The Azzurri’s trip to Türkiye hides pitfalls: excluding the experience risks compromising the race towards the European Championships and World Cup. But anyone who has doubts should say so now, it’s too convenient to criticize later…
I declare myself to customs, dear technical commissioner. I am not at all convinced of the choices he made for match number two of this Nations League, the trip to Bursa on the pitch of uncomfortable Türkiye. I am not convinced, always taking the reconstructions that have appeared in the newspapers as valid, because I fear you have fallen into the trap of considering this challenge important but not fundamental. Less important, perhaps, than the away match that awaits us in Paris at the home of Zidane’s France which scares us because there we really risk losing and in terms of image it would be a disaster.
Woe to losing against Montella, however. And perhaps to close the double comparison that also holds together Bologna’s return behind the Turks in a virtual ranking which would then see us cut off from the possibility of arriving in the top three and grasping the minimum objective (maximum for me) of this first phase of your new era: not to complicate life, to be seeded in the draw for the elimination groups towards the European Championship and not to be relegated to the bottom floor, putting ourselves in trouble also in view of the 2030 World Cup. Your true objective.
This is why I wouldn’t have left Barella and Mancini’s experience at home. Did they play badly against Belgium? True, like almost everyone. But in the Turkish bedlam they were needed. And I’m not convinced by the choice, if confirmed, to go ahead with debuts, experiments and first times. Not this evening. Not in a match that can heavily influence a two-year period.
There, I wrote it. Now, however, let it be done like in weddings where at a certain point the officiant proclaims: “If anyone has something to say, speak now or remain silent forever.” Anyone else who has doubts or perplexities raise their hands and make themselves known. Now. Not tomorrow, if it goes badly, to cover the coach with mud and controversy or some young person thrown into the fray with the right to make mistakes. Any reference to such Alexander Romano1920s, was intentional: described by the same newspapers first as the “new Rodri” and then as a disaster on which to charge the bad impression with Belgium.
Speak now or remain silent forever. If you like the turning point and the courage shown by Mancini in approaching this away match (and reading the articles from the day before it seems that they like them), tomorrow no one will deny them. A little coherence doesn’t hurt even if it is a rare commodity and above all not very functional for the exercise preferred by critics and not only in this moment of low in Italian football: unloading on the national team and on Mancini (who is already… disliked by many in his own right) tensions and frustrations that concern something else. From sports politics to the problems of your club. The blue shirt has nothing to do with it, if you have doubts raise them otherwise remain silent forever.
