Player Focus: Maturing Kalinic Proving to be a Fan Favourite at Fiorentina

Before leaving for Istanbul, Mario Gomez sat down and composed a letter to the Fiorentina fans. He wished to thank them for their “mega support.” Leaving Florence, wrote the striker, was “tremendously difficult” and a “very sad moment” in his career. “I will always carry you in my heart.” No fewer than 25,000 supporters had shown up at the Artemio Franchi for Gomez’s presentation two years ago. There was cautious optimism that he could score the goals that would get Fiorentina back into the Champions League.

But Gomez flopped and at no little expense. He had cost €15.5m from Bayern Munich and remains the club’s highest earner on €4.25m a year while on loan at Besiktas where, incidentally, he hasn’t disappointed. Gomez scored a brace in a 3-2 win against Fenerbahçe and has found the net six times in seven games in the Turkish Süper Lig.

Knowing better than to get their hopes up again, Fiorentina fans didn’t go to the same lengths to welcome Nikola Kalinic this summer. His signing wasn’t greeted with enthusiasm, nor was the club’s transfer strategy as a whole. Neto and Mohamed Salah had made Fiorentina look weak. Stefan Savic had been declared “unsellable” only to be sold to Atletico Madrid. Alberto Aquilani and David Pizarro were let go and Sergej Milinkovic-Savic chose Lazio instead of them.

A banner left outside the Franchi accused the owners of window shopping. They looked but didn’t touch and for all the appearance of doing serious business really they were no better than beggars. The fans were on the side of sacked coach Vincenzo Montella who they believed was correct to discern a lack of ambition on the part of the Della Valle family and a scaling back of investment.

This was the context in which Nikola Kalinic arrived from Dnipro for €5.5m in August. He wasn’t even the most expensive Croatia international centre-forward to move to Italy. In a market where Juventus, Milan and Roma splashed more than €100m on Mario Mandzukic, Paulo Dybala, Carlos Bacca, Luiz Adriano and Edin Dzeko, it didn’t even make a ripple. The phrase used to describe it was “in sordina,” for it was like Kalinic snook in quietly completely unnoticed.  Now everyone is making a lot of noise about him. An ice-cream, the viola coloured Violanic, has even been named after him and entered into a competition between the 20 best Gelatieri at a Gelato Festival in Florence.

Kalinic is already a fan favourite in the Curva Fiesole. He terrorised Milan on his debut at the Franchi. Rodrigo Ely couldn’t handle him and was sent off for bringing him down twice in the first half. Marcos Alonso scored from the free kick. Kalinic is always signalling for the early ball and looking to run in behind. His teammates’ ability to spot and thread the ball through to him with a killer vertical pass has caused defences all sorts of problems. That, for instance, is how the Fiorentina No.9 scored his first goal against Basle and how he forced Ely and later Miranda, the Inter centre-back, into mistakes that reduced his opponent’s to 10 men. It's no coincidence that the Viola have both attempted (29) and completed (10) the most through balls in Serie A this season.

Before that game at San Siro, Kalinic had taken a stroll through a market in Florence with captain Manuel Pasqual when a butcher came from behind his counter, and shouted: “The new Batistuta. Numero Uno.”  If it sounded like an exaggeration, it didn’t the following evening. Kalinic became the first Fiorentina player to score a hat-trick at San Siro since Vinicio Viani 82 years ago. Not only did it condemn Inter to their first defeat of the season, it sent the Viola top of the table for the first time since Valentine’s Day 1999.

Kalinic won the penalty for the opening goal after pressing goalkeeper Samir Handanovic into a mistake. He then made sure to follow up and put away a Josip Ilicic shot that had been too hot for the keeper to handle. If those goals were opportunistic, Fiorentina’s third felt familiar. It was a carbon copy of a goal Kalinic had scored four days earlier against Bologna, sliding in to get on the end of a cross from Alonso. A tap-in completed the fourth hat-trick of the 27-year-old's career.

Kalinic has already scored as many league goals this season as Gomez managed in all of the last one. Upon hearing about this, fans of Blackburn must be wondering if it’s the same player who made 44 appearances for them and only beat the keeper seven times in three years at Ewood Park. The potential was there. Sure. But Kalinic was young and raw then. “He has matured a lot in the last couple of years,” Zvonimir Boban told Sky Italia, alluding to the striker’s role in the Dnipro team that reached the Europa League final last season. “He’s now more composed and more professional. You could already see as a kid he was a phenomenon. I think he went to England too early in his career. It’s normal for some young players to mature later than others and to go to big leagues like the Premier League too soon.”

Davor Suker has also been impressed. Watching Kalinic this season has reminded him of another Serie A forward and the comparison seems spot on too. “Nikola is as cold in front of goal as Miroslav Klose," he explained to La Gazzetta dello Sport. The ruthlessness is there. Of 61 players to attempt 10 or more shots this season, Kalinic’s accuracy [64.3%] is the best. His movement and the quality and number of chances Fiorentina are creating for him has also helped. Kalinic has averaged the fewest minutes per shot inside the penalty area [50.3] of any player with more than 5 league appearances and has had the most big chances in the league [7], finishing four of them.

But he is more than an archetypal fox in the box. “He is also the team’s first defender,” Suker argued. “Have you seen how he presses the opponents when they play out [think of Fiorentina’s opener against Inter]? No wonder he is a teacher’s pet.”  His assist for Joan Verdú against Atalanta was also a thing of beauty and in addition to scoring against Bulgaria over the international fortnight he also set up Ivan Rakitic with a delicate backheel in another 3-0 win. To be sure, Kalinic’s fast start has been facilitated by his season starting earlier than Fiorentina’s did in Serie A. He had already played four times for Dnipro and was displaying a sharpness that had manifested itself in three goals for them too.

Kalinic was a part of the side that knocked out Napoli in the semi-finals of the Europa League last season and he is confident ahead of meeting them again on Sunday. “It will be a great game at the San Paolo,” he said. “Napoli have a lot of star players, starting with Gonzalo Higuain, but Fiorentina aren’t top by chance. Don’t forget our performance against Inter at San Siro.” How could we? Napoli-Fiorentina is more eagerly anticipated than even the Derby d’Italia. Sarri vs Sousa. Higuain vs Kalinic. It’s a match up that promises to be a cracker between the two teams who have lit up Serie A with their football so far this season.

Will Kalinic continue his fine start to the season with Fiorentina and how have you rated his performances thus far? Let us know in the comments below