Beşiktaş before Kocaelispor: Reading Italiano's training session amid the Vlahovic noise

The rain in Istanbul in October is not like the rain in Chengdu. Chengdu rain comes at the end of summer, heavy, pounding the grass at the Rongcheng stadium so hard that a passed ball does not roll - you have to push it with your whole foot. Istanbul rain is thin, persistent, soaking into the shoulders of anyone standing by the touchline for more than ten minutes. The Beşiktaş training session took place in that kind of rain, and I watched it through footage a Turkish colleague sent over. The first thing that struck me was not the passing. It was the accompanying headline. One name - Dusan Vlahovic - was placed at the top, while across twenty minutes of footage below there was not a single frame related to him. On the grass there were only 5v2 rondos, the sound of studs scraping wet turf, and an Italian coach patiently correcting his players' running steps. I sat for a long time with that mismatch. Because in my trade, the gap between the headline and the grass is usually where the real story begins. Beşiktaş enter matchweek 7 of the Trendyol Süper Lig with a fixture Turkish observers call a must-win. The opponent is Kocaelispor, a newly promoted side typically predicted to sit in the lower half of the table. In the power structure of Turkish football, Beşiktaş belong to the Big Three alongside Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe - clubs expected by default to compete for the title or a European place. But that historic status no longer comes with matching financial power. Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe have spent more heavily in recent seasons, and Beşiktaş must compensate through another path: efficiency in the transfer market and the impact of the coach. That is the context that brought Vincenzo Italiano to Istanbul. At the mid-point of his coaching career, Italiano rose at Fiorentina with a clear identity: a possession-based side, high pressing, a 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3 with demanding physical requirements. This is a different direction from Beşiktaş's more pragmatic earlier eras. Appointing him is a statement of style, and every training session is read through that lens. Meanwhile, the name Vlahovic appears in the headline as a separate layer of information, with no body text to back it. The Serbian striker of Juventus has been mentioned in Turkish and Italian media as a Beşiktaş target in recent windows. But in this article there is no deal structure, no fee, no wage terms, no negotiating detail. Only a name at the top, and below it a training session. This session must be placed in its correct time frame. Matchweek 7 of the Süper Lig falls in early October, when European clubs begin to enter the dense rhythm of the season. This is not a moment of fitness crisis, nor a peak of form. It is the middle ground - where a club's identity is taking shape, where new coaches are installing principles, and where every session is a brick. The session structure follows a template any regular at European training grounds would recognise: warm-up runs, 5v2 rondo, half-field shooting, then a small-sided game with two goals in a narrow area. This is the standard tapering model in a matchweek. Precisely because it is standard, people skim it and miss the signal hidden in the time allocation between blocks. Twenty years on the touchline taught me one thing: whichever block a coach gives the most time to is where he believes the match will be decided. In this session, the longest block was the 5v2 rondo - keeping the ball against a five-man swarm with two cutters. To outsiders it is a familiar warm-up game. To me, it is a signature. A 5v2 rondo does not simply teach ball retention. It teaches two things at once: the first reaction on losing the ball, and the pressing trigger the moment an opponent touches it. When a coach stops a rondo to correct the position of the third man - the player who does not touch the ball but moves to open the passing lane - he is installing a decision-making model, not a fitness drill. This is Vincenzo Italiano's fingerprint. At Fiorentina, his sides were known for pressing immediately after losing the ball, for the hunger to win it back within the first few seconds. The rondo is the soil in which that reflex is sown. I once spent an entire summer counting how many times a coach stopped a drill midway. At Chengdu Rongcheng, every time the coach halted a rondo I noted it in my book: who he stopped it for, at which position, and what he said. After forty sessions, a pattern emerged. Good coaches do not stop drills for a bad pass. They stop for a wrong position. A bad pass is a symptom. A wrong position is the disease. In the Beşiktaş footage, Italiano stopped the drill at least three times, and all three times he pointed at the space between two players, not at the ball. That is the mark of a man teaching structure, not technique. One thing must be said plainly about the limits of this analysis. A training report does not publish xG, does not publish PPDA, does not publish possession share. All I have is a qualitative description of the session's content. If someone tells you they can read Beşiktaş's specific tactical intent for the Kocaelispor match from a training report like this, hold on to some scepticism. The grass says a lot, but it does not say everything. And a serious trade writer must know how to draw the line between what he sees and what he infers. What the rondo tells me is verifiable through Italiano's coaching record. At Fiorentina, his teams typically posted low PPDA - passes allowed per defensive action - meaning aggressive pressing. A low figure means the team must run a lot. And this is where I must stop at something I have pursued throughout my writing career: distance covered and sprint counts. People package distance covered and sprint counts as effort metrics. A player who runs twelve kilometres in a match is lauded as a warrior. But ineffective running also produces beautiful numbers. A midfielder who runs twelve kilometres, eight of which are spent chasing a ball already lost, is not effort - that is erosion. The rondo, if misread, produces exactly those numbers. Passes exchanged inside a circle create the impression of a dynamic team, but the real question is: is the team running to keep the ball, or running to win it back where it can do damage? I saw this in Chengdu. In the season the newly founded club won promotion, their fitness metrics were so pretty the coaching staff printed them and pinned them in the dressing room. But when I reviewed the footage, most of their running was chasing the ball in chaotic defensive phases. Beautiful numbers concealed an ugly truth: the team did not control matches. When they learned to hold the ball, distance covered fell, and results improved. That is the lesson a stats sheet never tells. That is why I looked at the session's third block: half-field shooting. In the tapering template, this block is usually treated as sharpening the feel for goals. But when a coach gives it significant time, there is usually a reason in the previous match data. The team creates chances without converting them, and the staff decides to restore sharpness to finishing. I do not have Beşiktaş's goal or shot data to confirm this. But if a session keeps a dedicated finishing block, it is often the sign of an unspoken worry. A team confident in its scoring would spend that time elsewhere. I remember another Chengdu session, during a goal drought. The coach had the strikers shoot continuously for forty minutes, until it grew dark and the floodlights had not yet come on. No one said a word about the missing goals. But everyone understood. A training session is where worry is acknowledged without words. In the Beşiktaş footage, the finishing block was shorter than the rondo block. That is a small but worth-noting signal: the finishing worry, if any, is not yet the biggest. The biggest worry, for Italiano, remains ball retention and pressing structure. The final block is the small-sided game with two goals in a narrow area. This is a conditioning-meets-tactics drill where space is compressed to force quick transitions. Narrow pitch, two goals, meaning every lost ball becomes an opponent chance within seconds. This drill rewards directness and transition speed. But it does not reveal the matchday formation. A side can play 4-2-3-1 in a small-sided game and line up 4-3-3 on the day. The grass of a training session is the grass of principles, not of line-ups. This is where I want to speak about something I have observed for nearly four decades, and it irritates me whenever I am asked what modern football's trend is. Inverted wingers are homogenising football. In almost every training session of every big European club, you see the same drill: a wide player receives in the channel, then immediately seeks to invade the half-space inside, ceding the flank to an overlapping full-back. This shift creates numerical superiority in the middle, but it also erases a type of player: the traditional winger, the one who lives by hugging the touchline, dribbling past his man and crossing from the byline. In the small-sided game Beşiktaş ran, directness is rewarded. That fits the trend. But I ask myself: when every team focuses on the half-space, who stretches the opponent's width? When every wide player wants to come inside, the flank becomes vacant land, and full-backs must shoulder both the length and the width of the pitch alone. This is a trade-off modern football often hides under the label of flexibility. The truth is it impoverishes a skill, not enriches it. I do not oppose evolution. I oppose uniformity. When all teams play alike, football loses the material of surprise. And in history, the teams that left the deepest marks were usually the ones bold enough to swim against the current. They kept a traditional winger, a striker who could only head the ball, a defensive midfielder who could not pass long. Those anomalies are the seasoning, and without seasoning a dish, however nutritious, is bland. Back to Italiano. At Fiorentina, his sides operated with high physical demands and strict positional discipline. A session labelled fitness and tactics at matchweek 7 - early October - reflects a normal mid-season load, not a recovery session after a crisis, nor an emergency session. This is an important signal. If a team must train fitness and tactics in a matchweek instead of only light recovery, it often shows the staff judged recent matches insufficiently sharp. But early in a season, with a new coach, installing tactical patterns takes time, and such a load is reasonable. This is the point I want to stress methodologically: a matchweek 7 session under a new coach is usually about sowing rather than harvesting. Italiano needs time for his principles to become reflexes. Rondo, finishing, small-sided game - those are three layers of the same process: sowing the reflex to keep the ball, sowing the reflex to finish, and testing the reflex to transition. Read this session as a statement about a specific match and you will read it wrong. It is a page in a book still being written. And this is what those who only read the scoreline do not see. In the final eight months of a second-division club in Chengdu, I sat on the touchline for more than forty sessions. I learned that whether a team is heading in the right or wrong direction is not shown by tomorrow's result, but by repetition. If a principle is repeated session after session, it enters the match. If it appears once for show, it disappears. The 5v2 rondo in this session does not tell me Beşiktaş will beat Kocaelispor. It tells me Italiano is still patient with his principles, and that is what a beat keeper must record. There is another risk I want to mention, and it belongs to psychology rather than tactics. Kocaelispor are newly promoted. In football, matches against lower-ranked sides always carry a trap: complacency. A big club walking into a match with the game already won in its head is often the most vulnerable. Beşiktaş organising a full session before this match is a positive signal. It shows they do not treat the opponent as a formality. But that signal only counts if it is repeated in the actual match, through pressing intensity and focus in every phase. On the market side, I do not have enough data to assess Beşiktaş's finances. A training report contains no broadcasting revenue, no commercial revenue, no wage bill, no net debt. Any financial analysis based on this article would be speculation, and I refuse to speculate. The only thing I can say is that Turkish clubs have historically been monitored by UEFA over financial fair play, and Beşiktaş has previously been subject to settlement agreements. That is background context, not information from the article. This is where I must speak about the gap between the headline and the grass. Across more than twenty minutes of training footage, there was not a single frame of Vlahovic. No shirt of his, no stride of his, no detail suggesting he is training in Istanbul. Yet his name sits at the top of the article. To a long-serving professional, this is not a transfer story. This is a media phenomenon. Turkish sports media often use star names to drive clicks, especially in quiet periods such as international breaks or the weeks before a match against a lower-ranked side. The name Vlahovic has been mentioned as a Beşiktaş target in previous windows, and it is enough to generate heat. But a name in a headline is not a deal. There is no fee, no wage term, no confirmed intermediary. If a reader sees the headline and believes Beşiktaş are genuinely pursuing a Juventus striker, they are being led far from the reality of the grass. The irony is that this very headline conceals the article's real signal. An ordinary reader will click because of Vlahovic, read a few lines, find only running and passing, and leave. They will not know that beneath the headline is a coach installing a pressing system, and that the system demands something Turkish football sometimes lacks: patience with the process. There is a counter-intuitive reading here. If Vlahovic were genuinely a target, such a deal would carry panic-premium risk - a big late signing to placate opinion, with a high wage and immediate expectations. Beşiktaş have historically made such signings. But the bigger question is: does a team building a pressing identity in Italiano's style need a big striker who demands long balls and service inside the box? This is a tactical contradiction the media rarely raises. A resonant name does not automatically fit a system. Sometimes it breaks the system. I once witnessed a similar story, albeit on a much smaller scale. In the last summer under the Chengdu rain, a young player was rumoured to be joining our club. The rumour spread across the city. Fans bought shirts printed with his name before the contract was even signed. Then the deal collapsed, and disappointment turned to anger. The name in the headline had created an expectation the grass could not meet. That year's rain washed away many things, but it did not wash away the memory of one summer - nor the lesson about the gap between rumour and truth. To me, the article's real signal is not in the headline. It is in the staff choosing to organise a full fitness-and-tactics session before a match against a promoted side. A team that dismisses a lower-ranked opponent trains light. A team that respects the opponent trains fully. Beşiktaş training fully shows they do not treat Kocaelispor as a formality. That is far more valuable information than a name that does not appear on the grass. I write about the ball, but I keep the rhythm with the hearts of the people who play it. And a team's heart is not in a newspaper headline. It is in the 5v2 circles under the rain, where an Italian coach patiently corrects the third man's stride. Three hundred days without a single applause, I heard the players' breathing more clearly on an empty stand - and that lesson remains intact. When Beşiktaş walk out against Kocaelispor, look at how they win the ball back in the first five seconds after losing it, not at the headline. That is where the real story will be written. And if the name Vlahovic still has not appeared on the grass, then for me, it does not yet exist.