The show must go on, the show must go on when the trapeze artists fall, the clowns enter. The football that counts has always loved to accredit its image by cloaking it in values and good feelings. But maybe they’re only good when they don’t get in the way of business. Too often those who command in the sport that counts show themselves to be untimely and in their untimeliness reveal that they think, beyond the facade, in the manner of the unscrupulous and shameless impresarios who invented that terrible adage.
Sometimes it is public order that dictates not to stop: at Heysel it could have had a logic with a full stadium and an ongoing tragedy, force them to play to prevent panic from spreading and increasing the danger. Yet even today that raised Cup sounds like an insult. But the Champions League match between Real and Milan in Madrid scheduled for tonight at 9pm you still have to play. There was time to decide to postpone it because sometimes there are other priorities (Luca Pancalli did it with full merit as president of the FIGC, when he imposed the stop of the championships following the murder of Commissioner Raciti).
Hundreds and hundreds of families in Spain are waiting to know if the flooded mouth of the car park in Aldaia, transformed by the flood of the Dana into a buried port, will also return their missing children, fathers and mothers. Playing Real-Milan in Madrid is an insult to them. Among other things, law enforcement is needed to organize a match of that level, which these days would be more useful elsewhere. A Champions League match requires organisation, the calendars are busy, but there are times when organisations, even large organisations, have to deal with reality.
Carlo Ancelotti, it is not the first time, knowing he has specific weight, has taken the responsibility of saying what he thinks. And it is a thought of a respectable person, of a normal person. “Why haven’t they all been postponed?”, he said, alluding to the only two postponed La Liga matches, in the pre-match press conference in which he refused to talk about football, “We are employees and sometimes we are forced to do things even when we don’t want to . We had no power to do anything. Football is a party. And you can celebrate when you are well, when your family is well, when everyone is well. When people aren’t well you can’t party. I don’t know if it’s the fault of politics but I understand the frustration of the people who have lost everything. It is an immense tragedy. Today, with the technology that exists, you can even know what time it rains, but we were unable to predict a misfortune like this.”
To conclude: «They say that the show must always go on, but it doesn’t have to be that way». One might think that normality at that level is a rare commodity in that world, if even the request to cancel a match made by the best coach in history is ignored. It says a lot about a world that rarely misses the opportunity to show itself out of this world. Out of tune. Revenues drop, kids no longer go to the stadium and only watch the highlights in a few minutes on the web. Kids from all over Spain and half the world are shoveling in the mud. And if they are not interested in football, perhaps football should start asking itself why.
