Jorginho in crisis with Italy at Euro 2024: why he always plays with Spalletti

It’s a beautiful, warm sunny afternoon and the reporters don’t have to go into the thick, dark forest, among the low branches, hidden like rangers, to understand what’s happening on the pitch. Luciano Spalletti he decides that the training will be open-door, he even opens a smile before the match, which amuses the fans, but which gives no indications. The players who faced the Croatians remained doing exercise bikes in the gym and, therefore, the formation with which we will face the Swiss on Saturday in Berlin is still to be imagined. There are many doubts. Thorny cases remain. Like that of Jorge Luis Fregio Filho, better known as Jorginho.

Our director is playing a terrible European. It’s slow, without rhythm. Wickedly, they wrote: walk. He certainly doesn’t have flashes, he doesn’t invent corridors. Never a throw. She plays one touch, but in the sense that they pass it to him: and he passes it back to her. From the side, if that’s okay. If not, backwards. Fair only in the first game, against Albania. Embarrassing against Spain (the city, caught by the Sky cameras, shouted very harsh phrases at him: «Let him get it, otherwise there’s no point in him playing!»; then, during the interval, she replaced him). Bad against Croatia.

But Spalletti, so far, he kept him among the starters. Always. At the beginning, when he asked the team to try to interpret and realize his ambitious, almost visionary project made up of liquid schemes, perimeter football, relational football, in short that stuff (it happened like this and so we, in words, theoretically, let alone the players who had to apply it on the pitch): and then Jorginho remained at the center of the Azzurri’s maneuver even when against the Croatians we lined up with a prudent and very Italian 5-3-2 (or rather 3-5- 2: because if the “arms”, the fifths are Di Lorenzo and Dimarco, it is clear that you start with the idea of ​​having five permanent defenders on the pitch).

Spalletti seems not to trust Fagioli

In short: Spalletti, who had excluded Jorginho from his first squad list (on his debut on the bench, September 2023), now seems unable to do without him. Why? To a more or less direct question – they often try to find diplomatic formulas, and it doesn’t always work – the technician explained that «he is the only one who can tell his companions where to stand. And of those players there, we have few in the group». Jorginho’s natural replacement would be Beans (not Cristante: good at doing a bit of everything, in the middle of the pitch, but doesn’t have the director’s time).

Only the coach doesn’t seem to trust Fagioli completely. You know the story of this player: he was called up despite having just finished serving his suspension and quite a few observers say and write that, well, even rewarding him with a European Championship, perhaps was a little inappropriate. Spalletti, however, ignores all doubts: the human material that our championship offers him is of tremendous modesty and explains that he preferred him to Ricci, because he is the one who best plays the role of playmaker among young Italians. That’s exactly what he says: among the young (even though Fagioli is 23, Pedri 21 and Bellingham 20).

From the pitches of Brazil to the national team

Jorginho has 32, in a falling parabola, very experienced. With the story of him starting from a rain-soaked pitch at the Escolinha de Futebol in Guabiruba, Brazil, at 13 years old, a guy who weighed 50 kilos including his boots, and arriving at Veronaalready head held high and with millimetric precision in his passes, caressing the ball as his mother taught him (if you search on YouTube, you’ll find her in an amazing video in which he crosses the square at fifty: I mean her, his mother): and then at Verona they dawdle, there’s no contract, so the friars of a convent feed him, he wants to go back to Brazil, his mother screams at him on the phone “Don’t move!”, until Verona takes him, gives him his debut and from there he ends up in the light of great football, at Napoli with Sarri and then in London, first at Chelsea and then at Arsenal, where — last season — he struggled a lot to get a starting shirt.

He took the blue one when Tite, at the time coach of Brazil, decided to leave him in Italy and then in the Football Federation they found a very distant relative of his on his father’s side in Santa Caterina, a hamlet of Lusiana Conco, in the province of Vicenza: paperwork, Italian citizenship, a European Championship won that night in London and then the humiliating exclusion of Italy from the World Cup also because of the two penalties he missed (he, usually infallible) against Switzerland. They call from the newspaper. “Is he playing or not, against the Swiss, Jorginho?” Yes, no, maybe, I don’t know.