Allegri’s abyss, winning the Italian Cup but also losing himself

TURIN. Inside the manhole was It. In Jekyll’s darkness lived Hyde. Because there is always the explanation of the sinking, the black sea that churns in the invisible abyss. For a long time, of Massimiliano Allegri we only saw the ripple of the wave, the white foam that rolled along with the balls into other people’s goals. The surface. But the currents, ah, those are much further down, where unimaginable creatures slumber, monsters from the Odyssey. It’s a shame that a good story became a horror novel.

Allegri’s darkness is his solitude: the blood clot doesn’t always start because of this, but feeling alone and naked helps. They recalled him to Juventus, first admitting a double sin of illusion SarriThen Pirlo. The chimera of the “beautiful game”, the glittering reflections of modernity. But only he who wins is modern. Max, sorry, we were wrong. Let us win. You know how to do it. He knew how to do it: in three years, his verb became imperfect. He came back still there Cristiano Ronaldo, for a short time but it was there, with a president whose surname was Agnelli, and then he found himself with Kean and Nicolussi Caviglia, no offence. Before, the only ankle he cared about was Tevez’s.

Less than a thousand days. The first three hundred to lose two finals, the second to not lose track between points taken away and partly returned by the courts, a rubber ranking and the whole world collapsing. But Allegri was always on the deck, chasing the distant profile of a cetacean hump, his white whale a little tired: was the captain tired too? Has he really never updated himself after the two sabbatical years on the punt in Livorno, and the return to the house he never left? Was it right to pass Max off as a brontosaurus? There would remain, poorly counted, the last hundred days, the darkest. Everything had changed in the meantime, inside and out. Young team, another president, other managers, the complicated relationship with Giuntoli. The choice of Motta already at Christmas, the dam collapsing at San Siro, the whirlwind looping fall, the referees treating Juve like anything else. “Where is Rocchi?”. Good question.

Winning is the first thing that counts, yes, but also the last. The darkness presses, hell boils with its embers. And Max, who had experienced the revolution of an entire world after Covid, including some new and abstruse rules, such as the five substitutions (what a mistake to admit the discomfort in the management mechanics), he instead found himself always identical, perhaps immobile and no longer invincible. The wounded animal, mauled by tigers.

Once upon a time they bought them Higuainthen it arrived Alcaraz. And all the time spent hearing ourselves say old: even our grandfather would have been pissed off. So farewell to the foam of the wave, to the lightness of the Tuscan spirit. The reasons of blood claim the toll, and Max’s father was a longshoreman. How far is the night?, the son must have asked himself, winning a Cup that would have been better lost. All the anger, at that point, re-emerged from the bottom, together with the thirst for revenge, the boulders of pebbles in the shoes, and the outburst was an algebraic sum of the worst (which however makes blood in a world of plastic). In an hour and a half, Max’s underground memories have transfigured a man, completing a physical mutation too, those sharp edges on his face, that skull almost like a skull now, those haunted eyes. With the Cup already in hand, Allegri became a creature of Tim Burton between the frightening and the grotesque.

In Rome he won what he could and lost everything else. Maybe he won’t coach at certain levels anymore. It would have been better to be humiliated by Atalanta than by himself. But, guys, so much real life in the abyss.