This Week In Football History: Roberto Mancini's cheeky back-heel

Roberto Mancini: He made a great manager, but was a genius of a player

Today Adrian North takes us back to the 1998/99 Serie A season where Roberto Mancini, playing the latter years of his career at Lazio, scored a beauty with an outrageous piece of skill...

January 17, 1999 - Parma 1-3 Lazio, Stadio Ennio Tardini: Roberto Mancini's incredible back-heel

Roberto Mancini was quite the player. One in a long list of creative, intelligent and elegant Italian No 10s. I find Mancini is often not remembered as quite the genius player he was.

Italian football has a love affair with two positions - The defender and the Number 10. A list of Italy's greatest ever players will be predominately defenders such is the culture of Italian footballing pragmatism and perhaps only Christian Vieri and Paulo Rossi are revered as Italy's greatest pure strikers.

But it is the list of Italy's greatest No 10s that makes the generation of football fans who grew up on Channel 4's Football Italia during the late 90s the most nostalgic.

Of course, Roberto Baggio stands alone above the rest of Italy's great No 10s. In the tier below 'Il Divin Codino' we find Alessandro Del Piero, Francesco Totti, Antonio Di Natale, Gianfranco Zola and Mancini himself. Del Piero and Totti will always be held in a higher esteem than the other three thanks to owning a World Cup winners' medal, but where Mancini and Zola never excelled on the international scene, they sure had a moment or two of unrivalled brilliance back in Italy.

A quick youtube search of 'Roberto Mancini best goals' can see one eat through a good hour of their day marvelling at some of Mancini's greatest moments. In 1990/1991 Mancini formed a formidable and unstoppable partnership with Gianluca Vialli and led his beloved Sampdoria to their first, and as of today only Serie A title, breaking the hold that Diego Maradona's Napoli and Arrigo Sacchi's Milan had on Italian football.

It was a truly incredible achievement and a deserved medal to compliment Mancini's ability.

But for all his achievements at Sampdoria Mancini is largely remembered by many fans of 90s Italian football for a single goal he scored in 1999. At 32 years of age he had almost single-handedly taken Sampdoria to a sixth place finish during 96/97, and disappointed at the decline of his boyhood club Mancini took his talents to Italy's eternal city where he was to win a second Scudetto with Lazio in 99/00.

But it was on January 17, 1999, during a season that saw Lazio push AC Milan all the way to the final day, that Mancini pulled off one of football's greatest pieces of skill midway through the second half of a tense game away to Parma.

Mancini, reacting to what was a poor near post corner, with his back to goal simply volleyed the ball with his heel past the keeper and man on the post into the roof of the net. A truly nonchalant and outrageous piece of improvisation.

And just three years later, another Italian playmaker would go one better.