(by Arturo Minervini) – “Napoli was looking for an excuse not to play”. As if to say: “Those who don’t kill people on the street do so because they are afraid of going to prison“. The ruling of the Court of Appeal on the Juventus-Naples case has arrived, a series of legal and linguistic ups and downs that confirm the verdict issued by the Sports Judge Mastandrea.
We are facing an epochal turning point, the extreme attempt to defend the league at the expense of a club that had simply had the conscience of weighing the exceptionality of the situation: the previous contact with a club, Genoa, which had been hit from a real Covid outbreak.
Some passages of the motivation border on the hilarious why treat the ASL, a body made competent with the supplementary resolution of the protocol for exceptional cases, as an almost marginal body in the matter. A foreign body, in the midst of a world pandemic, which had to do business precisely because oh, there is Juve-Napoli to play and if the world falls, you have to play it.
In one passage we read: “The reason why a professional football club should ask for information on their application to the health authorities is difficult to understand and this conduct can only be attributed to other meaning than that of the applicant’s desire to pre-arrange itself a justification for not playing a match that the applicant club had already decided not to play “. I got it? Who cares about the law, which requires all citizens to put themselves in fiduciary isolation. Who cares about the ASLs, invoked to have a clearer vision of an unprecedented situation, not provided for in the protocol.
Who cares about the Minister of Health, Hope, and that of Sport, Spadafora, who in the hours following the choice of Napoli had not only supported it, but had been peremptory: “Juve-Napoli must not be played at all”.
Yet Napoli, for the Court of Appeal, had a stomach ache. He had locked himself up in his dormitory because he was afraid of Andrea Pirlo’s devastating Juventus, who had to wait for the Ferencvárosi carneadi to win a game. Yet, right now, the ASLs have blocked the departure of many players from other clubs for their respective national teams. Therefore? Nobody intervenes? Isn’t the competence of the ASLs questioned in this case? Isn’t that a way of altering the competition, allowing some to leave and blocking others?
There is the feeling of the papocchio. Of a kick that has taken the longest step, and now it can’t go back. She chooses the path of the unfaithful husband: deny, always deny. Even to the point of bordering on ridicule. Up to covering the evidence, trampling even the legal system, the only credible reference in terms of health emergency.
And now? And now it goes on. Al Coni, already almost pre-alerted by the Court of Appeal. It is therefore difficult to expect reversals. If the Sporting Justice had recognized Napoli’s reasons, probably the championship would have ended instantly for all the appeals that would follow. It was decided to step on a dangerous precedent, when instead it would have been enough to regulate it for the future. We will have to arrive before the Ordinary Justice, to put things right. To do justice and cancel this unbearable label that these reasons would like to stick on Napoli’s back. Another sad page, of a football adrift.
