Morocco in the quarterfinals confirms that this is a World Cup without “fairy tales”

The beauty of football lies in its unpredictability, in the possibility that a project that seems crazy to us can be realized, that a Cagliari, a Verona, a Sampdoria can win the Scudetto. Or even not, because every so-called fairy tale depends on too many variables. That is, that the teams that should play great football don’t play great football, that the great players take a break from being great, that a dictatorship of good luck is established that paves the way for a good team, usually with few alternatives to the starting eleven, making it easier than it usually is. The small and beautiful is only satisfying if you cheer for it, or if you prefer the narration, often full of already heard, of David beating Goliath to the aesthetics of the game of football.

Football is a strange thing, the only field of society in which all the chatter on the merits is set aside in the name of surprise, of the little one who makes himself strong in the face of the strong who loses very well like this. If it happened elsewhere, at work, in politics, in a thousand other contexts, there would be a cry of scandal. But in a stadium, perhaps in sport in general, there is no scandal, that’s okay, indeed it is desirable that it be so.

Now that Morocco has beaten Spainthe praised Spain of Luis Enrique who had made his debut in Qatar with a seven-time Azeri in Costa Rica announcing magnificent future fortunes, the idea that the “fairy tale” has reappeared, has once again imposed itself on everything and everyone is back in vogue. And yes, it must have crossed his mind that Spain could be a blunder, already from the match against an incomplete Germany as much as certain medieval cathedrals and a Japan dissolved on penalties against a slightly Slavic and very Central European Croatia. Morocco is not a fairy tale, it would be wrong and a little offensive to think so. It would mean admitting to thinking of football as an immutable monolith, basing oneself only on what has been without considering what is there. Because the Moroccan national team had only reached the round of 16 of a World Cup in 1986, but Walid Regragui’s men are anything but upstarts of great football. Fourteen of the twenty-six called up play, almost all starters, in the most important national championships in Europe; someone in the Champions League looks good, on the contrary; someone is in the market goals of teams aiming for great victories; and Achraf Hakimi is considered among the best in the world to play him. All professional people, certainly not professionals, starting with Sofyan Amrabat, who is proving to be among the best players in the league at Fiorentina.

Bella Guttmann, one of the most innovative coaches in the history of football, a man who believed that tactics were less useful than having good players, that a team should think about scoring one more goal and not conceding one less, and that he was capable of keeping the champions on the bench if they had a cold, because “if you don’t breathe well you don’t play well”; Bela Guttmann, we said, was convinced that “sentimentality destroys football”, because “being satisfied when the strongest team doesn’t win means admitting that mediocrity is a wonderful thing”.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to see Poland-Senegal play for access to a semi-final, nor South Korea-Japan. Morocco does not look bad among the eight that will play for the World Cup: they unmasked Belgium’s bluff, made Croatia suffer. At this World Cup the fairy tales quickly evaporated, they unemployed the road to dreams, solid realities remained, as not even in an advertisement for Roberto Carlino’s Immobildream. There is no Costa Rica 2014 version, no South Korea (moreover with a lot of help) or Turkey 2002. There is all the best around, and with them Morocco, which among the eight is doing quite well, because led off the bench by a capable and rationalistic coach, and on the pitch by players accustomed to first-level stages.