From the columns of La Repubblica, Paolo Condò analyses Italy’s disastrous European Championship
From the columns of La Repubblica, Paolo Condò analyses Italy’s disastrous European Championship. The journalist highlights the mistakes made in recent years by Gravina and sends a message to Spalletti. “Listening to Gabriele Gravina yesterday, the feeling of Groundhog Day was powerful: Italian football has been reliving the same disasters in a loop for a long time and the federal president faces them without even letting a strong gesture flash, with the detachment of someone who knows he has no alternative. Gravina was good at holding the helm in the Covid storm, where he had to deal with a minister (Spadafora) for whom football was smoke and mirrors. But that credit should have been played by reforming governance in harmony with the clubs, in whose assembly the big ones should have preliminarily resolved the issue of the 18 teams not by arrogant diktat, but by opening up to some form of compensation for those who would see the swing between A and B accentuated“.
“If the political big picture helps explain the repetition of failures, it certainly does not absolve the technical management of Luciano Spalletti, who yesterday presented not so much the alibis as the mitigating circumstances of this shipwreck. For the analysis to make sense, we need to clear the field of the need to see heads roll. We would have appreciated the gesture of resignation as we would have appreciated it from Mancini after the World Cup flop”.
“The unbearable weight that he has loaded on the shoulders of players who were already psychologically fragile – Barella and Dimarco the only leaders in the clubs – has ended up crushing them. Too many life lessons, too many reminders to the fans, too much yoke on them where the last good result was clearly due to a carelessness to which Luca Vialli knew and wanted to add with his terrible personal story that dramatic note that ended up inspiring Mancini’s Italy. Spalletti is a complex man who gets to you with time and everyday life, he is the drop that wears away the stone as demonstrated by a career in which he has always gone from strength to strength, up to the masterpiece of Naples”.
“The obstinacy with which he proposed poor Di Lorenzo comes from the fact that he was the only one who understood him completely. In his captain of Naples and in the debutants, from Calafiori to Fagioli, on whom it would be necessary to come to an agreement. The disqualification has been served: can we consider his debt paid – from September the same will be true for Tonali – or will the stigma have to accompany him forever? It was not only the elimination with Switzerland, going by memory, the worst performance of the Azzurri in the last 25 years”.
