There are few doubts about the result of the survey, almost zero. These days the fans are voting for the best Giallorossi player of the season and in the lead – from the start – there is obviously Pietro Iemmello.
The online consultation – just go to the official website to participate – was started on Tuesday and is not yet concluded, but the captain's advantage over his teammates is so great (at the moment he has almost double the votes of the second) that it leaves little room for any comebacks, which are unlikely in any case.
Despite having no scientific value (it is always a free vote on the internet which has no restrictions and involves a minority part of the fans), Iemmello as seasonal MVP has a clear technical value and an evident emotional meaning: since he returned to his city – for the first time as an Eagles player – that the attacker combines “things” on the pitch with matters of the heart. The correspondence between footballer and fan – profiles perfectly aligned in him – has been and continues to be an added value for those who watch him play from the stands and for the thirty-two year old himself who grew up in Murano, the Lido district.
To ensure that Pietro is collecting a harvest of votes, it is enough to re-read his annual statistics: 17 goals and seven assists, therefore a direct participation in more than a third of Catanzaro's 65 goals between the championship and the playoffs. Vandeputte (for now third in the poll behind Ambrosino) and others have played a great tournament, but Pietro deserves the title of MVP: no one more than him, when a match was important, was able to drag the team along, as demonstrated by the 13 of the second round, when the game gets tougher…
In Serie B he had only scored this much once (19 goals in the 2019-20 season). Extending the picture to two seasons in a row, only in Foggia, between 2014 and 2016 (but always in C), had he maintained scoring standards as high as these in the Giallorossi: 53 scratches with the Apulians, 48 with the Giallorossi colors which become 56 by adding the first half of the championship of 2022. The home air has given him back continuity as well as making him mature: «Like wine, the older I get, the better», he told Sky after the playoff match against Brescia.
The overall figure of 56 goals for the Giallorossi brought him ever closer to the club's monumentsof which he became the fifth scorer of all time: Codeluppi, Ghersetich and Geraci are one whistle away and easily overcome, Palanca (134) remains unattainable, but Iemmello, rather than aiming for O Rey's record, would prefer to hit the other mission – declared – to bring (and then save) Catanzaro to Serie A.
It is the dream that unites him with his fans and which, precisely for this reason, makes the technical dimension correspond to the emotional one: someone who cares about the Eagles like the thirty-two-year-old striker, and at the same time knows how to be so decisive, who has been missing in these parts for decades . The photo in which he cries after Donnarumma's goal against Brescia in the playoffs, the blows dealt to Crotone last year and in the two derbies with Cosenza, the other top performances (Cittadella, Modena, Venezia, Sampdoria in the first leg just to stay at the B) tournament they transformed him into a true icon. Icon and MVP, already thinking about next season.
