Together with the Pitch/fork Instagram page we retrace the last month of our championship.
As sports enthusiasts we are used to marking the passing of time by means of matches, tournaments, results, goals, points, dismissals, signings and so on, rather than by reference only to the numbers and names shown on the calendar. So, for those who follow our championship, now that the new month has begun, it is inevitable to think of a “January of Serie A” which goes beyond the 31 days arranged neatly before our eyes, made up of everything that our local football proposed in the first month of 2024. And it was a particularly intense and full of ideasbetween the transfer market, coaches who leave, coaches who flop, feats, mistakes, farewells and the Arab interlude of the Super Cup.
Consequently, we thought we would summarize this month of Serie A that has just ended, but without taking ourselves too seriously, which is the way sport should often be approached. They will then be five (plus one) memes to tell the story of January 2024 in Serie A, combining each of the most relevant football moments of the past month with a song that suits them. We did it together with the Pitch/fork Instagram page and we will also do so in the coming months, creating a fixed appointment that will tell from time to time the best and worst of each month of our championship. As well as below, you can find the month of Serie A in five memes also on our Instagram page and on Pitch/fork.
Support Sportellate: associates Our work is based on the commitment and passion of a young editorial staff. Through the association you help us grow and always improve the quality of the content. Join now! Roma sacks José Mourinho
On January 16th the home page of all sports information sites was occupied by news that at that point was thought would never arrive: José Mourinho is no longer the manager of Roma. The separation between the Giallorossi and I Special One it could have been foreseeable in light of Roma’s terrible start to the season and the two bad defeats suffered the previous week against Lazio and Milan, but the Portuguese’s two and a half year stay on the Roma bench had been punctuated by so many downs and ups, very high peaks and ruinous collapses, uncontainable euphoria and unsustainable boredom that now seemed like a relationship destined to last forever. Rome madly in love with Mourinho, regardless of everything, and vice versa.
In the marriage between the Portuguese coach and the Capital team, despite this visceral, almost toxic passion, there was evidently something wrong and Joy Division sang of a union in pieces and of love that destroys in their most famous song, released in June 1980, very close to the suicide of frontman Ian Curtis. “Love, love will tear as apart again“ Curtis sang, thinking about his problems and that of his marriage, which had also broken down due to his infidelity. In the case of Mourinho and Roma there is no other, but it was also this blind and visceral love – strengthened by the joy of Tirana and the pain of Budapest – that caused the two lovers to separate their paths.
Milan misses two penalties in one match
In the 42nd minute of Milan-Bologna on 27 January Olivier Giroud appeared on the penalty spot. The Rossoneri are losing 0-1 and the Frenchman puts the ball on the ground – to quote a historic monologue by Paolo Rossi about missed penalties – “with the confidence of a man who would never, ever make a mistake”. Giroud leaves. He kicks. Penalty saved. However, in the 74th minute the opportunity to score from eleven meters presents itself again. Giroud, unlike Beccalossi in Paolo Rossi’s monologue, does not take the responsibility of returning to the spot and leaves the burden and honor to Theo Hernandez. The Rossoneri full-back leaves. He kicks. Palo. Hernandez himself responds into the net but it can’t be done: Milan misses two penalties in the same matcha match that then ended at 2-2.
A new mistakein short, which translated into English becomes “A new error”like the song by the German electronic music group Moderate, released in 2009 and which you will surely have heard even without being fans of Sascha Ring and his companions, the magic of advertising. In addition to the title of the song contained in the band’s eponymous album, the cover of the album is also particularly fitting with the progress of Milan-Bologna for the Rossoneri, which represents a woman punching herself in the face.
Pasquale Mazzocchi gets sent off in his fourth minute for Napoli
Do you think you can realize your biggest dream from when you were a child: wear the shirt of your favorite team. Think about doing it when this team wears the tricolor on its chest after more than thirty years of waiting. Think of making your debut by entering the pitch at half-time, chosen by the coach to try to turn the game around. A dream, right? There, now you think your first game with your favorite team lasts only four minutes and end with a Red card waved in your face. This is what happened to Pasquale Mazzocchi, who moved from Salernitana to Napoli in the winter transfer window, on 7 January against Torino. Always a Neapolitan fan, Mazzocchi was thrown into the fray at the start of the second half, but in the 49th minute he was already heading for the locker room after sinking his studs into Valentino Lazaro’s knee.
The most classic of “I come in, I rock, I go out, bye“a phrase that has now become proverbial but which comes from Peyote by Salmo, the song that closes the album Hellvisback of the Sardinian rapper. The track is a criticism of the record market through the parody of different musical genres and the dialogue with a rather demanding producer and its verse which has become more famous is a reference to the self-celebration with which trappers fill their songs. A reference to those who believe they can arrive and smash – metaphorically – everything, which has become an almost automatic comment on situations in which someone makes an appearance, leaves their mark (for better or worse) and quickly leaves. Like poor Pasquale Mazzocchi.
Hellas Verona sells most of its players
Cyril Ngonge, Isak Hien, Josh Doig, Filippo Terracciano, Martin Hongla, Milan Djuric, Riccardo Saponara, Davide Faraoni, Yayah Kallon, Koray Gunter, Jayden Braaf, Bruno Amione. Only one goalkeeper is missing to make up a well-matched lineup, but this is it the list of transfers made by Hellas Verona in this January transfer window. Twelve sales (excluding minor movements) mainly due to the troubled corporate situation that the Gialloblu are going through, whose shares are 100% seized by the Guardia di Finanza as part of the investigation involving the owner of Verona Maurizio Setti investigated for fraudulent bankruptcy, not the first charge hanging over the entrepreneur from Carpi. Everything is good for making cash at the moment and within a few weeks Marco Baroni is found without a large part of its ownersreplaced by names straight out of a Football Manager game.
A story like many have been seen in our football, many of which without a happy ending. A famous story without a happy ending, that of Romeo and Juliet, is set in Verona. Born from the pen of Shakespeare, it has been revived and reworked in a thousand different forms, such as the update proposed by Baz Luhrmann and entitled Romeo+Juliet. While the credits of the film roll, the song that serves as the soundtrack is Exit Music (For a Film) by Radiohead, with a title that is semantically very relevant to the current situation of Hellas Verona. Exit Music (For a Football Team): here, now we are perfect.
The Super Cup semi-final is played in a semi-empty stadium
Yellow, yellow and more yellow. Around Naples and Fiorentina everything is yellow, dotted with sporadic human beings who break the hypnotic pattern of empty seats – yellow, in fact – in Riyadh’s Al-Awwal Park. The Saudis, for this first four-team Italian Super Cup, wanted Juventus and Milan, but they got Fiorentina and Napoli. Thus, on the occasion of the first semi-final, less than a third of the seats inside the stadium are occupied, offering a bleak scenario to the teams and cameras. There is no organized support, there are few Italians in the stands, at a certain point a banner appears that reads “LAZIO SHIT”, totally out of context. While in Italy a truncated championship day is taking place due to the absence of the Super Cup contenders, in Saudi Arabia it takes place a surreal parenthesis in the middle of our Serie A month.
“No one in the stands, no one on the bench / no one in the stadium, no one at all” they sang Elio e le Storie Tese before 1994 US World Cup, which Europe was approaching worried about the Americans’ possible disinterest in football. At the time the United States was the new frontier of football, as is the Middle East now, but in the end the 1994 World Cup was also a success in terms of spectators, while the same cannot be said of the Italian Super Cup played in Riyadh between last January 18th and 22nd. Paraphrasing Elio and the Tese Stories: “What interest do the Saudis have in the Italian Super Cup? Nobody!“
Bonus: Goodbye, Thunderclap!
We felt it was our duty to also dedicate a space to one of the greatest Italian footballers in history, as well as our national team’s top scorer, who left us on January 22nd. We are clearly talking about Gigi Riva, remembered in a moving way by his Cagliari fans on the last day of the championship, after the botched minute of silence organized by the Lega Serie A at the beginning of the second half of the Italian Super Cup final and booed loudly by the Saudi public for a cultural issue. If Gigi Riva had already elevated himself to the status of legend during his lifetime, now that he is gone has definitively entered the mythfor all of Italy and in particular for Sardinia.
The one between Riva, Cagliari and Sardinia is a very strong and indissoluble bond, between the two symbols of a land and the land itself, between a people and the man who helped bring it to the roof of Italy. Gigi Riva was one of the protagonists – or, indeed, the true hero – of the 1969/70 scudetto, the only one won by Cagliari. And even if he was the only one, as David Bowie sang: “We can be heroes, just for one day“. The song, released in 1977, is perhaps one of the most evocative ever, and what better occasion to use it than to pay homage and celebrate a champion like Gigi Riva. “I, I will be king / and you, you will be queen”, this is how Bowie’s song opens. King and queen, like King Gigi and his queen, Sardinia.
2024-02-01 15:00:00
#Serie #January #memes
