Azzurri, sorry, but are you Spallettis sure you understand this? (Corsera)

Azzurri, sorry, but are you Spallettis sure you understand this? (Corsera)

In the Corriere della Sera the correspondent Fabrizio Roncone writes a great piece which, like all excellent pieces, is impossible to summarize. It’s like a movie script. It starts from the scenes in the Acqua restaurant, in North Rhine, where all the footballers are having dinner.

And he writes:

Almost everyone, upon entering, went to pay homage to Gianluca Di Marzio, Sky journalist and authentic authority on the subject of football transfers. And this is what the Azzurri talk about: a bit about the transfer market, who goes, who stays, who extends the contract, and then about watches, cars, about holidays that no one knows when they will begin. Because the terrible question that hovers is: do we win with Croatia? Will we be able to qualify for the round of 16 of this European Championship?

Then, the direction shifts to Luciano Spalletti: a lonely man looking for the solution. This is how Roncone (who it is no coincidence that we here on Napolista defined as Sconcerti’s worthy heir) describes him:

Spalletti studies solutions with his notes

23 kilometers from here, in the center of a forest, there is the man who is trying to find the answer. The city remained in Iserlohn, home of the blue retreat. Locked in his hotel room, in the white light of a lamp, bent over the table and there he consults the data of the match in which Spain beat us (who ran more, who less, the number of missed tackles and wrong passages) and fills sheets of arrows and circles. Every now and then, he opens one of his notebooks. His famous, precious notebooks. And he reads.

On those notes there is the life of a coach who studies. Who is not satisfied. That pure tactical genius has never been enough, the talent of seeing positions and game tracks that others don’t see: Spalletti delves deeper, is curious about other people’s football and elaborates it, tries to improve his own, always immersed in close fussiness to obsession. A banal scheme demeans him. Instead, it excites him to invent (like certain “rotating” three-and-a-half defenses, or Totti a false nine, Brozovic a playmaker and Lobokta a living compass, when at Maradona they thought they were watching Napoli on the play-station).

Roncone then explains Mr Luciano’s football: relational and not positional.

Then it ends with a question. One of those films with an open ending.

He didn’t achieve all this against Spain. For the quality of the group, which is what it is, of course: but – if you think about it – perhaps also because many of the Azzurri, in an attempt to please him, play joylessly, worried. Even now, in this restaurant. Slightly gray faces. Di Lorenzo and Cristante at the register, for the bill. Sorry, guys, I have a doubt: but you, Spalletti, are we sure you understand it?

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