Luciano Spalletti leads the Italian national team with sunglasses and a trimmed moustache like Ferdinando Cefalù, the main character of Italian style divorce. This is how he arrived at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin yesterday when the passionate words he spoke in Leipzig three days ago were still echoing in the expedition: “Afraid? Spooky? I come here to watch the games and I don’t even pay the entrance fee! Fear of losing…? I have lost so much in my life! I have collected defeats and days of sleeplessness. Its normal. I don’t want them to put more pressure on me than is correct. I take enough poison by myself. When they don’t give it to me, I take it myself so I can react to all the situations that arise.”
The Italy coach is a single man on the wing, accompanied by a single man on the field of play. A man he puts pressure on every time he can. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, when after the defeat against Spain, on the second day of the Euro Cup, he was asked about Jorginho’s strange disappearance. The coach was desperate because his right arm, the midfielder, stopped offering himself to his centre-backs and Italy’s circulation dried up. Spalletti blamed it on the footballer’s precarious physical condition, unable to take the helm because he was always behind the plays, overwhelmed by the avalanche of Pedri, Fabián and Rodri, and surrounded by teammates who have rarely been up to par in Germany. . Tonight at the Olympic Stadium (9:00 p.m., Movistar), when Italy begins the last chapter of its eventful journey through the Euro against Switzerland, all the pressure will fall on the one who asks for the ball whenever he can: Jorge Luiz Frello, Jorginho.
His starting position has been the most certain thing so far in a team where everything is uncertain. But the Italian media remind us of it every day: Jorginho missed two penalties against Switzerland, one in Basel, the other in Rome, which kept the team out of the World Cup in Qatar. In front of him was Yann Sommer, the goalkeeper who will now protect the opponent’s goal, in the typical circle of drama that sometimes changes the fate of footballers. What is hardly mentioned in the troubled entourage of the national team is that without Jorginho, Italy would never have been able to lift the Euro 2021 at Wembley, because in a country where there are no players who think quickly and clearly, there was no one else who took on more responsibility with the ball. There still isn’t one. The drought is drying up the youth teams from the Piedmont to Sicily, the area with the most international titles in Europe, along with Germany, and this is perceived as a national dishonour. The fact that Jorginho was born in Imbituba, Brazil, 33 years ago, does not help the protagonist.
Thus, the journalistic question was unavoidable when Spalletti called him up for the first time last year: “Do you see any young player who can take over from you in the midfield?” The person questioned did not know what to answer. With Marco Verratti, his great partner until 2021, retired, the outlook is bleak. Nicolò Fagioli, the Juventus midfielder, is part of the squad but after seven months of suspension for participating in illegal betting, his physical condition is poor. Davide Frattesi is a dynamic finisher, but unprepared to ask for the ball at the base of plays due to his poor peripheral vision. Lorenzo Pellegrini, Roma’s midfielder, suffers from a kind of melancholy that leads him to play irrelevant or timid football, at best. Nicolò Barella is a dedicated and versatile worker who thinks after receiving the ball, which disables him from operating in front of his centre-backs without risk of accident.
Behind Rice at Arsenal
“There are banal mistakes that are sometimes made because the poor are not used to this pressure,” says Spalletti, shrugging his shoulders, like a resigned father. “We don’t have so many expert players in international competitions. That is why we have suffered.”
Jorginho is the only player in the starting XI who does not play in Serie A. Since he left Brazil at the age of 14 to go live in a convent in Verona, he knows what it is like to make ends meet away from home, and that is why he has made a career out of asking for the ball. By offering himself so much, in the 2017-18 season he broke the record for passes by a player in the Premier League: 3,118 deliveries in 37 games with Chelsea. In 2021 he won the Champions League. Who will take the penalties if not him? “I am ready,” he warns.
He has just completed a season in which he has barely played ten Premier League games as a starter for Arsenal, where English idol Declan Rice has priority. His physical condition is not optimal, but those close to the national team say that if they beat Switzerland they will have six days to prepare for the quarter-finals and that will especially benefit him. Meanwhile, all the pressure from Italy falls on Spalletti and his manager Jorginho.
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