Luciano Spalletti runs towards the fans, sings the Mameli anthem. Red Bull Arena, the match against Croatia has just finished. What effort, what stress. He seems happy, but something slowly goes wrong. The resentment rises, increasing minute by minute. The victory against Modric brings more anger than joy. There is not a moment of happiness when he gives himself to interviews, a single moment to smile, to enjoy what was given to him with that “delpieristic” rainbow of Zaccagni in the 98th minute, in the last available action. Italy, Spalletti’s Italy, is second in a group of iron, therefore destined for the round of 16, in Berlin, a city of world memories.
Italy-Croatia report cards: Donnarumma prodigious (8), Zaccagni decisive (8), Pellegrini does not make an impact (4.5), Calafiori man more (7)
Luciano Spalletti’s anger
Lucio, on the other hand, as he himself says, “injects the poison into himself, alone, without your help”. Yours means ours, the journalists, who are in front of him and don’t prod him, on the contrary, they let him speak almost without cross-examination, they listen to his outburst, apparently for no reason. Spalletti’s mood is not enjoyable, it is altered by anger. He is angry with those who “took the piss out of him… for a defeat”; with some spy footballers, with those who haven’t understood that playing with more “prudence” doesn’t mean denying oneself. Lucio arrives in the press room excited by the discussion during a previous Sky live broadcast, when he hears Paolo Condò say that Italy on the pitch was characterized by “prudence”. The magic word: prudence, wait-and-see, deadbolt. Horror. Words against his philosophy, of a man who loves to attack on and off the pitch, without filters, without a viewfinder. So, in the pile.
Italy-Switzerland, where to watch it (on TV and streaming) and when the Azzurri will play at the 2024 European Championships
The “pact with the players”
Usually he gets angry in self-defense, this time he takes the words and the inspiration from a question to jump in his chair and attack the space, or rather, as he himself says, the middle of the space. The question referred to a possible “pact between players and coach”. A pact that would have led to that formation, as already pointed out to him, more “prudent” than those seen with Albania and Spain. According to him, prudence wasn’t there at all, the issue was related to too many Italian mistakes (“we were below our level”), which crushed the team in the first half, making it seem prudent. You play with 4, you play with 3 (“I did my thesis in Coverciano on this module”, he says), the situation doesn’t change “we know how to do both”, he reiterates vigorously. To the journalist who talks about a “pact”, however, he replies that someone, perhaps one of the players, would have told him about it. She doesn’t have a nose ring, Lucio: «And she – she lands the blow on her Radio 24 colleague – she’s fifty-one years old, I’m 65, she still has fourteen years of pip to go …». It was a question without any particular allusion, but perhaps the coach didn’t miss the opportunity to show his desire for “me against everyone”, “us against the world”.
The method
A method that has often worked, leading to unexpected results. Spain ’82 is an example, most recently that of Marcello Lippi in 2006, just after Calciopoli, when no one wanted to know about the national team. The nervous Spalletti puts himself on a pedestal, attacks so as not to be attacked, teases his players and then exalts them. “If I were afraid I would do your job.” Yours would be ours: that of a journalist. That he asks questions, asks trying to understand, also criticizes, as always happens, players, coaches and technical commissioners.
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The messenger
