Italy
Things are on the move in Treviso as Benetton have really upped their game. We look at how they’ve done it
BENETTON, THE overnight success that was years in the making. Marco Bortolami’s team have been one of the stories of the season, powering up the URC table with an attractive, abrasive brand of rugby which also delivered them to the knockout stage of the Challenge Cup as pool winners. By the turn of the year, the Treviso troupe had already notched up seven league wins – only one fewer than they managed in the whole of last season. Louis Lynagh and Matt Gallagher will arrive from the English Premiership this summer, following in the footsteps of the likes of Paolo Odogwu, Jacob Umaga and Malakai Fekitoa as high-profile, energising additions to a squad bursting at the seams with native talent.
In men such as the Cannone brothers, Niccolò and Lorenzo, Federico Ruzza, Michele Lamaro, Juan Ignacio Brex and Tommaso Menoncello, Benetton have the backbone of the Italy team starting to gel together under Gonzalo Quesada. Build it and they will come. The sellout for the visit of Glasgow Warriors at the start of March was Benetton’s sixth full house of the season. The Stadio di Monigo is hardly a cathedral – it holds barely 5,000 people – but the pre- and post-match offering is up there with the best in Europe, not least when it comes to showcasing regional food and drink. Treviso, after all, is the home of Prosecco.
Both on and off the pitch, there is the smell of something substantial cooking, but speak to key figures in this rise and the story is depicted as a slow burner. For Bortolami, the former Gloucester second-row who won 112 Italy caps, it begins with Kieran Crowley, the New Zealander to whom he was assistant coach for five years after hanging up his boots in 2016.
“I learned so much from him both from a technical point of view and in how to manage players and the squad. I still carry with me loads of those things and I’ll always be grateful to him,” he says. “Kieran was so important for the whole team and whole club. He started us on the road to growth. When we won the Rainbow Cup in his final match (in June 2021), it was a historic moment, a cherished success.
“That year had been really hard for us. We hadn’t won a single game in the league but we had continued to work in a really positive way. After the Rainbow Cup, when I took over the team, my clear objective was to make improvements, particularly when it came to the culture of high performance. “The desire and the work-rate had never been lacking, but my view was that we needed a clear direction in terms of what our standards were going to be, and what the players needed to change in terms of how they go about their day, in order that there could be a culture of continual growth.
“That kind of change neve
