Penalties, penalties… and maybe more penalties?

By: Jake | August 30th, 2008

Hello, I’m Jake, and yes, I am a Roma and De Rossi supporter or fan, whichever you like. But surely you don’t care that much about that. After yesterday Michele did a nice little introduction to this blog, I’ll be discussing De Rossi’s penalty taking.

We all know that Danielle does like to take the odd penalty, for both club and country. Although he doesn’t always score them, he can take a mean spot-kick, well, sometimes. But still that doesn’t stop him from being fantastic, does it?

He does have sometimes crack under the pressure with spot-kicks (namely the Man United game), let’s have alittle look at some of them, he has taken.

World Cup 2006 – vs. France
Great penalty, helping Italy win the World Cup, so close to going over, just to think if it did? Would DDR be the same, if he had missed because that one it would have hurt. But thankfully he kept his cool and helped Italy win the World Cup.

Super Coppa 07 & 08 – vs. Inter
Scoring both, the winner in ’07, and one that really didn’t mean that much in ’08, but still two good penalties. And in the 2008 game it was really nice to see DDR score a penalties after the two high-profile misses he made not long before it.

Genoa –
With little time remaining, we needed to score to stay in the Serie A title race. And De Rossi was the man who stepped up and powered home the penalty. If this wasn’t smashed in, really I don’t think we would have scored in open play and De Rossi handled it well and scored, and showed how much he loves Roma with the celebration… some what like a war-cry or something from a video game like ‘Age of Empires’ with the special abilities some characters have, If you know what I mean. If he had other special abilties one would be ‘being simply awesome’

Champions League – vs. Manchester United
If this was scored how much would this have had changed the game? We would then only need one more goal to go to extra time, but he just couldn’t score this one. But hey, atleast when it smashed over into the crowd it most likely broke the face of a yob Man United fan?…ok, ok maybe that was alittle mean.

Euro 2008 vs. Spain
Going up against one of the best goalkeepers in the world for this one, not the best penalty but still a decent one nonetheless, missing both this and the Champions League penalty must have been heart-breaking, and it must have taken something to step up against Inter Milan and put it in the back of the net. And even with the misses De Rossi is still great. He could miss many more ‘pens’ and im sure all Roma fans would still love him.

After scoring against Inter, will De Rossi regain some penalty taking confidence? I hope so and with rumours saying that this season Totti won’t be taking the spot-kicks, should De Rossi be taking them now? Or should the small man from Chile, Pizarro be taking them since he seems to score everyone he takes. I’d personal like to see De Rossi take them to see how he goes, since he hopefully has regained the confidence for them and hopefully he can handle the pressure against the big teams taking them. But even if it is De Rossi or Pizarro I’m sure they’ll be best of friends saving each other in times of need And before we go I saw this on Mr Pizarro’s wiki page, nothing to do with De Rossi but I thought it was laughable.

‘His height may be misleading, but his performances on the field are anything but small in terms of quality or quantity.’