Fiorentina is playing the Conference League final. The redemption of Nico Gonzalez

“Cada vez falta menos! Vamos Argentina,” he wrote Nico Gonzalez on Instagram in mid-November 2022. There was a World Cup to conquer and an injury to forget. That photo with the national training shirt had been the straw that had overflowed the vase of patience of the Viola fans, particularly piqued in the comments, weakened by weeks in which the figure of the Argentine full-back was elusive: the accusation, decidedly little veiled, was to give more importance to the flight to Qatar than to Fiorentina. In the end, Nico Gonzalez did not participate in that World Cup. A month and a half later, after having witnessed the triumph of his compatriots and the celebrations of a crazy Buenos Aires, he seemed one step away from saying goodbye to the Viola: Leicester wanted him, ready to put around 35 million on the table. But in football everything can change with a gust of wind. And so, after the stop to the sale, in the second half of an anomalous and interminable season Fiorentina recoveredregaining the trust of those fans who seemed ready to unload him with goals and performances in which he gave everything for the cause.

Wise men say that goals are not counted, but weighed: Gonzalez has always been there on nights when they were giving away more valuable stakes than usual. From the away match in Poznan, with the goal arriving at sunset in the first half after the equalizer by the Poles, to the brace in Basel, which was essential to give Fiorentina hope which was then made concrete by Barak’s final assault: the Argentine, who has always been an indispensable element for the Italian, has finally become ruthless in front of goal, adding to an already particularly broad technical baggage the ability to hurt with a header, a quality that had not been recognized universally at the time of his arrival in Italy from Stuttgart. And it was he who appeared at the far post on Ikoné’s low cross in the very first minutes of the Coppa Italia final against Inter, deluding the Viola under the Olimpico sky. An evening ended in tears, those tears that Vincenzo Italiano no longer wants to see on the faces of his players.

Last Friday, after scoring against Sassuolo in a game that allowed Fiorentina to hoist themselves to an eighth place in the standings that had seemed like a mirage for months, with the Viola totally absorbed in the double run towards the finals, he crashed into the post of the Mapei Stadium door: just a blow and a lot of fear. The last act of a season that began on the eve of August 15th is around the corner and Gonzalez has already tried to draw up a balance sheet: “Winning in Prague would be an opportunity for redemption. It hurt me a lot when someone thought I didn’t play voluntarily to go to the World Cup: I always want to leave my life on the pitch. Now there are 90 minutes left and that’s where we need to make a difference.” Beating West Ham would be destiny’s repayment for that nuanced flight to Qatar and those insults that have already turned into applause for a few months.