The first trophy of his career coincided with a moral lesson.
“It’s the way we won” he is keen to underline Gian Piero Gasperini, intoxicated with a happiness that the world of football now seemed to reject. A week before he had lost the third final of his career: all of the Italian Cup, all in the last five years. Massimiliano Allegri’s Juventus had managed to break the deadlock after four minutes with a nice insertion from Vlahovic and things were dead there. Atalanta showed off every weapon, technique and character, while managing a couple of dirty conclusions, dominating the ball as an end in itself. The subtle difference there is between winning and losing, someone said.
There must be a reason why someone reaches 66 without winning, right?
Support Sportellate: associates Our work is based on the commitment and passion of a young editorial team. Through the association you help us grow and always improve the quality of the content. Join now!
It was the dimension to which everyone had anchored Gasperini: a provincial teacher good at cultivating the land but unsuited to managing the pressure of an intransigent and capitalist society; a brilliant coach, with innovative proposals but with a hint of smallness, who arrived in top-level football like an intruder. For Gasperini, getting to these finals as an old man was a luxury, one of those things that happen to you and that you no longer even hoped for.
He started in Crotone in 2003, after nine years spent enhancing the Juventus youth team. In 2009, as coach of Genoa, he relaunched the careers of Thiago Motta and Diego Milito: the following year they would win the Triplet with Inter. After his misadventure at Inter in 2011 he started from scratch: Palermo, Genoa again, then Atalanta. His suffocating man-pressing that extended across the entire pitch was a counterculture manifesto in Italy and Europe. When everyone focused on managing the free space and the position to take within it, Gasperini put the emphasis back on the bodies of the players: on the individual duel as a continuous challenge, which determines victory or defeat.
Sometimes it was even his admirers who noticed that a trophy was missing to celebrate this work. His influence on the players he coached – and who today in turn coach – was not enough: Juric, Palladino, Thiago Motta. The Serie A of the last decade has become Gasperini’s tactical laboratory, a championship forged by his ideas, which had to develop antibodies to survive. Today it is difficult not to recognize Gasperini as opening the window onto a renewed way of playing football. Making pressing not only a defensive tool, which breaks the opposing lines, but an opportunity to be dangerous offensively, as Lobanovskij’s Dynamo Kiev and Sacchi’s Milan taught in the 1980s.
Yesterday, in the Europa League final, Gasperini did not give up his identity. He fielded three attackers together – Lookman, Scamacca and De Ketelaere – from the first minute to put pressure on the defenders of Bayer Leverkusen: a team unbeaten in 51 games this season. «Today there were all the conditions to do it» explained Gasperini a Sky, “today it wasn’t enough to defend, we only played to win.” Gasperini, a political leader, therefore, bearer of a clear vision of the world, who during the interval of the quarter-final return against Liverpool asks his soldiers if they want to lower themselves, give up their nature, accept a compromise.
Atalanta dominated the game with a high man-to-man marking in the Europa League Final. The high-pressing is about physicality but also mentality. Once you win the duel, you don’t need to drop back🤞🏾🙌🏾 pic.twitter.com/rkTmlaC9Zs
— HAMZA 🦁 (@Shikisha_) May 23, 2024
«In my career there are no cups, but several medals and this is one» commented Gasperini, proud like a father who recognizes his son as his equal, now an adult and in some ways immune to the filth of the world. Isn’t seeing Atalanta playing with courage, on par with Liverpool, in itself a sign of victory?
That in Bergamo, that is, there will be one football before Gasperini and one after.
Bayer Leverkusen this year has built its fortunes on a modular structure: on the one hand the perimeter, the wide wingers who accept one-on-ones and create numerical superiority; on the other, the midfield quadrilateral, with two midfielders and two attacking midfielders with brilliant readings. Yesterday the Germans suffered from Atalanta’s intensity: Ederson and Koopmeiners put pressure on them to prevent them from building rationally, sometimes using the tactical foul as a weapon. Gasperini has drained the tactical sagacity of Xabi Alonso, but instead of modifying his system he has simply made it extreme. An uncompromising pressure, with the three strikers on Bayer’s three central defenders. How many other coaches would have dared to compete in a final?
Of course we will talk about the hat-trick of Ademola Lookman. And rightly so: the Englishman is in the small circle of players who have scored a hat-trick in a European final. Beyond him, as Jonathan Wilson wrote about X, there are Puskas, Di Stefano, Puskas and Prati. The second and third goals, in particular, seem to us to be the pure emanation of Lookman’s talent, a primordial gift: his sharp right foot, and the tough but short physique that allows him to be so elusive when dribbling. Yet it is enough to revisit Lookman’s career before his arrival in Serie A – this morning Sueddeutsche defined his experience in the Bundesliga as “a flop” – to trace, by contrast, Gasperini’s work even in his evening of glory.
POV: net cam 🥅
Lookman 💥 🫨 @Atalanta_BC #UELfinal pic.twitter.com/mhscPQxOiA
— UEFA Europa League (@EuropaLeague) May 23, 2024
Even the third goal, so to speak, not bad.
Without the trust with which Gasperini caressed him, and above all without a strategy behind the escapes of his teammates, are we sure that Lookman would have reached these levels? The second goal, the one from the tunnel to Xhaka, was surprising because it didn’t seem real. We have already spoken about the valorization of De Ketelaere, and the apparent languor of his talent in the summer. Then think of Scamacca, Ruggeri, Zappacosta, Hien. How many of these players arrived raw, perfect for Atalanta’s style but too immature for the big stages.
Gasperini has repeatedly rescued depressed talents from the moment of career or from the expectations placed on them. Over the years he has shaped his ideal Atalanta based on the material he had available, smoothing it like an ancient glass craftsman. With Papu Gomez and Ilicic he had accentuated the technical control over the matches, modulating Atalanta’s pace based on the humor of his two number tens. In 2019/20 he came close to eliminating PSG and reaching the semi-final of the Champions League: who knows what would have happened with Ilicic available, even for just a quarter of an hour.
In our country, it is known, an ideological war continues to pollute football discourse: playful coaches against results-oriented coaches, those who valorise talent and those who aim for instant victory. It is, of course, a ridiculous approximation. Now which of the two categories does Gasperini belong to?
As he said last night: “I don’t think I’m better than this afternoon.” There are no coaches who are disinterested in the result – which is, after all, the paradigm around which their work is judged by the clubs – and it is indeed around this assumption that we should start to get to the lesson that Gasperini gave yesterday post-match. What does it mean to achieve a good result, let alone victory, for a club like Atalanta, or Bologna, Verona, Lecce?
All three of these teams were cited by Gasperini as models of victory, and it is difficult to blame him. Gasperini had not yet won a trophy, at 66 years old, because he had never coached a team that had the aspirations. When he arrived at Atalanta in 2016, he gathered around his ideas a team that had never reached the left side of the table since promotion to Serie A.
The Atalanta fans no longer hoped for it: they were panting, they aspired to win beyond the curses and bad luck. They have succeeded, after sixty years, maintaining high fidelity to their nature. Because of this Gian Piero Gasperini had won before yesterday, and will win later. Maybe not another Europa League, nor another such important trophy. However, he was able to build a common identity, to impose on his team and on international football the ideas that have permeated his career for twenty years. No cup is worth more than this.
2024-05-23 10:00:00
#Atalanta #Gasperinis #lesson #Europa #League
