MONTREAL — If Marco Donadel had to give an assessment of his overall performance in the first five months since joining the Montreal Impact, it wouldn’t be very congratulatory, for in the Italian midfielder’s mind, he’s only just been adequate.
With time, however, he’s convinced of being able to raise his game in Major League Soccer.
“I feel and know that I can give a lot more from every point of view, but it’s still a work in progress,” Donadel told Sportsnet.
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If there are reasons for not having started life with the Impact as well as he would have liked, Donadel explains that it has had a lot to do with the fact that his transition to a new city, to a new team and to a new league has not all been easy.
At the very least, the 32-year-old Italian midfielder isn’t new to Montreal and the Impact. In a post-season friendly tournament in 2010, he visited the city with his former side Fiorentina (a club with which Montreal shares a close working relationship) and played the Impact to a 1-1 draw at Stade Saputo.
Out of contract with Verona last summer and failing to find a new club, Fiorentina let Donadel train with them in the fall in Florence to help keep him in shape, and that was when he met Nick De Santis, the Impact’s director of international business relations. After being invited to train in Montreal by De Santis, former Impact striker and Italian compatriot Marco Di Vaio showed Donadel around town.
But as much as Donadel knows his way about the city and feels very much at home, he’s had to spend most of his days so far without his wife and daughter, who will only be joining him on a permanent basis from Italy starting in June. He’s also already had to return to Italy on a few occasions for personal issues.
Perhaps the greatest cause for difficulty in acclimating, and what has ultimately affected his play the most, has been his lack of physical condition, especially upon his arrival. Before joining the Impact for pre-season in January, the last competitive game Donadel played in was with Verona last May.
Therefore, for his first involvements with the Impact to be the fierce CONCACAF Champions League knockout games between February and April was less than ideal.
“To play in demanding games in CONCACAF after eight or nine months of not having played was difficult,” Donadel admitted. “And then I had never trained or played on turf before, and we practically did that for two months straight, so I had some little issues, but luckily nothing very serious.”
Compounding Donadel’s difficulties was that the Impact couldn’t afford to devote a large portion of time on fitness work in pre-season, and that affected the Impact’s performances in their recent outings in MLS.
“In this moment we’re missing physical conditioning, because we didn’t really do a standard pre-season, and for different reasons because we had to play important games (in the Champions League) so we couldn’t spend so much time on fitness, and this is hurting us now, because in the second half we’re struggling a bit,” Donadel said. “But that’s just part of the game: we played in CONCACAF, the other teams didn’t, so we just have to fight through it.”
Despite the challenges he’s had to overcome, Donadel is enjoying his time in Montreal, particularly the welcoming aspect and multiplicity of cultures inside the Impact’s locker room. He’s also relished the chance of visiting Central America in the Champions League and said he was surprised by the passion and intensity of the booming crowd of 61,000 fans that packed the Olympic Stadium for the final.
As for his early impressions of MLS, Donadel explained that he’s found opposing teams difficult to predict and the playing conditions strenuous.
“It’s difficult to prepare games in MLS, because you expect things to go a certain way but then they don’t,” Donadel said. “A lot of the times you face teams that come out strong, whereas other teams are a lot more measured and play at slower rhythms, so you have to quickly adapt to the characteristics of each team, which tend to be very different.
“And then you’re facing teams that are coming from faraway or we have to travel four or five hours, and there’s different climates—this is probably the biggest challenge—but in the end we’re a team that, in any event, tries to impose our style of play.”
While he may not be at 100 percent as of yet, Donadel says that he’s reassured by how he’s improved and grown stronger with every game and feels confident that he will continue to progress.
Ccoach Frank Klopas believes the same.
“Being on grass now is better for him. He’s learning the league a little more, he’s a good player with the ball, tactically he’s very smart, and it’s what I expected, but I think with every game he’s going to grow and have more of a bigger impact within the group,” Klopas said.
