I don’t know Massimiliano Allegri, coach of Juventus, other than from some hallway in some stadium, a quick hello and goodbye, but I thought of him as a seasoned guy and not much given to spectacles, much less to striptease, so I was surprised by his exaggerated reaction in the stoppage time of the Italian Cup final that pitted his Juve against the admirable Atalanta. Seeing an experienced coach being stripped of his clothes, after receiving a red card, for protesting a foul in the final seconds of a match that could give a title to a needy entity, could be a motivation for such an exaggerated protest. Well, there will also be those who can read that behind so much uncontrolled effusiveness there was a lot of fine, not cold, strategy to stop the game, stop the final seconds, who knows whether to influence the referee.
The fact is that this image of an experienced coach pushed towards the locker room tunnel while he made to take off his shirt adds to that of Pep Guardiola lying on the grass of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium while trying to free that lumbar vertebra that is causing him discomfort. while his team was rowing to get ahold of the Premier title and the tension, and Tottenham’s chances, blocked the City coach’s lower back and sent him to the horizontal to regain control of his back; or that other one of Valverde complaining wildly for an action that sent him punished staring at the wall with a red card and a couple of suspension matches, so many extreme situations that one is glad that one has never taken the path of the benches as if up there in the box one did not suffer and one’s shirt was not left over more than once.
What can I tell you about the intense debate between Guardiola and his goalkeeper Ederson when Pep decided to change him after the strong blow received to the head by the goalkeeper, who felt fit to continue but prudence demanded that he leave the field. Something came to mind, don’t think it was very much, to remind me of a similar action in which I was involved and in which after receiving a strong blow to the head I was treated by the magical Ángel Mur, who with water, massage and touch me. He replaced everything that had moved and I continued playing. The fact is that since Ángel Mur knew much more about these things than I did, he stayed behind the goal to ask me how things were going. I, responsible and professional, told him that everything was fine, a little headache but everything was under control. Suddenly, Ángel says because I don’t remember anything, I turned around to ask him a question: “Ángel, where are we playing?” From there to the change, the stretcher, the ambulance and the admission to a hospital in Mallorca, because it was Lluís Sitjar, there was no more than half an hour. A blank time in my memories.
The tension, the responsibility, the unconsciousness, thinking only about winning without paying attention to other issues, the risk of measuring what you have to do and not what you should do, the feeling that a project is slipping through your fingers and that hell of relegation, defeat, the absolute abyss opens under our minds, it can lead us to situations in which we do not recognize ourselves, those in which sitting in the tranquility of your office you always have the right answer, the right phrase and the argument. accurate until, to paraphrase Mike Tyson, the game comes along and punches you in the face. And he sends you to the canvas.
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