Death of the Azzurri Part 2 "The Unraveling Thread"

Every house that is built needs a foundation. Every statue needs an idea, a vision. And the same goes for a football team. You need to start with a nucleus and work your way out. This has been the idea with Italian football for as long as I can remember. And from our last World Cup win all the way back to the first, Italian football has always been the same, never flashy, but always effective. Our strength has always been to work through our foundation and progress from there. The 2010 World Cup team wasn’t any different. The only thing that everyone seems to forget is what Italian football really is.

From the naked eye, or simply a bandwagon fan, the key to an Italy victory lives and dies with one person. A single individual which holds together the team like a single thread. A thread that if pulled long enough the whole sweater will unravel. We all know that thread. It is the thread that hangs from our sweater and in order to save the sweater we have to cut it off or burn it off as to not ruin the whole piece of clothing in the long run. To them, this thread is Andrea Pirlo, the master mind and savior of our beloved Italian Azzurri. The ball starts and ends with him in their minds. And by the looks of the last match in this World Cup, they can make a valid point. When he entered the game, things seemed to be going in our direction. We seemed to be on a mission and no one was to stop us. But again I state that these thoughts were to the naked eye. Thoughts coming from people who could only tell you the name of the players who played in that final match with France, not the ones on the bench. Ask these same people who Paolo Maldini is and watch them squirm in their shorts and try to guess. And even if they do know of him, do they really know his importance to the nation and all the Azzurri faithful. My guess is a no. A huge no as a matter of fact. Which is why all of their assumptions on who the true nucleus of this team is completely wrong. It is true that Pirlo is a huge force within this team, that that is not Italian football. Italian football is built on a strong defense with a quick and tactical counter. So knowing this, all you bandwagon fans, who do you think is the Italy backbone? The Foundation on this team?

If you guessed Fabio Cannavaro, then you are correct. He is our captain, our caps leader, or simply our leader. He was loved by a nation and then some. He was the epitome of Italian football, that face, that bald head, his small stature but quick feet were known all over the world and one the best strikers in the world feared. The central defender of a defensive minded team is just as important as the coach putting together the team. This captain was given the reigns of a team, who is the returning champions, an aging team, a team who many were writing off before the World Cup even began. When people doubted the team, they turned to him for words. And words he had for everyone. He was poise, he was intelligent and calm like a true captain should be. No matter how worried people were, he seemed to put them at ease for the time being. And as we saw, that time being was very short lived.

We had high hoped for this squad and for this man. He is aging, ok he is old. A 5’9” 36 year old central defender is something that should be passed upon when entering the biggest tournament in the sport. But he wasn’t and yet we still had faith. Faith that our great captain would take us back to the promise land. Well maybe the Azzurri are a little too close to Rome and the “Faith of the Catholic Church” is rubbing off on them and us all, because in this sport, to just have faith in someone is not enough. This once great captain has lead us on a chase and we have all been fooled in the end. He has become the poster child, not for our great victory in Germany, but for this embarrassing loss in South Africa. The model of how not to form a team. One without speed and agility. One without that youthful spirit of just being glad to put on the blue Azzurri sweater over your head. But it is not just his age that we saw on display. It was his lack of ability to perform at this top level. A level that was on display during this year’s Juventus season. In a World Cup year, players tend to worked extra hard to prove to their coaches that they should play for the national team. But with him and his club team, it seemed that they were just happy to get paid, and had no worries about making the team. Well by the looks of our group stages games, maybe we should have lost faith in him a long time ago.

The group stage games were a horrible display of defense, coming from a team known for its outstanding defense. And it all leads to our captain. On every single goal that we let up, Fabio had a hand in. He was either jumped over, out run, or out smarted. In his position and his experience, he should have been not only the rock we lean on, but the conductor instructing the team where and what to do in all occasions. Well he failed us all. In the 2006 World Cup we let in 2 goals in the whole tournament, one of which was a penalty. This World Cup, five. Five goals, all of which could have and should have been avoided, if it wasn’t for our “great captain”. In two weeks time, you have taken our faith and destroyed it with sloppy play and a give up attitude. You have become that thin thread unraveled from the Azzurri sweater that should have been cut a long time ago. But instead of being cut by Lippi a long time ago, you have simply burned us. The sweater is destroyed and a new one must now be knit. Just always know that the Azzurri blue will always be more important the the yellow arm band you wore around you arm.

Death of the Azzurri

So as the Italian side went crashing out of this year’s World Cup, many of us Azzurri fans are sitting around wondering what went wrong. Well where do we begin? Well the normal person would start from the top with Marcello Lippi. But to me, that isn’t high enough. We have to go to the FIGC and place all the blame on them. And not for what happened this year. This whole mess started four years ago when a man by the name of Roberto Donadoni was named the coach of the Italian squad.

His lack of respect from the players, with the added World Cup hangover put the FIGC is a crunch to find a new coach for the World Cup which would be in two years after Donadoni’s contract was not renewed. This mess forced them to beg Lippi to come back, when one can only guess he had no interest in coaching as he all ready won his World Cup. This lack of interest, lack of desire would then transcend onto the players, the core group of players that Lippi holds so close to the heart. Buffon, Grosso, Camoranesi, Cannavaro all showed signs of this. Only Pirlo and Gattuso in my mind still has that drive, that desire and pride to win for the nation, for the fans. Now given, Gattuso isn’t the player he once was, but in that first half, it showed that he was the only player on the pitch who knew what was at stake. He played with power and determination, but the skill wasn’t there as it once was, which brings me right back to Lippi.

I am a huge Gattuso fan, always have and always will be, but why was he on this squad? And that question could be said for a lot of people. Why was Iaquinta on the squad and not Marco Borriello? And the obvious question everyone was asking, why wasn’t Pirlo in the starting XI if he was fit enough to play the second half? And the same goes for Quagliarella. The only Italian players to show any kind of finesse were either dropped from the team, or sat on the bench every game. Whatever was going on in Lippi’s head when he made the decisions that he did, I believe it was more along the lines of let me not embarrass myself and make it home in one piece. Well I am sorry to say but he did just that. The blame rolls down hill my friends. It must start from the top. And in my next article, the ball keeps rolling!

Twitter High

As I sit here today and think about what I could possibly write about on my first blog, I catch myself going back and forth to check my Twitter account and then it hits me. I’m addicted to Twitter, so why not write about that. But what am I going to write about. About how great it is and how you meet people from all over the world? Or maybe how cool it is that you can see what celebrities are thinking at the very moment, even what they are doing or even eating? I could even write about the millions of people on Twitter and the rush you get when you find out people are actually following you and many people are reading what you are saying.
Now these ideas are all fine and dandy and to be honest, is what got me stuck on Twitter in the first place, but that is not what I am going to write about. I will write about all the other aspects of this wonder. I will write it from an eye of an outsider. An outsider, whom understands that whole concept, yet relinquishes all efforts to even make an account. An evil eye, as I will call it throughout this blog, which sees all negatives and no positives.
At first glance, the evil eye sees craziness and chaos. Millions and millions of people simply putting there current thoughts or status on a web forum for the world to see. And in its evil eye, who cares what you are doing right now and thinking. Ok so you are eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, let me shake your hand. Or maybe you would like a cookie for telling the world that? Either way, I feel you have just wasted about 2 minutes of the evil eyes time, 2 minutes in which it will never get back.
Just as if you thought this was the only reason the evil eye is upset about Twitter, it strikes again. The funniest part of this all is that if u look at Twitter from afar, it is really just a HUGE high school. There are a number of people who are supper “popular” on Twitter and a majority who are so-so, and the rest not so much at all. Just like high school, al the not popular people look up to the popular ones and watch their every move. They want to know what the other is doing all the time and what they are thinking all the time. And they try to talk to the popular kids all the time hoping for a simple response, and when we do get one, we are hooked and can’t get enough. It’s like crack, we want more and more. The so-so popular ones just live their lives as is and pay some attention to the not popular kids at times, but not all the time. They feed them just enough to keep them coming back for more, while looking up to the popular kids just the same. Now the popular kids are the funny ones. They run the “high school” and determine whom they will be friends with, whom they will interact with and when they do respond back to someone lower then them in the social ring, that lower person will brag about it to everyone they know and feel special. But unlike real high school, we will never graduate from this, we are stuck.
But what the evil eye really doesn’t understand is the Twitter lingo. Not what it all means, because it is not stupid, but why it is used so much. This “RT” thing is the worst. It seems as though everyone like to repeat what others already said. It is like writing an article and stating your sources. Well how about this source? The evil eye is me, Eric Jon Farino and as I write this I laugh to myself because these thoughts go through my mind every day, every second as I loom back and forth to the Twitter pages I call my profile.
I am an addict. I am a high school freshman. I am a not so popular kid in “high school”. I am the one telling everyone what I am doing and what I am thinking and what I am eating. I even go as far as take pictures of it so people can actually see it. So knowing all this yet being the evil eye, how can I play on both teams here? Well it is very simple really, I don’t know and I don’t care. I am happy trying to be on the varsity team and hang out with the upper classman.
Just like the New York Sate lottery says, “Hey, you never know”. So as I leave you on my first blog attempt ever, I will leave one more note to dwell upon, www.twitter.com/ejfarino follow me and enjoy the chaos. Time for class!