Napoli Wizard Khvicha Kvaratskhelia Keen To Avoid Falling Into The Milos Krasic Trap

As far as debut seasons go, or rather, the opening months of a debut season go, it’s hard to think of many better ones than Napoli’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The Georgian winger landed in Italy last June as a relatively unknown commodity to all but a few eagle eyed observers.

Signed as a replacement for Lorenzo Insigne, Kvaratskhelia was signed for around €10m ($11m) and to say the former Shakhtar Donetsk winger has hit the ground running would be an understatement.

With his lithe frame, agile feet and ability to skip past players in a myriad of different ways, Kvaratskhelia has been arguably the star performer in the opening three months of the Serie A season.

Such has been his impact at Napoli that many have forgotten all about their former hero Insigne, who left to play out his final years in MLS with Toronto FC.

Kvaratskhelia ended 2022 for Napoli with six goals and seven assists in Serie A; eight and 10 when extended to all competitions. The 21-year-old has taken not just Italy by storm, but also in the Champions League, where he gave Trent Alexander-Arnold a roasting not once, but twice.

The surprise factor will have no doubt given Kvaratskhelia the upper hand in the first half of the season, the unknown factor in that opposing defenders didn’t know what they were dealing with.

But Kvaratskhelia must not fall into the same trap as former juventus winger Milos Krasic did in 2010-11. The Serb arrived in Italy as a somewhat unknown quantity, despite having Champions League experience playing with CSKA Moscow.

Krasic lit up the first half of the 2010-11 season with Juve, and in what was a terrible team, a mishmash of players including a young Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci and Claudio Marchisio and older players like Alex Del Piero, Amauri and Fabio Quagliarella, Krasic stood out, his wizardy on the right wing winning games for Juve single handily.

But then come the Christmas break, and by the resumption of Serie A in the beginning of 2011, the opposition had worked Krasic out. His movements had been studied and he subsequently became easy to nullify. Moreover, Krasic didn’t have the awareness to attempt to change up his game, and so he struggled in the second half of the campaign. He barely got a kick under Antonio Conte, when the Tottenham coach took over at Juve in the summer of 2011.

Krasic played eight times in his second season in Turin and was then sold to Turkish side Fenerbahce in the summer of 2012. He went down in Juve history as a flop, but for those first four months he was magnificent, and most believed he would only get better.

Kvaratskhelia has, to his credit, talked about not becoming predictable, and working on being as difficult to mark as possible. “Everyone will study and analyse me but it will be useless to them,” he told DAZN. “I work on myself a lot, to learn new tricks and solutions to become even more unpredictable.”

Given his speed, low centre of gravity and almost untrained, unorthodox way of playing the game, it remains to be seen how anyone will stop him without resorting to doubling up on him.

But the mere fact that Kvaratskhelia has acknowledged the need to mix up his game will likely prevent him from becoming another Krasic, and from 2023, we could see an even better Kvaratskhelia than the one that had electrified audiences in the final few months of 2022.

And that is a frightening prospect for all right-backs who stand in his way.