Ranieri assesses Lorenzo Pellegrini’s negative moment: “I told him ‘I want you to enjoy yourself.'” | OneFootball

Claudio Ranieri went in depth in his assessment of Lorenzo Pellegrini’s negative spell.

During his pre-Atalanta press conference, the veteran technician shared his view of the situation concerning the struggling Roma captain.

“I told him: ‘You’re running around like crazy. You’re feeling the pressure. I want you to enjoy yourself. So now we’re going to switch off, reset and you’ll see that you’ll go back to being the midfielder I know.’

“I’ve had two amazing goalscoring midfielders in my career. One is [Frank] Lampard and the other is Pellegrini. He comes in for a lot of criticism but how many midfielders score as many as Pellegrini?”

“My job at the moment is to help Roma. And in helping Roma, I was very clear with Lorenzo, I told him, ‘Lorenzo, this is my plan.’”

“In football you never know how long such things last. I can tell you that he’s started scoring goals in training, hitting the target more than when I first arrived. I don’t know how long it will last.”

“You can tell when a striker is in form: when he shoots, he always hits the target. When he’s not in form, he misses the target. Now his shots are always on target. He’s scoring. He’s started the reset process that he needs. He’s a very sensitive lad, very introverted, and the situation is affecting him more than others.”

“I read somewhere that he was supposedly responsible for [Daniele] De Rossi getting sacked. There’s no truth in that. None whatsoever. The fans should know that. It wasn’t [Gianluca] Mancini, or [Bryan] Cristante, or Pellegrini that got Daniele sacked. On the contrary, they did all they could to keep him. People need to know the truth.”