It's the thirty-second minute. Fiorentina loses two to zero. The coach decides to shake up the team and summons a faded ghost dressed in purple to the bench. Ljajic is written on his shirt, with the number 22 below. Ljajic leaves the field and waves his hand to the coach, plus a few too many words, and sits on the bench. And this is how the bloody carcass of a man, a 60-year-old professional, who loses his pitcher, becomes a precious prey, a gourmet dish, but produced and consumed with fast food times, to be placed on the Italian football table. on top of the faded checkered plastic tablecloth.
The viewer's mouth opens and closes in a continuous, voracious cycle, in a movement that is the passionate metaphor of hunger. The dish is succulent, delicious. In Sky's ultra-modern studios, white and illuminated like so much imagined America, a gloating Ilaria D'amico censures and deprecates, accompanied by a choir of children's voices, the virginal Costacurta above all, in which the only variation allowed is that on the degree of indignation, between the tone of "it is a deplorable gesture" and that of "it is a shameful gesture".
Meanwhile, in the foreground or in the background, pass the images of the furious Delio who throws himself at the insolent boy sitting on the bench, barely held back by his collaborators, with the excuse of asking all the Serie A coaches, even before a opinion on their own game, what they think about it.
The day before yesterday the fans asking their players to take off their shirts in Genoa, yesterday the final brawl between Udinese-Lazio after the phantom whistle, and today Delio furioso. Knock the monster into the front page and, if you can, throw stones at it. Let's clear our conscience with a little canned indignation and on to the next one. Good job, everyone.
However, this time, instead of generalized condemnation, discordant voices are raised on the web, which dramatically widen the distance between the unofficial and the official vulgate, between the vox populi and the vox dei.
The network, in fact, for the most part, is with Delio Rossi. Perhaps it is the widespread annoyance towards overpaid children (but Rossi too, for that matter, is overpaid) and spoiled, dressed, before and even more than with their shirt, only with their hypertrophic ego, and unable to assume their responsibilities and behave like men.
And then, even more, there is the annoyance for the widespread hypocrisy, for the moralists and the hangmen who invoke exemplary disqualifications and point to the cross at the back of the canteen, for future reference. The annoyance for the muddy depth of silence that always lies at the bottom of these Italian stories, a tired little theater that thrives on its compulsion to repeat itself and in which things, bad things, can happen, but they don't have to be known.
This and more happens inside the locker rooms of a football team, it happens even worse, and such a fuss had never arisen, because after all, just to go back to some famous precedents, the patch on the eyebrow, under the long blond hair, due to the boot received on his forehead by Baronet Ferguson, suited Beckham, or because the Swindon Town striker with whom Dicanio got into a fight was one meter ninety of a big black man, while Lijaic, poor, he only has twenty years old (although rumor has it that he is already of age at that point) and was sitting on the bench. Every week we read in some newspaper of teammates who fight in training, but the blows on live TV are more blows than the others. It is always the form that offends, in Italy, and never the substance.
Of the same moralism, then, are permeated the not very credible rumors that circulate on the web and which claim that Lijajc would have insulted a phantom handicapped son of Rossi, and which try to justify the furious Delio by attributing his gesture to a superior and very strong reason, the unbearable insult to a sick family member.
And then there is the other part of the speech, the one in which the punch of Delio Rossi, or Delio Rissa, as we read around, speaks to many of us, to all those who have been humiliated in the workplace and have had to swallow. In that punch loaded for a long time and not really vented there is all the anger of the mobbed and offended and of the fallen workers who fall every day of their lives. And there are many days in which the employees of the Apple store in Porta di Roma, on the day of the inauguration, have to dance in front of their customers as if they were the drunk patrons of an Old West saloon.
They say that when Delio Rossi sees the images of what he did he will be ashamed. I'm not sure, in my opinion it shouldn't, because his mistake (because it is a mistake) is a very human mistake of a man. I'd keep gallows and crosses aside for better days. The puppets of morality will still be there, he's sure, and as always it will be enough to pull a string to make him point the finger.
