Zonal Marking. Michael Cox. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Michael Cox
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008291150
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then show the advantages and disadvantages of each one. There’s a variety here, and that makes Serie A a lot more interesting.’ Whereas Dutch football was fixated on 4–3–3 or 3–4–3, Italian football featured almost every possible formation, and just as Juventus’s versatile defensive players had no defined position, Lippi and other Italian coaches had no defined system. They reacted to the opposition’s tactics to a greater extent than coaches elsewhere, and they routinely substituted star forwards to introduce defensive reinforcements.

      Lippi’s Juventus defined Italian football during this period. They became European and World champions in 1996, won Lo Scudetto in the next two campaigns, while reaching the Champions League Final in both years too, being beaten by Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid in turn. Juve had long maintained a reputation for losing superstars yet continuing to prosper, sacrificing World Cup winners like Paolo Rossi and Marco Tardelli in the 1980s without suffering, while the players themselves declined after departing Turin. After the 1996 final it wasn’t just their defeated opponents Ajax who suffered because of the Bosman ruling; Juve lost Ravanelli and Vialli to newly monied Premier League clubs. Ravanelli had finished as Juventus’s top goalscorer that season, while Vialli had been named Player of the Year by World Soccer magazine, who commended him for being ‘equally at home on the right, the left or the centre of the attack – he defends like a tiger and attacks like a lion’. In other words, in keeping with the Juventus ethos, he could do whatever job Lippi demanded.

      Lippi therefore had five good options up front, and the nature of Juventus’s goalscoring throughout their 1996/97 title-winning campaign underlined how he used different strikers in different situations. Bizarrely, for champions, none of the five strikers recorded more than eight goals: half as many as Sandro Tovalieri, who played half the season for Reggiana and half for Cagliari, both of whom were relegated. Lippi had fully embraced rotation, and his five centre-forwards all played a similar amount: Bokšić scored just three goals from 51 per cent of Serie A minutes, an injury-affected Del Piero managed eight from 48 per cent, Vieri eight from 43 per cent, Padovano eight from 39 per cent and Amoruso four from 36 per cent. There was no grand hierarchy, no divide between untouchable first-teamers and frustrated back-ups, and everyone provided different qualities. Bokšić offered hold-up play, Del Piero provided invention, Vieri lent his aerial power, Padovano was a good poacher and Amoroso brought speed.

      When Ronaldo, the world’s most exciting striker, was destined to leave Barcelona and move to Serie A, Juventus declined to become involved in a bidding war, not because the sums of money were too vast, but because Umberto Agnelli, the club chairman, believed such an overt superstar would ruin the club’s spirit. Even Zinedine Zidane, who joined in 1996 and soon became Europe’s most celebrated player, was diligent, introverted and hard-working, a world away from the self-indulgent galáctico that he would later become at Real Madrid.

      Zidane was shocked by the intensity of Juventus’s fitness sessions, led by the notorious Giampiero Ventrone. ‘Didier Deschamps told me about the training sessions but I didn’t believe they could be as bad as all that,’ he gasped. ‘Often I would be at the point of vomiting by the end, because I was so tired.’ Ventrone was nicknamed ‘The Marine’ by the Juventus players, and he had three terrifying mottos: ‘Work today to run tomorrow’; ‘Die but finish’; and ‘Victory belongs to the strong’. The players had a love–hate relationship with him; Ravanelli said he couldn’t cope without him, while Vialli once became so incensed by Ventrone’s approach that he locked him in a cupboard and called the police, not the last time the Carabinieri would take an interest in Juve’s methods of physical conditioning. It was Lippi, however, who remained Juventus’s most important asset. ‘He was like a light switch for me,’ Zidane said. ‘He switched me on and I understood what it meant to work for something that mattered. Before I arrived in Italy, football was a job, sure, but most of all it was about enjoying myself. After I arrived in Turin, the desire to win things took over.’

      ‘To Italian players, it’s a job. It’s not fun, not a game,’ said Fabio Capello. ‘When I was coaching Real Madrid, training would end and everyone would stay and eat, get a massage, go to the gym together … in Italy, they’ll stay as long as they have to, then they’ll go. We don’t have this joy inside us. It’s almost as if they don’t like being footballers.’ Capello was another celebrated Italian tactician, and his experience at Real Madrid during 1996/97 was particularly enlightening.

      Capello had succeeded Arrigo Sacchi at Milan in 1992 and won four Serie A titles in five seasons, strung together an unprecedented 58-game unbeaten run and won the Champions League in 1994 with a memorable 4–0 thrashing of Barcelona. Capello was less ideologically attack-minded than the revolutionary Sacchi, but he provided creative players with more licence to express themselves, usually from wide roles in a 4–4–2. After Real Madrid slumped to sixth place in 1995/96, their worst season in nearly two decades, they turned to Capello. President Lorenzo Sanz declared him ‘the greatest manager in the world’ upon his appointment. Capello won the league in his first season. He then promptly returned to Italy.

      ‘In Spain, everything that comes from Italy is seen in a negative light,’ said defender José Amavisca, quoted in Gabriele Marcotti’s biography of Capello. ‘Because he’s Italian, everything Capello did was seen as ugly, dirty, nasty or boring.’ Capello’s training sessions were typically Italian: long periods spent drilling