Why Napoli have fallen McTotally for McTominay

Conte has unlocked the Scotland version of the all-action midfielder - a force in both boxes who is No.1 among Serie A midfielders in shots on target

Adam Clery writes his own brilliant, hilarious, unmissable football analysis on Substack,
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Sunday nights aren’t for watching Serie A, let’s face it. Juicing the last sweet drops from the weekend, moving the belt down a notch after a fat roast, staring endlessly into the void as the ‘scaries’ envelop you. But not Serie A, which is why Football Italia used to be on in the morning.

If you did though, this week, you’ll have seen Scott McTominay hauled off after 82 minutes with his side limping to a surprise defeat against Lazio. A dagger to their title chances, and a performance from him that underwhelmed in the extreme, and yet he received appreciative applause from every home fan in the Stadio Maradona.

You might think that’s just because it was his birthday (it actually was his birthday), but the real reason is that the Napoletani just absolutely fucking love him. There hasn’t been a career reinvention that did this much good for your heart since George Forman decided his current grill wasn’t draining away enough fat.

Under Antonio Conte Napoli have been flying in Serie A. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, a household name despite always looking like your cat has just walked across the keyboard, is undoubtedly the star, but the squad excites throughout. Stanislav Lobotka is a Bond villain of a central defender, Giovanni Di Lorenzo is the most exciting piece of Italian right-wing entertainment since bunga bunga parties, and Romelu Lukaku finds the net in the reliably unreliable way that Romelu Lukaku is wont to do. Also, Billy Gilmour is there for some reason.

They’ve even moved away from Conte’s obsession with a back three. A confusingly fluid 4-3-3 / 4-2-3-1 / 4-2-4 now looks to flood the centre of the pitch with attacking talent rather than relying on the athleticism of two wing-backs to stretch defences and open up the chance to cross.

But at its heart, both on the pitch and in the stands, is a lad from Lancaster who happens to call the Firth of Clyde home. Scott McTominay, driving forward from midfield, popping up at centre-forward with vital goals, and defending the airspace around his own box like his life depends on it, has become an overnight sensation in Naples.

They’re an Armani suit of a football team, but one with a robust tartan lining inside the jacket. A far, far cry from life at Manchester United where, across multiple squads, seasons, and managers, he was given all the treatment of an ‘HM Slave’ from the Pokemon games.

A what? Fair question, but stick with me here…

[Harsh Cut To A Scene Change - I am now wearing a lab coat and glasses, standing in a classroom in front of a chalkboard that reads: ‘HM Slaves - Pokemon Explained For Normal People’. Jaunty Elevator Music plays softly in the background]

Like all video games, the Pokemon series needed a way to make the player follow a linear path by not allowing them access to certain areas of the world map. This is done environmentally, with late-game towns, routes, and challenges requiring certain moves for physical access.

(It’s not too long this part, just stay with me…)

These moves - cutting down trees, physically moving large boulders, sailing across open water - were unlocked sequentially throughout the game, but with Pokemon only able to learn a small number of moves themselves, massively inconvenient for the purposes of battling.

(I promise you’re doing really well here, keep going…)

Hence, rather than spreading a succession of ‘bad but necessary’ moves across your favoured Pokemon, players elected to find a more useless one that could learn a number of these HMs. They would never use them in the fun parts of the game, but keep them in their party to allow them to traverse the map.

(Nearly done now man! One more paragraph!)

You hated them! You felt mortified having some level-8 ‘Krabby’ in your team at the end of the game just because it knew Cut, Strength, Whirlpool, and Rock Smash! But you couldn’t impose those functional tasks on your beloved Blastoise! It could do too many much cooler things!

[Music stops, the classroom has gone, you’re back in the room]

That was Scott McTominay to Mourinho, to Ten Hag, occasionally even to Ole and, deep in their hearts, sometimes even to Manchester United fans. Nobody ever really wanted a starting line-up that included him, but they rarely had other players willing to do his work. Five different managers in just under a decade, stints as an emergency centre-back, holding midfielder, box-crashing No.8, and ‘only-person-willing-to-actually-press’, but never once in a preferred XI.

Under Conte though, McTominay looks like the imperious all-action midfielder only previously unearthed by Steve Clarke’s Scotland. From his home (usually) on the left side of centre midfield, he’s averaging a goal every three games and leads the entire league for shots on target by a midfielder. He’s also around the very top of the rankings for things like touches in the box, carries into the box, completed dribbles and, staggeringly, successful take-ons. He currently beats his man more reliably than Timothy Weah and Theo Hernandez. Here he is scoring against Como in October, after 25 seconds. He is already ahead of Lukaku when the big man receives the ball.

Even in a collective stinker against Lazio, two of their brightest moments came through his mix of skills. First, he received the ball on the edge of the area with his back to goal, pinning a defender with his strength; holding him off for what felt like an eternity before deftly laying it into space for Kvaratskhelia to shoot. He blazed it over.

Five minutes later, he received the ball slightly deeper, knocked it ahead of his marker, and then jinked between two players before being brought down. He is a monster truck that weaves like a street mime, which is about as rare a profile as you can get in football.

The key to this is that he almost never passes the ball, a staggering average of only 28 per game, just three shy of being the lowest in the division. He doesn’t come short to take it off the defence, he doesn’t offer a backwards outlet against a stubborn low-block, he doesn’t do any of those thankless chores that made up the bulk of his career at Old Trafford. Antonio Conte simply points at the opponents’ goal and says “in there”, before pointing at their own and saying “and not in there”.

Thus, for all the impressive numbers he’s posting at the top of the pitch (and the adulation that predictably brings), he’s adored for his defensive contribution. Not in anything so modern as applied pressures or final-third tackles though, but in dominating the aerial barrage that inevitably emerges when defending a slender lead. For clearances and aerial duels won, he’s also one of Serie A’s most effective players; in the top 8% and 12% respectively.

Here he is repelling Juventus earlier this year.

Back in October, The BBC published an article looking at how he was settling into life in Italy. It included the following two facts. Firstly, that in his opening three games he had covered more distance on the pitch than any other player in Serie A. Secondly, that this application, enterprise, commitment, and contribution in both boxes, had seen everyone at the club fall so deeply in love with him that he’d already been given the nickname “McTotally”.

The former isn’t anything new, but he’s been waiting his entire career for something like the latter. Buon compleanno, Scott.