An eleven-year dream ended on Friday September 15 in the evening in the southwest of Paris. Marco Verratti said goodbye to a Paris Saint-Germain audience who saw him blossom, grow, and gain the respect of his coaches and players around the world. At the twilight of his career, since he took charge of the Qatari championship and the Al-Arabi team this week, it is a decade of the life of a club and the existence of this sport which ended in tears and applause.
The tears that accumulated as the Italian, 416 games with PSG since his arrival in 2012 in the shadow of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, became the most successful player in the history of Ligue 1, with nine championships of France on the clock.
For those who are not familiar with the Italian’s game, you have to imagine a 1.65m boy with piercing blue eyes, making marvelous passes, never scoring, dribbling and, above all, taking risks that deconstruct the game. he opponent in his own camp, an area where each toddler learns never to dribble, under penalty of being immediately taken off the field by his coaches.
His carelessness in the face of opposing pressers, maintained over the years, made crowds stand up and scream in a sector of play – the midfield in front of the defense – where artists are now almost non-existent, leaving room instead for metronome distributors clean balloons but without jokes or tireless leather scratchers.
escapades
Marco Verratti – his game, his balance of life, his sincerity – is an anachronistic player. Perhaps he was born fifteen years late, he missed an era when many idols also stood out for their nocturnal or daytime escapades, a golden age of football, from the 90s to the middle of the 2000s, we can set in an arbitrary manner, which above all left more room for indecision, for bold gestures and, corollary of all that, for irregularity.
Except that social networks have changed the paradigm of analysis: while the missed matches of Ronaldinho or Ryan Giggs were covered by their exploits and the dreams they brought, the now global and instantaneous commentary on everything, and especially nothing, leaves less and less room for error.
“I know it will happen sooner or later, I will lose a ball which on that day will cost a goal, and on that day White will kill me and he will be right to do so.”
— Marco Verratti
The native of Pescara, in Abruzzo, is not the standard of what modern football expects. In particular from a midfielder, who we want athletic and efficient, in defense as well as in the offensive phases.
“When three players press you in your own penalty area, behind, there are only seven left to defend,” explained the Italian in 2015 to So Foot. If you can get rid of this pressure and get the ball out cleanly, the chances of scoring a goal are greater. At the moment, I have the lucidity necessary to find the solution and go out with the ball to launch a counter. If I clear into touch, the opponent recovers the ball, and we don’t go on a counter-attack.”
Elsewhere in the same interview, when we asked him if it was true that Laurent Blanc, his coach between 2013 and 2016, yelled at him when he took risks, he prophesied: “It’s true that he told me that each time, and each time, I started again. After a while, he understood and he told me: ”Do what you want, but if you mess up, I’ll kill you”. I know it will happen sooner or later, I will lose a ball which that day will cost a goal, and that day White will kill me and he will be right to do so.
That day arrived this year, in the round of 16 of the Champions League against Bayern Munich. A failed check, the Germans score, qualification eludes Paris again. And the Italian was singled out, not by White but by a few hundred supporters who insulted him in front of the stadium, a sign of a rift with the club that will never have healed.
Ejected
Also targeted by the sports management of PSG, in particular Luis Campos, very close to Kylian Mbappé, who decided to turn the page. Messi and Neymar, also on bad terms with the French star, were the first to be ejected from the Parisian club. Marco Verratti was next. Not replaced in the squad during the transfer window, the affair looks more like a decision which abandons the sporting framework, unless we imagine that it is less useful than players who oscillate between average and passable, like Fabian Ruiz or Carlos Soler (starter this Friday evening and ghostly during PSG’s defeat against Nice at home, 2-3).
Even though the player was in decline last year, the statistics showed that the catastrophism towards him was nevertheless exaggerated. The newspaper l’Equipe modestly summarizes the situation: “PSG, where coach Luis Enrique validated the decision of his superiors, was keen to part ways with the player permanently.” Sad end for the second most capped player of the red and blue.
Most of the most powerful clubs don’t know how to say goodbye to their idols. PSG demonstrated it with Thiago Silva, the best defender in its history, or with Zlatan Ibrahimovic, its best player in more than 50 years of existence, who had a beautiful farewell ceremony but left angry.
The low-cost tribute offered Friday evening to Verratti will not erase the fact that he was thrown out. The height of ridicule, we even had to wait for the Italian to stand in front of the Auteuil bend and for the supporters to improvise a speech with their own microphones to hear his voice one last time. Tears then overwhelmed the player and many supporters.
After Marco Verratti rushed into the tunnel one last time to leave the lawn of the Parc des Princes on Friday evening, this new PSG lost against Nice (2-3) a match that it deserved to lose, dominated in particular in the middle ground because the creativity went away with “Little Hibou”.
In the stands, the sadness of the departure has given way to anger against the proposed game, because after all football is a rectangle, cages and a ball, the rest only allows the symphony to become even more beautiful. And if the void is felt in the hearts and heads of those who question the balance of the red and blue squad, the players pass and the club remains, in Paris as elsewhere, because there remain imponderables beyond the specificities.
Childhood
Leaving the stadium, dozens of jerseys flocked with the name of Verratti and the two numbers he wore (24 and 6) swarm the corridors then disperse into the opulent streets of the 16th arrondissement of Paris and Boulogne-Billancourt. Everyone takes a bit of this strange and irrational sequence back to their lair, to perhaps bring together their memories of the player. Friday evening finally makes visible the passing of time, the time that brings everyone closer to the end.
And when we look back, wondering where we were eleven years ago, for some, we smiled with happiness discovering a player like Marco Verratti who, sometimes, did as he pleased but for the benefit others, forgetting the instructions to invent things that only he saw. We then began to savor the joy of simple pleasure that we often lose once childhood is over.