When Alejandro ‘Papu’ Gomez left Bergamo for Sevilla in acrimonious circumstances in the January transfer window, the feeling was the very heart and soul had been ripped out of Europe’s most entertaining footballing side.
Gomez wasn’t only a reliable source of goals and assists from his favoured left-wing role, he was also the man who made Atalanta tick, a Serie A record-breaker whose seven-year spell at La Dea coincided with the club’s rise from mid-table mediocrity to the Champions League quarter-finals.
How on earth could the much-admired Gian Piero Gasperini replace the seemingly irreplaceable?
Well, it turns out the answer to that particular poser was more obvious than anyone expected.
Atalanta didn’t even need to enter the transfer market in search of a player capable of emulating Gomez’s string-pulling brilliance in the final third. Papu 2.0 was waiting in the wings all along.
Just four months ago, Ruslan Malinovskyi wanted out of Atalanta.
The Ukraine international had been in and out of the starting XI and, with Everton and Leicester circling, a £20 million January exit looked likely for a 28-year-old who was also on Leeds United’s radar (Telegraph).
Flash forward to mid-May, however, and Malinovskyi has made himself all but untouchable.
The former Genk playmaker has either scored a goal, produced an assist – or both – in each of his past ten games. He scored the winner against Juventus with that hammer of a left foot in April before finding the net versus the Old Lady again in Wednesday’s Coppa Italia final.
In total, Malinovskyi has ten goals and 12 assists in all competitions – numbers that look even more remarkable when you consider he wasn’t even a regular starter before Gomez’s heart-wrenching departure.
Losing key players is an annual tradition at Atalanta but here they are again, second in Serie A with Milan, Juventus, Napoli, Lazio and Roma choking on their dust.
Only Atalanta could lose perhaps the greatest player in their history – their king and captain Gomez – yet come back stronger.
Here’s what some fans had to say on Twitter about Malinovskyi:
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