Wednesday 14 July 2021

Forza Azzurri: From Rotterdam to Wembley



Even after Bukayo Saka buried his head in his shirt, I didn't realize what had happened.  Gianluigi Donnarumma picked himself up and walked away slowly, as if nothing had. It was only when I saw Roberto Mancini embrace his staff that the enormity of the moment started to wash over me.  

Somewhere, somehow, in the eternity between Jorginho's and Saka's miss, I had lost count of Italy's most important penalty shoot-out since the World Cup Final of July 9, 2006.

The one count I had faithfully kept, throughout the tournament, throughout the Final, only stopping just before the liquid images of Italy's Wembley triumph started to unfold on television before me, was of twenty-one years.  More than two decades had passed since my most excruciating football memory: Italy's Euro2000 Final defeat to France.

Since then, I have witnessed the thespian range of Italy in South Korea (2002), Milan in Deportivo (2004), Milan in Istanbul (2005), Italy in Kyiv (2012), and Italy in Milan failing to qualify for the World Cup (2018), but none of these farces and tragedies have the jabbing edges that Euro2000 Final has, those barbed images of abysmal dejection. 

It was how Italy lost.  They could sniff the trophy's silver.  Journalists in the press box were practically proofreading their final copy.  The Italy bench was almost spilling onto the field in anticipation.

What happened with less than ninety seconds remaining was unimaginable given how Italy had defended that tournament, and how they had edited out Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry from the Final's storyline.  But deep in injury time, Fabien Barethez's long clearance eluded Fabio Cannavaro, whose desperate attempt to head the ball away only helped it onto the path of Sylvain Wiltord, who snuck the ball under Francesco Toldo from an angle.

That was the moment Italy lost.  David Trezeguet's golden goal in extra time had the inevitability of the next day's tired headlines.  Best team of the tournament won! French football reigns supreme!

Del Piero (left) contemplates defeat in Euro2000
While Alessandro Del Piero (who missed two convertible
chances) stared off into that unredemptive Rotterdam night of July 2, 2000, the silver medal an albatross around his neck, I knew that seeing Italy win the European Championship and right this wrong would become an obsession of mine in the following years.

And during those years, I have witnessed Zlatan Ibrahimovic's backheel at Euro2004, a penalty shootout loss that started Spain's domination of international football (Euro2008 quarter-final) and a 4-0 pasting that marked its pause (Euro2012 Final), and, yes, that Simone Zaza penalty against Germany in Euro2016.  Yes, Italy won the World Cup in 2006, but that was to cancel out my pain of 1990 and 1994; the European Championship was the precise antidote for 2000.

Italy's triumph on Sunday at Wembley needed to shift the trauma of heartbreaking defeats to the genre's most brilliant method actor: England.  

That is the story of possible redemption that I told myself before and on Sunday, but reading the previews leading up to the Final, little space was granted to any Italian perspective in the English media.  Talking about 55 joyless years is a story that subsumes all, even for the neutral, and yet moving that colossal narrative rock only slightly reveals teeming particularities, nuances, missed narratives of big men like Gianluca Vialli and his battle with cancer, of big football countries like Italy standing on the cusp of becoming even bigger. 

I am one of those who believes that winning the European Championship is a higher achievement than winning the World Cup.  Not more significant in national memory, but more of a rigorous test of credentials.  The fact that the last four World Cups have been won by European nations only strengthens my conviction.  

But alongside the football question, Italy also needed to answer the spiritual one, the one that lingered for more than twenty years.  They did.  Nothing will ever erase the pain of that night in Rotterdam, but this helps. A lot.

Forza Azzurri!


Saturday 5 June 2021

On Milan's Return To The Champions League


I'm the type who twins his life's course with his football team's.  Doing so is a tacit acceptance that your daily rituals are inadequate to shape an amorphous sense of time, especially during this pandemic.  You look to the structure of the football week, the rounded edges of rote formations, the clockwork of kick-offs, as your team plays out your life in parallel, on another exhilarating plane above you.

There can then never be a moment without significance this way.  You score any personal success as your team's, and your team's failure as your own.  Just as certain songs comprise your life's soundtrack, your football team's successes constellate your memory, like glowing hooks on which you hang summers.

As Franck Kessie converted the second penalty against Atalanta on Sunday, May 23, he not only booked Milan's ticket to the Champions League after seven years of suffering, but he also opened up my summer to a possibility.  That is all I needed: to be on the cusp of something better.

Nothing focuses your club's rank and relevance in the football world like a Champions League Final.  Despite the thinly peopled stands, the dreamscape of Chelsea vs Manchester City--its stakes, its sheen, the exquisite shades of blue-- felt removed many times from my football possibility.  The last time Milan played the Champions League Final was in 2007, a triumph filtered through standard definition, calibrated necessarily by the mind's eye into speckless brilliance.  

It was as if I need to be roused to be able to register last week's Final, as if the absence of my own team from the competition has cob-webbed my faculties.  In February, I had written of the Scudetto dream; that fell away definitively by March.  What was left was not just the original goal of Champions League qualification, but also a more fundamental question of survival.  Financial health.  The ability to plan on a tight but at least not moneyless budget.  Sporting Director Paolo Maldini materialized whenever my fears would, whenever the league table started to look dicey, grim, reassuring in every interview that even without Champions League football, the project would continue.

But you knew you couldn't be satisfied with another disappointing season spun as success.  More pragmatically, you knew that renewals and loan options hinged on qualifying for UEFA's showpiece event. 

In the end, Milan finished second. They managed to beat every team in their peer group (Inter, Napoli, Atalanta, Juventus, Roma, and Lazio) at least once, including a thumping 3-0 win over the defending champions in Turin.  They managed 16 out of a possible 19 away wins, which is a league record. 

There are so many players, so many numbers, so many people to consider when discussing how a team with the youngest average age in Europe, assembled through bruising negotiations and pennies (relatively speaking), comprised of loanees, an almost 40-year-old Ibrahimovic, managed to do what it did this season.  The fanboy in me wants to answer with one name as being responsible for it all, Maldini; others will say, Ibra.  But there was much more to it.

For me, it was not crucial to write about each element that contributed to the success, but only the crescendo of success itself.  To know that if my team is headed in the right direction, so am I.

Somehow.


 

Tuesday 2 February 2021

Dreams Of A Milanista Past The Half



There comes a time when you have no choice but to share your dream.  After twenty rounds, Milan still sit, somehow, at the top.  They did so after nineteen rounds as well, at the halfway point of the season, but I daren't have written this then, even though I had dared to dream much earlier.  The podium for the Winter Champions is laid down only in discourse, and after a bruising 3-0 defeat to Atalanta in the nineteenth round the title felt emptier than usual.

I had been anxious before the game against Bologna this past Saturday.  I feared it would defy what was on paper, all of Milan's work so far would falter in front of the heaving beast that is The Narrative, which has maintained that Milan are, at best, a third-wheel: Inter and Juventus have the better squads and over time it will tell.  The twentieth game, the start of the return fixtures, would show that the first half of the season had been a dream, a madman's dream, and in the second half Milan would find themselves in someone else's, walled out as the familiar Juventus cavalcade moved triumphantly ahead in the distance.

In these times, dreams compensate more than usual.  This Serie A season will be unwitnessed by fans in the flesh.  It will be asterisked for posterity as a perversion.  The noise of fans in stadia has been replaced by howls of players clipped in flight, the pantomime of a coach's protest by his bellowing--and it is on this stage that Milan have emerged as contenders. 

In a way it's fitting.  Milan's owners Elliott are used to surveying carnage before finding a position of advantage.  As the pandemic rages, Milan inoculates itself against financial and sporting ruin.  The wage bill has been slashed, players surplus to requirements have been moved on, there is no debt owed to banks, the fanatical line of buying only young players has been moderated to include old hands like Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Simon Kjaer, and a whole department dedicated to precise statistical analysis offers directors Paolo Maldini and Frederic Massara profiles that they then pursue in the market.

The result is that a team with one of the youngest average ages in Europe sits on top of a league that has always been suspicious of too much youth. Now, though, the suspicions have been momentarily diverted. 

If this had been a normal season, Milan's young players would have disintegrated under the pressure of a packed San Siro, some say. If they hadn't been awarded all of their penalties, they would sit third at best, often the same people say.

The first can't be proven; the second is tenuous, not even taken seriously by honest Inter or Juventus supporting journalists.  

No one can argue with the math, so they argue with the method.  Coach Stefano Pioli faces the snide line of questioning with customary grace, swatting away questions of penalties, reminding them that a team which has been sweeping almost all before them since July of last year isn't here by chance.  They have earned the points and the penalties (note: all but maybe two of Milan's fourteen penalties were blatant).

Supporting Milan isn't exactly a martyr's fate.  The fanbase of a club that has won the European Cup seven times and the league almost three times that forfeits the right to complain of lean years.  But in the interregnum between 2014 and now, when Milan didn't have the towering leadership of Ibrahimovic or the business stability, there was almost nothing to surrender at the halfway point.  Milan were almost always realistically out of contention for a Champions League spot after nineteen rounds, let alone the Scudetto.  

It feels strange as a Milan fan to have something at stake this far in the season.  To ease the pressure, the line publicly remains that finishing in the top four is the season's goal, but the editorial lines have already converged across Italian media.  Papers and podcasts of all political colour agree that Milan are among the favourites.

What you fear as a fan is the dream, preferring to defer it.  We'll see where we are after ten rounds, you said at the start of the season.  At round ten, you said fifteen.  At fifteen, nineteen.

You fear something ghostly, which periodically assumes contours: a disproportionate amount of injuries, COVID-19 cases that have reduced your key players to posting Instagram videos of themselves on stationary bikes at home, and the recent spat between Inter's Romelo Lukaku and Ibrahimovic during the Coppa Italia. 

At first glance the spat had all the hallmarks of how footballers square up--like rams they touch heads, sometimes falling, sometimes keeping their balance and at least some dignity, as was the case here. But without the noise of the fans drowning out the verbal exchange you heard everything.

No need to rehash it further, but the (non) issue has been typically exaggerated in the Italian media, and the talk of a ban on both (possibly extending into the league) strikes at that part of you that has started to believe.

That belief has been steadily building, collapsing, rebuilding, resurrecting itself again and again.  For every slip, there is a wonder Rafael Leao goal (one of which was the fastest to have ever been scored across Europe's top five leagues); for every story that heaps doubt on the club, there is one that heaps praise.  Milan's season has bloomed during a time of disease, and it therefore feels like a full-blooded rebirth.

Davide Calabria, Theo Hernandez, Franck Kessie, Ismael Bennacer, Ante Rebic, and the man who always supplies the key, Hakan Calhanoglu--there is so much to look forward to at last.  

For now, you tell yourself what they tell you: finish in the Champions League places.  But the January window that added a player like Mario Mandzukic (among others) tells you something else.

Hopeful, you look towards May, still a flicker in the distance.


Friday 23 August 2019

Serie A Season Preview: More To It Than Juventus

Before a ball is kicked to start a season, the league table reads like a perfect democracy.  Everyone equal, facing discrimination only on the basis of alphabetical order. Sere A kicks off this weekend, but Atalanta are already champions of Italy after 0 games played.

Put aside your partisanship and enjoy the pristine table while you can.  Teams and fans, delude yourselves with visions of triumph now because the illusion will begin to lift after a dozen matchdays.

By then, the table will start to tell familiar stories of the haves and have-nots and the tundra that yawns between them.

Maybe it will be different this time. Maybe Juventus will not have sown up the title by Christmas; maybe the teams that look like relegation candidates right now (Verona, Lecce) will be flirting with mid-table bliss.

After the last eight seasons, I have learned to enjoy Serie A's subplots more than the hackneyed main one. The fight for European spots or salvation.  The surprise players or teams. A near-decade of black-and-white Juventus dominance has bestowed upon me nuance, a shade of gray through which I can appreciate the undeniable progress Serie A has made as a whole and teams like Atalanta and Torino have made in particular.


Ready for battle: Antonio Conte
This season, the prevailing opinion is that Inter are the new anti-Juve. Both teams have new coaches, but there is a palpable belief that while Juventus coach Maurizio Sarri fiddles and fine-tunes, Antonio Conte's knuckle-down approach at Inter will yield results quicker.  And maybe that will be enough for Inter to steal a start on Juve that will prove unassailable in the end.

You go through the well-rehearsed arguments all the time. How Romelo Lukaku will be the missing piece for Inter on the field, how Cristiano Ronaldo will "SIUUUU" himself and his team to glory, how Napoli coach Carlo Ancelotti will finally steer Napoli to the Scudetto because of continuity.  All of  this matters, of course, and I am invested in the league's denouement, but so much like the following compels me even more.

Decreto Crescita Law: Italy's Rientro dei Cervelli

Former Milan CEO Adriano Galliani never missed the opportunity to lower everyone's  expectations near the end of his tenure. When pressed upon Milan's relatively low-key mercato or Italy's inability to attract the top talent, he would list off a variety of reasons, and one of them was the country's unfavourable tax law.


Those laws will change in 2020. Italy has passed a new law, Decreto Crescita (or Growth Decree), in a bid to attract talent from overseas into various sectors of the economy--and football will also benefit. I won't go through the finer points, but in a nutshell Italian teams will have to pay significantly lower taxes on the salaries of players who have not lived in Italy for the last 2 years (Italian or foreign).  It is a bid to bring back to Italy the brains (Rientro dei Cervelli literally translates to return of the brains) it has been missing and losing for years. 

Purple Ribery

The benefits of the law are already being seen. Fiorentina signed Franck Ribery from Bayern Munich on a free transfer and are going to pay him 4 million euros net, capitalizing on the new legislation to land a high-profile signing like the Frenchman.

Ribery laps up the adulation in Florence

While the media speculated all summer about Federico Chiesa's departure to Juventus, Fiorentina's new Calabrian-born American billionaire owner Rocco Commisso had other ideas. Ribery, even at 36, is a statement signing for Fiorentina, a type of signing their fans had craved for years but never saw under the previous owners, the Della Valle family.


The Thinking Man's Coach: Marco Giampaolo

New Milan coach Marco Giampaolo is nothing if not cerebral.  Arrigo Sacchi gushes over him. Journalists have so far given him a deferential respect. Unkempt and disarmingly calm in most pre-season press conferences, Giampaolo has given the impression of a man who prefers to toil within as he finds the formula that can make Milan tick. He is the first coach since Massimiliano Allegri, who left in 2014, who is not an ex-Milan player. Already that represents a bright point for a club that has seen little or no success with experiments like Filippo Inzaghi, Clarence Seedorf, and Gennaro Gattuso on the bench. 

Giampaolo is a man driven by his methods, always ready to point out to journalists that he will throw in new signings like Ismael Bennacer and Rafael Leao when they have learned the movements of the new team.  Milan finally have a bonafide coach.  And the Champions League is a must after having missed out on it by one point last season.

Balotelli returns to Brescia

Mario Balotelli is back. This time to represent Brescia, the city where he also grew up from the age of 2. It is remarkable that while Balotelli negotiated life in France's Ligue 1, he was still a vexed topic in Italy, finding himself as part of discussions around the national team and still referred to as a cautionary tale. 

Balotelli will always be the locus of all Italian football's desires and anxieties it seems. He is variously saviour and scapegoat, but never forgotten.  Balo's partnership with Alfredo Donnarumma up front at Brescia will make for an intriguing season.


In short, there is more to it than what's at the top.  Serie A, after a long time, looks competitive, compelling top to bottom. The Scudetto struggle is merely a sideshow.

Whatever happens at the end of the season, enjoy the ride.  Even if you feel Juventus winning the title is a foregone conclusion.


Friday 28 December 2018

Some Thoughts on Milan...

Unrealistic: Antonio Conte
You have to go back to the summer of 2015 to understand the predicament.  Then Milan president Silvio Berlusconi and his CEO Adriano Galliani laid out a project in front of former coach Carlo Ancelotti. Ancelotti deliberated, or respectfully pretended to, and said no.  Milan ended up with Sinisa Mihajlovic as coach, who did not make the impact that his tenure at Sampdoria had promised.

More than three years later, after a string of disappointing results, seemingly everyone around Milan is asking the question, "why don't we hire a big coach like Antonio Conte."  But they are likely to be disappointed like they were in 2015.  The fans who want Conte in place of current Milan coach and former club legend, Gennaro Gattuso, live in a parallel universe in which a) Conte would want to come coach Milan currently and b) UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules don't exist. To land a big name you need to have the ability to pay both for the name and the players he wants, when he wants. Not when you break even or reach the promised land of financial bliss. 

The January market will be telling and decisive. In my view, we’ll see Milan's financial restrictions laid bare. 

"When we bought Paqueta, UEFA sent us a warning letter," said Milan DS Leonardo today.  "It will be a market of opportunities."

The road is still long, in other words. The timing is unfortunate. Juventus resurrected themselves post-Calciopoli when FFP was basically a rumour. PSG/Manchester City when it was yet to be refined.

Milan have filed an appeal to TAS (the Court of Arbitration in Lausanne that also overturned their Europa League ban) against UEFA's verdict for breaching FFP rules.  The club's owners Elliott are litigious, bullish, but it depends how much they want to push UEFA.  Milan have two options: 1) flout the rules and litigate 2) fall in line and shrewdly move on the market.

In these circumstances, a coach like Conte will never come.  He started his career at Arezzo and has subsequently coached Juventus, Chelsea, and Italy; he doesn't need to cut his teeth anymore.

Until a Conte becomes a realistic target, Milan will stick to company men like Gattuso. They don’t ask for much, first of all. They also have the backing of the fans for a decent amount of time. If they manage results all the better. If they don’t, you look around and see alternatives like Roberto Donadoni, and hesitate. Rightly. 

Gattuso isn't Milan's best bet; he is practically Milan's only one. It's clear that apart from the coaching names being circulated in fantasy land, any other coach would simply be a lateral move--and in some cases worse.   

(As an aside, Gattuso also provokes the worst elements online and elsewhere not only to put their neuroses on display, but also their prejudice.  The bad patch had barely started, and people started to take shots at his Calabrianness.  Gattuso was offered a long term contract by Massimiliano Mirabelli, the director of sport who left with the former Chinese ownership.  He was also Calabrian.  This is license, you see.  People ridicule Gattuso for his cliche-laden press conferences during which his linguistic shortcomings become plainly evident, for phrases like si tocca con mano (you can feel it), which features almost every time.)

"Gattuso is not under discussion, even if he knows we expect more," Paolo Maldini said today.  

If there were viable alternatives, I, too, would replace Gattuso. But not with, with all due respect, Francesco Guidolin or Paulo Sousa. 

That failed attempt to land Ancelotti in 2015 is precisely the issue still: Milan needs a big-time coach but can't attract one.  Until it can, it is best to support who we have.  Forza Milan!

Monday 26 November 2018

No Thank You, Prime Minister

Salvini (left) and Gattuso
"Dino Zoff behaved like an amateur," former PM Silvio Berlusconi said of the former coach after Italy's soul-crushing Euro2000 Final defeat to France. "He left Zinedine Zidane completely open."

The word dilettante (amateur) stung Zoff so much so that he resigned as coach a few days later, saying that he didn't need to "take lessons in dignity from Berlusconi."

He needn't have taken footballing lessons from the man either.  Zidane was cancelled out by an excellent Italy.  The goal came in the last few seconds of the game when French goalkeeper Fabian Barthes launched a hopeful ball that bounced off Fabio Cannavaro's head and into the path of Sylvain Wiltord, who put it past Francesco Toldo from a tight angle.  Either Berlusconi didn't watch the game, or he felt compelled to say anything, something, to be part of the conversation.

Throughout his Milan presidency, Berlusconi offered unsolicited advice to his coaches and players, some so ludicrous that you could almost hear the journalists chuckling when asking the various Milan coaches their opinion of the president's umpteenth formation advice.  

It wasn't as if Berlusconi was always wrong, and it wasn't as if he didn't deserve any deference.  But it was the timing, the simplicity, the, well, amateur nature of his advice that at once rankled and amused.

Why does this matter after eighteen years? Well, Italy's deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, once an ally of Berlusconi, is, unfortunately, a Milan fan.  He has no formal association with the team, but he airs his opinions on it and Milan coach, Gennaro Gattuso, seemingly every week.

The final straw seemed to have arrived after Milan's ultimately valuable 1-1 draw with Lazio in Rome. 

"Why didn't Gattuso make substitutions?" asked Salvini.  "You could see our players were spent."

Lazio's equalizer came in the 94th minute.  Salvini's opinion in the 96th.  It was the kind of facile criticism  that the twitterati subsist on.  

Gattuso finally had had enough. 

"As an Italian I could say a lot to Salvini and all the problems in our country," he said. "This isn't the first time, he seems to talk about Milan a lot."
Salvini retreated, and praised Gattuso, saying "he had only spoken as a fan." The self-deprecation arrived too late.

Political figures weighing in on sporting matters isn't peculiar to Italy, but the significance given to them in the media is rarer to find in other countries.  Salvini's and Berlusconi's comments are a provocation, an overreach. Would Salvini tolerate a public figure like Gattuso giving a potentially unflattering verdict of his leadership? Given Salvini's tendencies in general, I'd hazard a guess that he would not.

What irritates the common fan who suffers with the team, who agonizes over formations is not that Salvini or Berlusconi gives their opinion; it's more that those opinions are crude and unsophisticated.  The ordinary fan expects something extraordinary.  In short, something more than what an amateur could manage.