Chronicle of a Death foretold.
"This is not the drama of fatality, but the drama of responsibility."
This is how Rossana Rossanda described the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which in 1981 produced the perfect metaphor for the failure of our national team to qualify for the next World Cup.
We could immerse ourselves in the simplistic and superficial analysis of the defeat against Macedonia, we could reduce it all to Berardi's missed goal or Trajkovski's goal conceded but as you know Nati Sportivi loves to complicate life but at the same time deepen the issues.
I didn't know it could go like this. But I knew that there were too many clues that could have led us to this terrible final, in which Italian football does not come out reduced in the image but defeated in the management system. But let's go by key words, through those I will try to give voice to my reflection that adds up several factors and from which a picture that should have been worrying but which in the end has worried few comes out.
COMPETITIVENESS'
The competitiveness of a player grows through the frequency of expression of talent in high-level competitions and environments. These generate situations to be managed and solved in which psychological, technical, tactical and motivational factors, in addition to multiplying, become complex.
In other words, net of yesterday's defeat, considering what our second opponent would have been (Portugal) 13/11 they play steadily and regularly in the Top 15 of Europe (or have played there) unlike our national team that sees part of its best expression between Sassuolo, Naples and Lazio.
The absence of an important block of Italian players in the best European and Italian teams is the technical problem of today but the difficulty underestimated yesterday. The symptom detected and not taken into consideration that today has resulted in the disease.
MANAGEMENT
But if we talk about symptoms we have to go into two terms in which we find the greatest gaps, Planning and Programming. Because the high-level competitiveness, the frequency of the expression of talent is only the last aspect that affects the planning of a system.
A system that must provide not only technical but above all organizational investments that follow the evolution and sound out the scenario.
The policy of the facilities, their functionality and accessibility, must provide for investment from below and not the other way around, educating individual sports clubs to the Culture of the Facility, of the House as a tool and not as a simple box where the event takes place.
The programming is not aimed solely and exclusively at the search for talent but at the identification, detection, evolution and maintenance of the talent itself as a principle of the investment itself.
Young Italians who again become the heart of the system and not the problem, with sensible and targeted obligations at a high level and not in the lower leagues with strategies, if possible, shared with the clubs that attend international competitions.
The young people who will become the protagonists.
But the interlocutors must go back to being primarily those who choose on the pitch and not those who promote interests. The owners of the puppet theater who cut the strings to continue to be successful through the Actors and Directors trained in the neighborhood, in the country, in the city.
RESPONSIBILITY'
The ball at a high level weighs but in some moments it weighs more. And the weight you have to be able to carry and manage, you have to be educated to identify it. The national team must be communicated, felt, eaten and digested as an absolute value, as an ambition, as a goal.
And at the finish line the weight increases, it multiplies between that of the jersey and that of the ball.
Because the national team is not another means of increasing media exposure, but lives with the pride of the representation of many carried out by a few.
In this way the weight is transformed into emotion, the one that is generated by adding together the territorial diversities under a single cultural and social expression.
IDENTITY'
The word National, like it or not, comes from Nazione. And as a friend of mine says, as long as Nations exist, the Nationals must be an expression and a luster.
And then we arrive at Identity. In a world that has disintegrated the concepts of belonging, identity, roots, which has subverted values and customs, it becomes a business to generate a cultural process that unites people under a single symbol or shield.
It is not by chance, however, that I left this word for last.
Because it is the end of the deepening but it is the principle of the Vision.
The one that must all agree, the guideline.
The identity of a strong and numerous movement in which there is no lack of economic and human resources, a movement among the best in the world for quality and quantity, for history and passion.
The Path must be traced today, without wasting time and looking to the day after tomorrow, which brings together the technical, organizational and cultural variables with a strong national identity based on the conscience of those who have made bad choices and the pride of those who he can solve problems better than anyone else.
Article World Cup, chronicle of a death foretold From Sports born.
