u/Montemauri

Two years ago the gap between how optimistic or pessimistic I could feel about Zebre's season was so vast that I wrote a season review for 2023-24 entitled Two Wildly Different Takes on Zebre Parma's Season, trying to parse the competing arguments in my brain. This season has caused some similar feelings, so lets play it again...

~Pessimism~:
Various excuses or reasons can be presented, yet none of them change the fact that this season was nowhere near the level required. Zebre's extremely mild ambition is “don't finish bottom”, and they finished bottom of the URC by a mile, not just in terms of table standings but on multiple other metrics:

• 19% more points conceded per game than the 2nd worst (Benetton)
• 20% more tries conceded per game than the 2nd worst (Benetton/Dragons)
• 5% fewer points scored per game than the 2nd worst (Benetton)
• 14% fewer line breaks per game than the 2nd worst (Dragons)
• Over 50% fewer lineout steals than anyone else (4, next worst was the Lions on 9), and just a fifth of the league average (20)
• Joint most yellow/red cards received (Zebre had 16+3, Scarlets 18+1, versus a league average of 13)

Zebre's wins were mostly a result of their opponents' priorities lying elsewhere (Montauban), inexplicable brain fades (Ospreys), or both (Pau). Opposition sides just needed to make an effort and keep their heads in order to win (more often than not with a bonus point), and there's been a regression in the way Zebre are seen by the rest of the league: once again, anything less than 5 points is seen as failure, and once again a frequent sentiment among opposition fans is irritation at not winning convincingly enough against Zebre, even when they do get 5 points.

Any fear teams might have had of Zebre after Brunello's first season seems to be gone, and by the spring you had the Dragons, down to 14 players, going to the corner instead of taking the points and burning the clock when down a man in the Challenge Cup Quarter Final. The Dragons scored from that lineout, of course, and they won that game comfortably, despite Zebre's late-game result cosmetics.

The poor discipline feels like an issue that should have been resolved during the season rather than requiring some sort of post-season reset, and while the fault ultimately lies with the players, the culture is set by the coaches, and if the issue persists that's really on them. One thing about Brunello that has me worried is his regular post-match moans about refereeing. These complaints are being made to the Italian media in Italian, which means they're having no impact on either the media chatter in the URC as a whole or on the refs themselves, but the team are hearing the man in charge talk about them like victims, and after a while this risks making them accept defeat even before kick-off.

The fixtures next season don't leave much cause for hope, with just two league games Zebre can realistically hope to win based on recent history (Ospreys and Edinburgh at home), leaving the cup as, once again, the only way to salvage their season. Only this time, it seems unlikely they'll land in a group with the two weakest sides in the competition).

Zebre have done a better job this season in their function as a development side for the national team given how many of their players showed up in the 6 Nations, and they might provide as much as a third of the touring Nations Championship squad, but if the competitiveness of the team continues moving into reverse, Italy's national side will also suffer for it in the long term.

- - -

~Optimism~: 
A big difference between this season and last was the extent of squad turnover. In the summer of 2024, no key players left, and only one arrival was going to play significant minutes (Da Re). Last summer by contrast, six of the 11 leaving players had played at least half of Zebre's games in 2024-25, including four key leaders:

• Fischetti - captain and one of the best looseheads in the world.
• Andrea Zambonin - lineout captain.
• Geronimo Prisciantelli - vice captain and key playmaker
• Luca Bigi - former captain and backup hooker - see below
• Fetuli Paea - part of a key defensive partnership with Damiano Mazza .
• Scott Gregory - a flawed player, but outstanding in the air in defence & attack.

Arguably the most important of these by results alone was Bigi, who despite not being the all-action auxiliary-flanker archetype of a modern hooker, was a key factor in multiple wins via his set piece reliability. The evidence since Christmas suggests that Giovanni Quattrini will become a better player overall, but having missed almost two complete seasons post u20, and having not yet reached the ~30 games it normally takes young Italian players to adapt to this level, there will be games like Edinburgh away: Quattrini started, the lineout broke down, Zebre lost by one point.

Player turnover meant integrating several new players into the first XV (6 new faces played more than half of Zebre's games), and even good players need time to build mutual understanding. As an example, Marco Zanon has been one of Zebre's better players offensively, but the time required to develop defensive combinations is reflected in the average score for each of the key centre pairings Zebre started (Mazza has been at Zebre 4 years, Bertaccini 2, Zanon 1):

• Mazza-Bertaccini (7 games) Zeb 19-23 Opp
• Mazza-Zanon (4 games) Zeb 21-27 Opp
• Zanon-Bertaccini (6 games) Zeb 22-31 Opp

There's a similar story with locks, and at hooker. The point isn't "Zebre's first XV are better than Zebre's reserves", rather that there's good reason to expect that next season these specific reserves, and the squad overall, will be better and better integrated. Di Bartolomeo was an iffy thrower at this level two years ago, but now he's a fixture in the national team. Quattrini can make the same jump, especially given the arrival of his u20 teammates Alex Mattioli and Pietro Turrisi. There's also Sergio Parisse, whose new role as Italy's lineout coach should also provide Zebre with additional insight and input.

Brunello's main job last season was to fix the defence, and having settled on the Mazza-Paea partnership, he did. Last summer he lost the key to his attack (Prisciantelli, whose departure prompted one analyst to ponder, "What are Zebre going to do now that (...) basically all of their attack has left?"), and Zebre's tries and points per game improved, despite the lineout and discipline issues preventing them from exerting sustained territorial pressure. The lineout issue is not so insurmountable as to be unfixable: +0.5 lineouts won, and +0.5 opposition lineouts disrupted per game puts them, statistically at least, back in the black over the course of a season.

11 players will leave this summer, but as in 2024 none played a key role this season. The eight players confirmed as joining will have their own adaptation requirements, but there are good reasons to expect a positive impact. Tommy Allan is Tommy Allan. If Ortombina and Odiase (who also joined from Espoirs teams) are anything to go by, Mattioli and Turrisi should make the grade quickly. Four others are joining from Petrarca, whose players are better prepared physically for the URC than any other domestic Italian side, including three forwards. The last seven forwards to move from Petrarca to the URC are all now internationals, with 199 caps between them: Spagnolo, Di Bartolomeo, Hasa, Canali, N.Cannone, Lamaro, L.Cannone.

Next season will be too soon to dream of a mid-table finish, but if the likes of Allan are choosing to move to Parma, it means that the sentiment around the team must still be positive enough for us to think of Brunello's two seasons thus far as two steps forward, one step back, and not the other way around*.*