Last November 13, among too many things that happened that night, a bomb exploded a few meters from the Stade de France. In the following days, the images of the match between France and Germany were broadcast on TV. A usual image (an interlocutory giropalla on the defensive trocar of the blues, in what the commentators certainly define as "study phases") was joined by a new sound, similar to that of the firecrackers that sometimes explode in the stadium, however profoundly different. The whole, revised ad nauseam, became one of the many portraits of distortion, of the uncanny that enters the ordinary, distorting it.
In the following days it seemed that the long shadow of that night would stretch up to the European football championships, but perhaps this time is too liquid for a permanence other than that of memory. The events follow one another and the images overlap and we go on until we return to the usual, to the interlude circle of our lives.
And so seven months have passed and the European Championships are about to begin. France will open the ball, right in Saint Denis, against Romania on June XNUMXth.
A date that, here with us, hardly anyone seems to be interested in. The fever of a football-sick people seems to have subsided, healed by the unpleasant antibiotic (talking about vaccines these days is too uncomfortable an exercise) of a national team that doesn't let you dream.
Despite Juve's steely defense, the defections of a midfield deprived of the injuries of its two best interpreters (Verratti and Marchisio) weigh heavily, but above all, the absence of the magical figure of the Salvatore della Patria weighs heavily in the imagination of the Italian fan , the man of fantasy or the striker capable of making a small Amazonia flourish from the traditional shallows of our offensive football.
Roberto Baggio is a memory, as is Del Piero (although never particularly decisive in blue), while Totti and Pirlo walk at a slow pace along Viale del Sunset. Cassano and Balotelli, the two prodigal sons we had decided to believe in for a better tomorrow, are grappling with a nebulous today, as is the perennially injured Giuseppe Rossi, for whom regret has now become a habit.
Even the shouting for Conte's summons seems to have failed to rise, remaining at the level of background noise, the hum of a refrigerator in an empty room. To have something to say we had to cling to the controversy over the number 10, symbol of the magic that absolves us of our sins, resting on the broad but not so refined shoulders of Thiago Motta who, despite being an immovable starter in one of the strongest teams of Europe, pays in the eyes of public opinion for the original sin of his origins and that of the final/massacre of 2012, when, stretching himself five minutes after entering the field, he definitively opened the doors to the oxen that were quivering to escape.
We approach the European Championships without too much hope, in that state of abandonment which has sometimes been the prelude to those great undertakings which, after the burns of the last World Cup, we no longer dare to imagine, even if the structure of the competition, with 16 teams on twenty-four destined to pass the rounds, authorizes us to smile.
We will have to deal immediately with the Belgian nouvelle Vague which, having become mainstream within a season, risks already being considered a bit vintage, with its breathless Hazard. Should we go ahead, the improbable road to victory will be paved by the closed circle of the usual notes: Germany slightly withered, but still very strong and France coming forward in water three, with the rising stars Griezmann and Pogba, but without Benzema, except for the bad story of the Valbuena sextape.
Spain, the two reigning champions and world dominators at club level, meanwhile, will try to rekindle their winning cycle after the horrendous Brazilian World Cup, while Portugal and Sweden, to varying degrees, remain the tour companies in which they perform, without high hopes, the two most decisive soloists of the competition, tired of their too many monologues.
In the competition extended to 24 teams, there is also room for the small Iceland that faces the football that counts, and for the derby between Wales and England, and the one between Albania and Switzerland swollen with Albanians and Kosovars, with brothers Xhaka who will clash on both sides of the barricade.
There will be all of this and there will be the vivid memory of that night 9 months ago, which is all over Paris and the Seine floods, and there will be the usual football every summer, in the hope that there will be only that.
