It was the middle of June when the German soccer player Robin Gosens spoke about the fact that professional soccer was allowed to start again in the country of Italy, which was plagued by the corona virus. Gosens lives in Bergamo, where the virus left its mark very clearly. The 26-year-old is a left-back at the local club Atalanta Bergamo – a small club that thrills the really defensive-oriented league under his coach Gian Piero Gasperini with exhilarating offensive football and is also in the quarter-finals of the Champions League because of that football.
In August the decision is now in the premier class, in a tournament in Lisbon the winner will be played out. Gosens, whose league had to catch up with most of the games in Europe’s major football nations, said in June: “We certainly have an advantage in terms of rhythm, but I would not go so far that we are favorites.” Gosens laughed. He meant this sentence rather than a joke. Atalanta is considered a blatant outsider in the field of participants solely because of its name and history. The team itself does not even have a stadium that is suitable for the Champions League and competed in Milan this season.
But if you look at the performance of Gosens’ team, third in the table in Italy, after the Corona break, then the thought of favorite Atalanta is no longer so absurd. Out of nine games since the interruption, the “Dea” goddess, as they call the club in Italy, won seven and lost none. They only played for Hellas Verona (1-1) on Saturday evening and Juventus Turin (2-2) a week ago – but the record champions Juve had to save with two penalty goals from Cristiano Ronaldo to draw. “Atalanta has the courage to attack the queen and should have deserved more. Juve saves himself thanks to his killer Ronaldo,” wrote the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The team of the hour in Europe is Atalanta Bergamo with 23 points from nine games – and it continues to march.
Quarter-final opponents Paris played the last mandatory game in March
This is why the thing mentioned by Gosens with the rhythm also suits the northern Italians. No national league will play as long as Serie A this summer. While the Bundesliga celebrated their final match day on June 27, Spain’s first league ends this weekend and England’s Premier League in a week, the Italians won’t stop until August 2 . There are only ten days left until the first Bergamaschi tournament game in Lisbon. For comparison: the quarter-final opponent Paris Saint-Germain – with Neymar and Mbappé actually a towering favorite – played his last competitive game because of the league breakout in France even in March.
Due to these circumstances, the goddess could even travel to Lisbon as a secret favorite for the first game. Her pace football under Gasperini with the attacking full-backs Hans Hateboer and Gosens (nine goals, eight assists) is now also feared in Europe. No team kicks in Serie A nearly as effectively as Bergamo: only SSC Napoli has scored at least 94 goals in one season in the past 50 years (95 in 2016/17). Atalanta now has four games left to surpass this mark. The second-strongest team, Inter Milan, met just 72 times this season.
Bergamo produces such dizzying numbers in the Catenaccio country that the former AS Roma coach, Zdenek Zeman, even expressed some suspicion on Italy’s radio station “Rai 1” a few days ago. It is “strange” that Atalanta runs so much on the pitch “considering that they come from Bergamo, where there have been major problems with the virus,” said Zeman. However, there are no suspicions for illegal performance promotion in Bergamo.
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