Southampton’s Graziano Pellè: I am more mature now and I know what I wantSouthampton’s Italian striker Graziano Pellè has blossomed late after facing up to the fact that he simply was not working hard enough
Four years ago, Graziano Pellè was going nowhere fast. A reserve at Parma, he was well into his mid-20s and showing no sign of fulfilling the potential that had once made him a teenage starlet. That was when the look in his father’s eye, and a barb from his agent, persuaded him to dig deeper.
“I always believed in my quality but it is one thing to think you are good and another thing to show it,” he says. “I was a good player but I was not that concrete. My agent helped me a lot. He said to me that I was not hungry enough to be successful. I am a proud person and that touched me so I said: ‘OK, I will show you.’
“Also, my family is really important for me … and when I was not playing much it was not nice for me to see my father not happy. He said to me: ‘Don’t be on vacation.’ He was not ‘you have to play football’, he was more relaxed, thinking more to educate me in normal life than just to play football, but of course he knows that I had some quality and he didn’t want that I waste the hard work that he maybe did to make me alive.”
Pellè honed his focus, although, as it happened, the key break came while he was on holiday in Ibiza. There he bumped into a friend of the son of Ronald Koeman, who was then the manager of Feyenoord. Pellè had briefly worked with Koeman at AZ Alkmaar, the Dutch club the striker had joined in 2007 from his hometown team, Lecce, for whom he had made his Serie A debut at 18 before fading. “I said: ‘Say hi to Ronald Koeman and ask him to bring me to Feyenoord!’” says Pellè of his chance meeting in Ibiza. “It was just a saying but in the end it went like that. A good vacation!”
Koeman brought Pellè to Feyenoord in 2012, first on loan and then permanently, and the Dutchman then made the Italian one of his first signings after his appointment at Southampton last year. Pellè had not been prolific at Alkmaar, where he was signed by Koeman’s predecessor, Louis van Gaal (“a good coach, a strong mentality, works on details, you improve a lot with him,” says Pellè), but Koeman evidently saw the fearsome goal-getter the player could become. The manager figured that Pellè’s latest flop in Italy was an opportunity to be seized.
“He gave me a lot of confidence, let me play also when probably I didn’t deserve to play because he knew I needed time after the period I was not playing that frequently,” says Pellè. “He gave me the good chance to be the main striker. I always say that if he is here in Southampton, it’s because of me, because I scored 60 goals [at Feyenoord].” Pellè’s hearty laugh makes it clear that joshing is part of the pair’s relationship. “He is a great coach, was a great player … and he doesn’t need to have good words from me because he has a lot of people [praising him].”
Graziano Pellè helped Southampton to seventh in the Premier League last season and is confident the club will enjoy a strong campaign this time around too. Photograph: Jordan
Now Pellè is the main striker at Southampton, doing what Dani Osvaldo, an Italy international signed for a club-record fee in 2013, spectacularly failed to do by emerging as a viable long-term replacement for Rickie Lambert. Saints are heavily reliant on him and he relishes the responsibility while welcoming the fact that there is relatively little external scrutiny on the south-coast club.
“Here is not Manchester, where after a bad game everybody is talking and giving their impressions,” he says. “I come from Italy, where the pressure is on top of you, but here is more relaxed, it’s a nice environment. Everybody is working hard from the physio to the coaching staff. There are great people working around us and they give us the feeling that it just depends on us if we do well because they give us everything we need. So it’s up to you to work to achieve what you want. I am more mature now and I know what I want.”
What he wants is to justify the faith that Koeman and the club have in him – and he knows how his worth is measured. “If I play a really bad game but score one goal, the day after you will see me on all the front pages. That’s the good part of being a striker. But on the other side, you can play a good game but you don’t score and after you will see: ‘Oh, he was bad.’ As a striker you have to score goals. You know that the players behind you need you to do that. Maybe I don’t have to score 30 goals a season to do well with the team but still, I’m a striker, and at the end of the game if I didn’t score a goal and get an assist, it stays with myself because I’m an ambitious person.”
Having pushed himself, belatedly, to pursue his ambitions, Pellè, 30, cherishes English football because it will not let him ease off, something he realised in pre-season even before his first Premier League campaign. “We had matches against Championship or lower-division clubs and they were all tough games. It doesn’t matter who we played, it was always difficult. That already made me focus and say in my head: ‘I can’t relax a moment in this competition,’ which maybe I could do in the Eredivisie. Sometimes there I was maybe a bit stronger than the other players because they were younger so sometimes even playing at 80% I could achieve what I usually do when I’m 100%. But here in England every small percentage is important because all players in every teams are really competitive.
“Hopefully I will always reduce the percentage of mistakes in the game and always have more focus. The small details that make you work harder in the week to be prepared in the game. I understand many things that you need time to understand. I am a very open-minded person, I like to travel and see different cultures so I like to adapt to another part of the world. It was just a pleasure for me to come to England and the best competition in the world.”
Southampton finished seventh last season and despite another summer of transition at St Mary’s and strengthening elsewhere, Pellè is confident they will do well again this term. “It’s not easy to say because all the teams now are building really good squads, the difference is minimal. Newcastle is a great team but now is struggling and, wow, on top we have Leicester and West Ham! That is also the beautiful part of this league. I can’t say for sure where Southampton is going to be but I am pretty sure we are going to do another great season.”
And, as things now stand, at the end of the season he will go to the European Championship as Italy’s first-choice striker, his late blooming at Southampton having finally earned him a senior call-up for his country a decade after he prospered in their youth teams. “There was a moment in my career where I was not performing that well and was not playing much and I was watching Italy winning the World Cup and so on and in myself I was saying: ‘Why can’t I be there?’ But I knew that if I kept doing what I was doing – not playing and not performing well – then probably I could never do it. But when I started to play well and then I came here, I thought: ‘I can be there.’ The national team trainer has given me the chance to play and I’ve done well most of the time. Now I try to keep a tight hold of the shirt in my hand. It is an amazing feeling.”
Guardian
