Last year’s post about Belotti, written not long before his transfer to Torino.

One year on from his move to Torino, Andrea Belotti has firmly established himself as one of Italy’s great hopes in a position which has been sorely lacking of late. This was exacerbated by Antonio Conte’s underwhelming forward options at the Euros this summer – mocking comparisons were quickly made between his admittedly underwhelming selection – Graziano Pellè, Eder and Simone Zaza – and the great strikers that past Italian managers would have been able to take with them – the likes of Francesco Totti, Roberto Baggio or Alessandro Del Piero. Although they didn’t do injustice to themselves by any means –in spite of Zaza and Pellè’s awful penalties against Germany – there is a prevailing sense that Italian football is yet to definitively find its main marksman, the rightful heir to the forward role.

The season of their return to Serie A, Palermo’s 11th place finish would largely be attributed to Franco Vázquez and Paulo Dybala’s effective partnership, wherein Dybala’s finishing provided the ideal outlet for advanced playmaker Vázquez’s creative nous . When Dybala eventually moved to Juventus over the summer, there was a sense that Belotti could have been able to take on Dybala’s goalscoring duties and benefit from the creative force of Vázquez behind him. The season beforehand, spent in Serie B, was a far different affair: Belotti had scored 10 goals, double that of Dybala, who had spent two underwhelming first seasons in Sicily. It was the faith that Maurizio Zamparini – Palermo’s owner and holder of several manager-sacking records – placed in the young Argentine that sparked his ‘revival’ the following season. Last summer, with Dybala already gone, Belotti was clear on his ambitions in an interview with Sky: he wanted to start every game, prove his worth. Nevertheless, Zamparini, always one for fresh faces, would find more appealing the prospect of bringing in a striker from the outside to replace Palermo’s star man.

So, shortly after that interview with Sky, he transferred to Torino, who were in the process of a rejuvenation project that also featured the signing of Daniele Baselli to complement the imminent breakthrough of their own young hopes – featuring the likes of Vittorio Parigini. At first, Belotti found it hard to make his ambition come true – for the majority of the first 12 matches of the season he found himself confined to the bench. Nevertheless, once Ventura handed him a chance at the starting eleven – with Fabio Quagliarella and Maxi Lopez both falling out of favour – he would seize it with both hands: From game day 12, he would always be in the starting line-up until the end of the season. He went on to net 12 league goals over the campaign – 11 in 2016 alone, making him the top Italian scorer of Serie A for the calendar year and making all the more baffling his non selection. His highlights of the season would include breaking Gianluigi Buffon’s clean sheet streak – who had set a new Serie A record –, scoring the winning penalty against Inter and a spectacular solo effort to seal a 4-1 win against Udinese. A strong finisher with effective hold-up play, he would also strike up an effective partnership with Ciro Immobile – who had returned to the club on loan in the second half of the season – in the second half of the season in order to safely guide the club to midtable.

This year, having enjoyed a solid preseason in terms of goalscoring, Belotti looks set to build the successes of last season and begin to gain firm hold on a place in the Italian national team. ‘Il Gallo’ (‘The cockerel’) – a nickname he claims to have stolen from a friend, which found its way into the 22-year old’s goal celebrations – will look to be a key part of Sinisa Mihajlovic’s first season at Torino, a team strengthened by the arrivals of wingers Adem Ljajic and Iago Falque, both of which will be able to facilitate Belotti’s task as the team’s main provider of goals. Nevertheless, Belotti maintains that competition for the striker’s spot was always welcome: speaking from the club’s pre-season camp in Austria, he highlighted the burgeoning entente between the Torino’s strikers, speaking particularly highly of young Argentinian striker Lucas Boyé, the latest of the club’s gambles on youth.

No appointment could have been more beneficial to Belotti’s chances at the national team than former Granata coach Giampiero Ventura to replace Chelsea-bound Antonio Conte. The manager who had placed his faith in him, who insisted on his signing last summer, will undoubtedly by less hard to please and Il Gallo will surely find himself with an opportunity to break into the Azzurri squad. The rooster may be France’s national symbol, but Italy’s attack looks set to be spearheaded by ‘Il Gallo’ for the years to come.