Technique in power. In a historical moment in which there is more and more talk of football-business, Robert Beccantini puts the focus back on field aspects, focusing on the deed which made it the most loved and popular sport in the world.
The well-known journalist (forty years of career between “Tuttosport”, “Gazzetta dello Sport” and “La Stampa”, as well as a long stint as a jury member for the Ballon d'Or), in his new book “Played by God” (published by Hoepli) tells us about football through thirteen deeds, as many portraits and one hundred and thirty snapshots fished between over four generations of champions, for what becomes a real hymn to the ball, in its purest form. An overhead kick by Gigi Riva, a save by Zoff, a throw by Platini, a free kick by Maradona, up to the more recent Ibrahimovic, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo: Beccantini leaves nothing out and paints an original compendium of the history of world football.
Beccantini, where did the idea of telling football in this way come from?
A kind of sheet to escape from the cells of “tactically correct”. The desire to bring back to the center of everything, and everyone, the man and not the apparatus, the gesture and not the context. The nostalgia of a certain football, when the streets and the oratories helped to dream, and not just to score.
Choosing must not have been easy. Did personal memories or objective ones prevail in the selection criteria?
Remembering is also forgetting, unfortunately. I dug up old papers, I looked inside and around me, I dredged my memory, in the hope of not violating the objectivity of the facts and the (major) factors. Bearing in mind that with fans and passions - personal and of others - it is always complicated to come to terms.
In the book there are at least four generations of talents, some belonging to a football that excited and had a social value well beyond the game. What should we expect from the future?
Numbers have taken over. Let's hope they govern without imposing a sort of tyranny on us. The calendars, clogged up, have taken away the Leopardian taste of waiting, fundamental in the twentieth century. After Omar Sivori, Diego Armando Maradona was born; and after Diego, here is Leo Messi. Who after Leo? It's a question to which I would like to answer with a range of names but I can't find any suitable candidates around. Dead calm. As Jorge Valdano wrote, "talent in football arouses suspicion. Muscle is innocent." Coaches and trainers are in charge: even too much.
One last curiosity: where does the title “Played by God” come from?
It is a phrase that Alessandro Bonan, head of the Hoepli series, stole from the great Carmelo Bene, who in his life was everything: actor, director, playwright, writer and poet. As well as abrasive and amazing football critic. A spade a spade, always and in any case. A lust that, reading it, transmits lust.
