Several months ago we’ve all speculated about the acquisition of the all-known trouble maker Pablo Daniel Osvaldo, since he didn’t make it in any of his former teams like Roma, Fiorentina and lately Juventus despite his obvious talent and eye for goal, and even at his foreign experience with Southampton in the English Premier League in which he punched their captain in the locker room, but Inter decided to gamble against all of this warnings and obvious big NOs and get him thankfully on loan.
Now Osvaldo, as expected, had made a situation at Inter too, causing the relationship between the Italian-Argentine Striker and the Milanese club to reach a no turning back point, so let’s have a look at this situation, analyse the reasons and actions leading to such a misery and work out a feasible way out of it.
Osvaldo joined Inter on a season long loan from Southampton with the option to buy at the end of season, he has been substantially good with the ball and useful for the team, actually better than expected too instead of going on punching his teammates (as he has done before on several occasions) or insulting his coaches, but it was just a matter of time before his true villain inside rose to rule over his body and act as the typical Osvaldo, the enemy of his own self.
During the last Juventus encounter at the Juve Stadium, Icardi failed to pass the ball to Osvaldo in a touch of selfishness from the youngster. That was not the problem, the problem was when Osvaldo decided to rush for his Argentine compatriot hurling insults on him and god knows what else would have happened if not of Guarin’s stance that prevented him from exaggerating the situation, resulting in harsh decisions from the Inter management and coaching staff in banning Osvaldo from joining the team in training forcing him to do it separately and deciding not to include him in the then next game against Genoa, and ending up by deciding that they don’t need him anymore and putting him on the transfer market.
The question here is: are we being unfair to Osvaldo?… In my honest opinion I think yes, after all he didn’t actually punch Icardi, he was rightfully frustrated at not being passed the ball in a great position to score the sitter in a game against your life long rivals, his actions after the game, in swearing at the coach and sprinting down to the locker room where he erroneously thought Mauro Icardi was in, of course, are significantly less forgivable, but didn’t we have similar incidents with that in the past?… (Materazzi & Balotelli, Ibrahimovic & Adriano).. And more importantly, are these sins so grave that he can’t come back into the team?
He got a perfectly reasonable punishments, But does this one hiccup immediately cost him his future at the club? Especially after being so good for the first six months of his spell, he’s a hot head we all can give him that, but we knew that when we signed him. What I did not expect, however, was quite impressive performances, For Inter now he has five assists and seven goals in 19 matches. That’s not just impressive, given the previous management, but genuinely dangerously good, he has at times served as the ‘tip’ of the team, a role which will now be fair to be dominated by Icardi, but he really impressed me in a more attacking midfield/forward role where he isn’t the sole player responsible for scoring goals for us, he is a real asset to our game that adds a lot of depth and needed experience to the team.
Now thinking about the team, if we sell him we will be left short in the attacking department with Palacio struggling in injury crisis since god knows when and even if he recovered, he is not the old known Palacio which is now more useful as a right wing, so we have only Podolski and Icardi in that position, in addition to the untested unexperienced youngsters in Bonazzoli and Puscas (who are linked with Genoa too in the recent days) but I really don’t expect them to be given much of a chance to claim that for their own. The next few days is really crucial for Osvaldo that if resolved properly we could have a potentially great player who could do an effective job for us on our hands. Remember, Osvaldo’s temper affects his price, by no means is he an €8 million player now. That being said, there is the inherent risk that this could boil over, and at the same time, a permanent transfer is a very different story now that we cannot help ourselves with.
What we can do now is just wait and see where this goes in the next few days, with lots of possibilities rumoured from an Osvaldo-Quagliarella or Osvaldo-Darmian or even Osvaldo-Destro swap to his return to Boca Juniors or even staying at Inter after refusing so many offers from lowly Serie A sides like Torino and Cagliari.
What do you say of this case, and what is the best possible way out?
