Cagliari, Nicolas Viola and Sinner’s example: “Jannik can teach us footballers a lot”

The four points achieved with Atalanta and Inter bear the signature of Cagliari’s number 10, Nicolas Violaelected by Claudio Ranieri as a game-breaking wildcard: “In football you live by labels – underlines the player Tuttosport – but I rather believe that you have to get on the pitch to do well and every minute is fundamental. I train to be a starter, there’s no doubt about that, and I respect the choices.”

How much do psychology studies help you manage your emotions?
“On the pitch, the one who has the most balance wins, the one who doesn’t let himself be carried away by the positive or negative moments in the match. In this regard, having studied has given me a lot (Viola obtained her three-year degree with a thesis on the “Role of “empathy in socio-emotional development: analysis of some empirical contributions”). If you don’t get carried away by emotions, you manage to learn from mistakes and, in the same way, analyze the good things that happen to you to improve your path”.

In Monte Carlo Sinner, after the referee’s mistake, suffered cramps and lost the match: how important is the psyche in the sporting gesture?
“It’s fundamental. I have a lot of respect for Sinner because he’s a well-organised boy and you can see that he studies a lot to make everything he does on the pitch coincide perfectly. The growth path starts within us, not outside: if you focus on external factors remain conditioned by random events, by luck, by bad luck, by the referee. The right path is instead to focus on what can be done. It is a process that requires effort because injustices also exist that the really strong ones manage to have balance even in managing certain things that require patience and calm. And I think Sinner is one of those.”

So, despite being very different sports, can Sinner teach a footballer anything?
“Absolutely: sport is like life, but everything is much more accelerated. Every day we have to prove that we have the right head and balance to face training and matches: sometimes it’s not easy because we are human beings and we are influenced by external factors. Good players know how to influence these events in their favor.”