Every (rare) Como defeat is accompanied by a debate on the football and communication philosophy of its coach. Which suffers from a bit of initial arrogance and must avoid becoming the fetish of lounge gamers.
There are two Fabregas, or rather many more. And one, or some, of these Fabregas have earned a bad reputation in the lounges and sports bars where football is talked about from morning to night. The first Fabregas, the one who is disliked by many (but also has an army of faithful ready to do anything to defend him) is the one who is a little arrogant and presumptuous. Fabregas, who sends his team to attack on the pitch at San Siro against Inter, match one of this long season of comparisons between the two teams, is skewered mercilessly and then boldly tries to explain to the onlookers that he didn’t see all this difference. As if having caught four and having squandered doesn’t count for anything and sport is just philosophy and little practice.
That Fabregas has made himself unpleasant far beyond his sporting and communication merits. Every now and then he comes back, between a feat and a setback in a championship that has projected his Como into a new dimension. He appears in the pass count after losing from a comeback against Milan (“We made 700 passes against 220, I don’t know what to say. I can only say that Maignan made a lot of saves and Rabiot won the game with two quality plays”), or when he tries to convince everyone that Chivu, who overturned him again with Inter, just for a change with a comeback, did it because he “a team of veterans who win a championship, I won’t say easy – because Chivu will never say it – but with these players you are always closer to winning”. Phrase that contains an obvious one (the stronger players are more likely to win) and a trace of the old Fabregas.
Because Chivu who overturned him for the second time in two weeks did so risking everything, following his ideas and relying on those who Cesc called “kids who make a difference” and who, instead, were a gamble in a theater that would not have forgiven him for those choices in the event of defeat. And, therefore, they were a merit and not a gift of fate.
The new Fabregas has changed his communication path a few months ago to talk about himself and his Como. He has become more humble, attentive, aware that he still has a road to travel and that even defeats have a weight, they cannot always and only be dismissed as a stage of growth. Or, worse, claiming their own way of interpreting football as if the result didn’t matter. He is working on himself and on the moment of confrontation, the one in which he has to speak and explain whether he won or lost. There are those who continue to perceive him as unpleasant, or arrogant or presumptuous, however, and this happens because the new Fabregas, very different from the old one, pays at least a couple of penalties for which he is partly responsible and partly not.
The first is that he works in a context that has been constant for years, perhaps even longer polarization between two parties that do not recognize each other. There are the gamers according to which aesthetics matters achievers who fight, almanac in hand. Both deaf to the thoughts of others, both with the need to identify with a fetish which is Allegri for those who think that the end justifies the means and, now, Fabregas for those who assign themselves a not well justified ethical superiority. And Cesc risks becoming a victim of this opposition like Zeman, De Zerbi and others before him, sacrificed on the altar of fundamentalism. Better to run away from this deadly embrace and if you have fueled it (the first Fabregas) to quickly and publicly disavow it.
The second question, however, sees him as guilty and is the atavistic resistance of Italians to having life explained to them by others. Today it applies to football, where we have found ourselves fragile and losers. What does this Fabregas want when he comes to show us a new way? And what does he do from the top of a project held up with hundreds of millions of euros and sold (by others) as if it were a story of the industrious province that emerges? Well, Cesc is not to blame for this. He isn’t teaching us about life (and football), but neither does he deserve for the beauty that his Como has been showing for a year now to end up buried under the envy of others.
The philosopher Schopenhauer is the author of the famous aphorism according to which “Every truth goes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as self-evident”. It is not necessarily applicable to Fabregas and his Como, but it certainly contains a grain of truth.
