that feels good. I’ve had to change my wardrobe because I’ve been living in shorts and t-shirts. It was 28 degrees at the end of October – that’s a perk.”
The weather is reflected in Smalling’s clothes — a Roma training kit and flip-flops — and he might not have been the only Englishman basking in the autumnal Italian sun. Smalling has heard that Jack Rodwell is in the building and Roma are interested in signing him, but the Italians pass on the former Everton player. Despite this, Smalling is not short of visitors. A Manchester United official has come to check on him, while some friends will come from England to see the forthcoming game against AC Milan. And now he has waited for The Athletic to arrive after his team-mates had gone home.
When he follows them out of the training complex, he’ll be greeted at his house by two dogs — the last piece in a jigsaw which is fitting together nicely. Minutes on the pitch are, of course, a key part and he’s played every minute of Roma’s last seven games, scoring his first goal for the club in Wednesday’s win against Udinese. InStat, the scouting system, put Smalling in their Serie A team of the month for September.
But why did he leave Manchester United on a one-season loan? “I wanted to play every game,” is the simple answer. “I spoke to [Roma manager] Paulo Fonseca and he explained that he needed a centre back with the attributes I had. No player can be guaranteed to play every game, but I knew that if I was fit and performing then I would be able to play regularly. I’ve done that and the reaction from the coaching staff and the fans has lifted my confidence.”
But, despite just signing for a single season, Smalling is having Italian lessons. Inspired by bad experiences of some imports to England, he feels he needs to embrace the language.
“It’s not easy,” he says. “It doesn’t help that so many people speak English. I could get by off the pitch just speaking English, though I need to speak Italian on the pitch. I know the key words already.
“But it’s important to me to make the effort to learn Italian. It’s not ideal when the foreign lads come to England and their English isn’t great years later. Speaking the language makes a big difference off the pitch. I’m not going to be totally fluent by the end, but I’ll try my best.”
He can lean on quite a support network, even if one of the dogs may not have taken kindly to the sudden switch of location. “My mother-in-law has got a camper van and she brought our dogs here. I got back home at 10pm last night to see them for the first time in six weeks. The little one was pissed off with me because I’d left her for so long, the bigger one was happy to see me.”
Eden Dzeko and Aleksandar Kolarov both lived in Manchester when Smalling was there and the centre-back reveals that, despite knowing them as Manchester City players, he was not comfortable enough to contact anyone when he first pitched up in the Italian capital.
“We were rivals and they’ve been friendly, but I didn’t know anyone well enough to pick up the phone to when I arrived,” he says in his soft Kent accent. I received calls though. The captain Alessandro Florenzi messaged me when I was about to join.”
Smalling shows the message, which is written in English: “Hi Chris. I’m Alessandro Florenzi. Welcome to the club. I’m very happy for your arrival. See you soon.”
“Roma have been welcoming, they look at every detail,” he states. “The training is similar to United. We’re playing every 3-4 days so we recover, then play a possession game the day before the match. I’ve also worked a little more on tactics and pressing the line during the international break.”
That is another intriguing line of conversation for Smalling, who at 29 is arguably in his prime as a centre-back. He hasn’t added to his 31 England caps since 2017, with Gareth Southgate citing his inability to play out from the back — a surprise to Smalling as the feedback he’d received was positive.
“I won’t close the door on England until I’ve hung up my boots but the chances seem slim under Southgate regardless of how well I’ve done at United or here,” he explains.
“That’s the manager’s choice but I hope that situation changes. Maybe he’ll look at me in a different light playing well in Italy where they know a thing or two about defending. I think I’ll be a better player when I go back to Manchester next May.”
With the extra time at his new club while England were losing to the Czech Republic and then hammering Bulgaria 6-0 in the Euro 2020 qualifiers, what did he work on tactically?
“The manager wants the defensive line to be a lot higher than I’ve played before,” continues Smalling. “He wanted a quick and aggressive defender — that’s me! I’ve been watching clips and find the tactics interesting. It’s more tactical here, too. In Italy, they play with three or five at the back and with two strikers up, with a lot of balls into the channels. Teams are harder to break down. Every time the ball goes wide the strikers shift inside – it’s channel ball, channel ball, channel ball."
It’s a different style for Smalling. In England, most teams play with one striker and two central defenders can cover. Now, he must adapt, and the Italian lesson is proving tough, though he is learning quickly.
“Here it’s two versus two,” explains Smalling. “I feel more on guard, that I have to do a lot more because the manager wants us to play a high line. I’ve played with Fazio who speaks English and also Mancini, who signed in the summer. We’re getting stronger with each game and giving the other teams very few chances.”
Roma are fifth after nine games, with only one defeat. Smalling still watches every United game and is in touch with the squad. “I still speak to all the players – I was there a long time, they’re my friends,” he adds. “Tough times there at the moment, but the manager drops me messages. He’s watching me, he saw I’ve been man of the match and congratulated me. I think that Italian football suits aggressive and quick defenders who read the game well. I want to be a nuisance to the strikers here, just as I did in England.”
It works both ways, of course, and Smalling admits there are some strikers that were a nuisance to him in England. “Jamie Vardy is always a pest; he doesn’t stop running. A lot of strikers will run for the good ball – strikers like (Sergio) Aguero who is very good, one of the best but he wouldn’t run for a ball he’s probably not going to get. Vardy would, but he finds me annoying to play against too.”
Smalling has often been a scapegoat. Criticism has not been short from United fans in recent seasons and the defender is one of many players who have found themselves under the microscope.
“It’s unfair at times,” he says. “There have been times where I’ve played well and yet still you see the same one or two players picked on. It’s tough. I’m mentally strong and I don’t go into my shell, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect you.”
He notices the vicious criticism from people purporting to be United fans on social media, yet stays engaged in the hope of getting something positive from it.
“Social media can be a dangerous place,” he said. “We have the beauty of being able to share our message or opinions, but people can get too drawn on it. I wasn’t on social media until three or four years ago. I’m quite private I didn’t want to share everything about myself, but I also felt I could use my platform to help some of the things I’m involved in like FBB (Football Beyond Borders), a social education charity which tries to get struggling kids to focus in the classroom. Maybe people can relate to what I’ve been through — growing up without a father or missing out on a trial because we couldn’t get there as there was no car in the family as we couldn’t afford one.”
“My mum felt she was letting us down because she couldn’t get us to trials. I was released from Millwall because I couldn’t get there to train. Good can come from social media as we’ve seen from Raheem (Sterling) who spoke well about racism or Danny Rose about mental health.”
People don’t know Smalling, the person. Or they don’t know the detail. He hasn’t really spoken about his dad, who died when he was five.
“I can’t remember him,” he says. “I have a few pictures and had he died in modern times I would have had a lot more.”
Smalling opens his phone and shows a picture of his dad with his brother. “I look at it and it fuels me,” he says. “Dad had cancer. Lung. Smoker. He died in his early forties. I was lucky to have my brother when we grew up. We could share our problems, even if we weren’t the most open.
“Maybe I wish I was more open when I was younger. Mentioning dad was almost a taboo subject. My brother and I lied in school to pretend dad hadn’t died. We said he’d moved away. Mum was trying to shield us so it wasn’t discussed.”
Smalling’s first years were spent in Greenwich, but when dad his passed away, the three moved to Chatham and a council estate in the working-class Medway town.
“Mum had family there,” he explains. “She didn’t marry again. She raised us two. My brother and I wanted mum to be more sociable, to meet other people and live a little bit. She did have one friend, but we always came first to her. She sacrificed her life seeing us both through to 18 and finishing our A levels with good results. Mum pushed and encouraged us. She would be the one on the doorstep before it was even dark shouting ‘Christopher! Jason!’ because she wanted us in to do our homework. It was so annoying and a bit embarrassing.”
Theresa Smalling instilled punctuality, the importance of homework, and humility, it seems. “My brother did even better because he’s a bit smarter than me,” adds Smalling. “He got two As and a B. I had school teachers like Mr Emilino helping me too. He put me forward for trials and drove me to them — which got me into Millwall.”
Smalling was six weeks away from going to university while also working, riding his bike to a nearby hotel where he was initially a kitchen porter, before graduating to waiter. But this childhood Arsenal fan, who’d idolised Ian Wright, played for Millwall and joined another London club, Fulham, instead. It went so well that Arsenal wanted to sign him.
“In my head, I was going to Arsenal. Then Manchester United got in touch. I was leaving the team bus at Blackburn away and [Fulham boss] Roy Hodgson said: ‘we’ve accepted a bid from Man United’. That threw me. I felt there were more opportunities to play at Arsenal, but I spoke to Fergie and he said: ‘I wouldn’t sign you if I didn’t think you could play games.’ Maybe his aura felt right, but I made the right decision because I was soon playing alongside great players and winning the league.”
Smalling sits in the boardroom of the Trigoria training ground under an AS Roma badge. It’s where he signed his one-year loan deal two months previously. Pictures of the players sit above their lockers, there are more Roma logos on display than in the club shop at a training facility which has been updated with new pools and gyms. It’s also a place where supporters have made him feel welcome.
“The fans are crazy here, the stadium is very noisy, especially the ultras. People come up to me in the street and say “Forza Roma” all the time. Someone came to the training ground and presented me with a picture they’d drawn of my son Leo. You feel the love and that makes you more confident.”
As one of the players who has bridged the disappointing divide between the post-Ferguson era and the current Solskjaer reign, Smalling is one of the few who has seen United try to adapt since the most successful manager in British football history stepped down. They are currently in seventh place in the Premier League and questions surrounding their form, manager and business off the pitch, but Smalling believes the club is doing the right thing by planning for the long-term, though admits fans want to see the side moving forward.
“We’ve had good spells, we’ve won all the cups since Fergie left,” he continues. “We finished second under Jose. We haven’t been far away at times and we’ve produced in big games, we’ve gathered momentum but then it has fallen away. We’ve not had consistency or stability to win titles and it’s difficult to get it when there are so many managerial changes, but it’s such a demanding place that you need to deliver all the time. I like the idea of a longer-term plan like now, but you also have to see progress.”
Clearly, there is still a long way to go until United manage to win the Premier League again — something Smalling achieved twice early in his Old Trafford career.
“The first was probably my highlight,” he recalls. “I’d joined a club that had Vidic and Ferdinand, Wes Brown, John O Shea and Jonny Evans. All were pretty much in their prime, yet I played 33 times in my first season. Fergie managed players well; he’d tell you which games you were to play weeks in advance. He’d explain which areas I would be working on in training. I was young, but he still played me in the derby when Wayne scored the overhead kick in my first season. I did alright in derbies myself too.”
“Doing alright” is being modest. Smalling scored three times against Manchester City, including the winner in the 2018 game when City were leading 2-0 at half-time and about to lift the league against United.
“Defenders might say they prefer a last-minute tackle, but to score a winner in the derby in front of the away fans is better,” smiles Smalling. “We came into the dressing room shell shocked at half-time, we couldn’t believe how poor we’d played. There was silence for a minute before the manager went off on one, shouting and raving. It was justified. Then the players started exchanging angry words.”
There were angry words between the manager and players, and among the squad too. “It was as bad as I’d seen it, it was messy. They were about to win the league, but once we’d said our bit we flicked a switch. We regrouped, we changed our tactics, but tactics are only part of it.”
“We’d been missing aggression and belief,” explains Smalling. “That changed in the second half. We put them on to the back foot, we started to believe. Paul (Pogba) scored and he scored again. Then I popped up after Alexis whipped in a free-kick. The feeling was similar to PSG last season. On both those occasions, I celebrated so hard that I felt dizzy. I was shouting so loudly in that corner at PSG by the away fans. We’d been written off, we had injuries — and we went through. We did those fans proud that night, we just needed to do it more.”
Smalling has his own explanation for the malaise that followed Solskaer’s good start. “We went into free fall. Before Ole came we knew it hadn’t been good enough. We were waiting to start again. We did that on a run after he arrived, but we dipped and went back into our previous ways. Our confidence was fragile. We took a lot of criticism — and justifiably so — but we had a lot of younger players and we weren’t strong enough mentally when things didn’t go our way. We were mentally shot at times.”
A 4-0 defeat at Everton in April comes to mind. “It was one of the worst,” Smalling agrees. “We’d got into the mindset that whoever we were going to play was going to be a tough game. Difficult times.”
Are there leaders in that dressing room now? “The beauty of United is that it’s a good dressing room. We can have frank discussions and then move on. They’re not personal. This pre-season was a good one, a fresh start. The last pre-season was not. We felt like we could kick on this season.”
And yet it’s been a worse season than last year. United have won only three of their first 10 games. “The league position is unacceptable and, in my opinion, false. United have a genuinely good group. Injuries haven’t helped and I really do think the league position will improve. Does the squad need additions? Yes, no doubt. But there’s a good core there. The changing room I joined in 2010 was full of strong characters. Gary Neville was the funniest. He’d sit in the middle of the dressing room. If you fed him a nugget of information, be it a minor gripe over a schedule or food, off he’d go to sort it out.”
“They were great players too,” notes Smalling, “but it was a stable dressing room. They’d been there for years and that’s what changed after Fergie went. We had a massive change of players and I’m not saying that as an excuse because United have spent a lot of money, but the stability went. New managers come in and want to make their own mark and impose their own style.
“That’s fair enough, but each wants to bring their own players in. Two years later the manager goes and it all starts again. Managers need time to get that stability, but at the same time United have to be a lot higher than where they are.”
Smalling saw some big-name players arrive, some more successful than others. Robin van Persie was one. “He came to win the league and he had an aura. He basically wanted us to feed him the ball — and we did.”
The Dutchman was a success in Fergie’s final season. Others, later, were not, though it came as a surprise to the defender — one forward in particular. “This might surprise you but Angel di Maria was one of best players I’ve ever seen,” says Smalling. “It ended sourly, but when he first signed he looked incredible. He did it on the field at the start too, he chipped a goal at Leicester and I thought he would take us to the next level. All of us watched him and thought: ‘We just need to get him the ball and he’ll do something special’. It’s a shame it ended for him so quickly at Old Trafford, that he has been considered a flop because he’s a great player.”
There were more. Radamel Falcao came with a reputation as world-class striker, exciting fans when he arrived on deadline day in 2014. “One of the nicest guys I’ve ever come across,” recounts Smalling. “He spoke good English, he was friendly. He spoke to everyone at the training ground. We all really wanted him to do well and he had a frightening goalscoring record, but he arrived after a big injury and it didn’t happen for him.”
“Sometimes when things don’t work out the players are largely to blame and you don’t feel sorry for them. Falcao was different. He just couldn’t deliver because of what had come before. A year or two later and he was scoring again for Monaco.”
“I got on really well with Daley Blind,” Smalling says of another post-Ferguson signing. “He was so easy to play alongside. I speak to him regularly.
“He’d learned football the right way at Ajax, he was selfless — he would play left-back, central defensive or in the middle. He never kicked up a fuss, never disrupted the team. I’ve seen other players be disruptive and not been good for team morale, though not in a full stink-the-place-out kind of way.
“But when you have a player thinking of themselves it doesn’t help at all, especially after a defeat.”
Defeat is something Smalling has only experienced once in Rome so far — in his first match against Atalanta in Serie A.
Since then, things have been improving on and off the field, especially now his wife Sam, son and dogs around. All are vegan.
“I’ve been eating in the same vegan restaurant and the staff think I’m a sad man by himself, so I’ll take my family there,” he says. “Mum still watches every game I play and messages me after. She’s never critical! She might say that the team were bad and insinuate that I was too, but that’s as strong as it gets.”
It’s time to go, time to prepare for another game at home to AC Milan. Roma win 2-1 and Smalling plays another 90 minutes. Things are going well for him in Italy.
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