For the collective imagination, Rino (Gennaro century) Gattuso is still “Ringhio”, a fray median, to steal a metaphor from rugby, ready to venture every ball and squeeze every drop of sweat: One who woke up every morning with the desire to bite someone’s legs like Snoopy, for the rest of the big dreamer, in the rare jolts of Canininia. Maybe they exaggerated, but it is true that he was not one who gave up the bone.
Gattuso was, as a player, one who admitted their limits (even too much, because those who do not have if the comparison stone is punishment from the edge of the Pirlo area), which did not miss frankness, But who always and always worked at the service of the team, inside and off the pitch.
A distant episode comes to mind, Gattuso was still in the blue jersey with Italy. At the end of training, a companion, difficult to say who today at so much distance, say who, pulls a ball from the middle of the field and puts it on the net. Gattuso sees and screams him: “If I make it up I give you 500 euros”. It was clearly the joke of someone who wanted to say to his partner: “At that distance it is only luck, even if I felt a million times we wouldn’t enter you anymore”. But in the newspapers the next day he whips the cream: the blues become those who do not value money, who end the training by betting with each other. A forcing that does not make the incident, whoever was there.
THEThe next day Gattuso takes aside the manager, he knows, and his voice comes clearly at least to those who pass by there: «Listen to me well, I was not born rich, I saw them my parents struggling, I was born in the middle of the fishermen, I know how 500 euros are worth 500, even if I am a privileged one, it is not good for me that I can make the figure of the one willing to throw them away. It was a joke, I just wanted to tell him that he had lucky. “
The words are not exact, because you remember by heart, but the meaning is that: Probably that in the place of luck in the tingle context he had used a more colorful synonym, but makes the idea of him, of his Franco way of understanding life, bread to bread wine with wine, zero duplices, and all in all of the fact that he had a ratio, having used debt time as a title of an autobiography the Calabrian proverb, If one is born, a round does not die.
It would be wrong today to identify the player at the time with the technician of today, who at 47 years ago the coach of 12, between Italy and abroad, with alternate events, and very different from each other also due to complexity not all linked to the field (Sion, Palermo, Ofi Crete, Pisa, Milan U19 and first team, Naples, Valencia, Marseille, Hajduk Split. Italian Cup with Napoli 2019/20 The only title). In the work he often changed air and bench, the opposite of what he did in love, having shared all his life with the same woman, Monica, the girl known in Glasgow where she had gone to play as a young man when abroad was less fashionable: they got married in 2004 and have two children.
Certain Those with motivator’s skills, already present in the leadership on the field, will have had a weight in the choice of the Federation, at a time when there is to merge, it seems, the attachment to the blue jersey that has recently become a little lac; As perhaps it can be useful, to an Italy a little disoriented, the spirit of cohesion that can trigger one like this, which has passed its career to row so that others finalized the game, to put it with Ligabue.
It is clear, however, that not only a determination lives a national football team that has, not from today, a narrow rose, which in the short term not even a San Gennaro will be able to resolve miraculously: The tactical and amalgam limits can also be adjusted in a short time, the technical ones and the fishing basin not.
It will be up to the sleeves and understand if a fuse of passion on can be enough to trigger performance beyond the limits. In sport sometimes happens: woe to underestimate the mental aspect at certain levels. It will be enough to grab a world qualification that arises uphill, to get to which will be needed to win all the games with many goals, so as not to end up condemned at the start of the proof of the nets difference?
It is a question that will answer only from the field, on which the performances here and now more than the blazon that brings a national team of four world titles, the most recent of which, Gattuso on the field, 19 years ago. Perhaps he can help have the patience to shovel balls one game at a time, so as not to disperse nervous energies and not to transform the qualification into an anxiety -making Holy Grail.
What matters will also not forget, at the time of the budgets, that Gattuso now takes the witness of a relay that starts behind. It also takes courage to get involved like this, even if you are without a contract, even if it is of those who exalt when they see blue. Gattuso first said to the Federal President that the challenge will be impervious before accepting: a matter of healthy realism, not only of hands forward.
But when Rino Gattuso has never seen himself back back, at the cost of being a little. The appointment with the field is for September 5, the first test of nine against Estonia in Bergamo. And it will already be an exercise without a network.
