Only the World Cup can break this Napoli

With his magnetic gaze, used to supporting the eye of the camera, Luciano Spalletti continues to dispense maxims and quotes. The victories accumulate, the points of advantage over the competitors increase, he remains there, apparently insensitive to events. On the rough terrain of this anomalous first part of the championship, an opening tournament that is weakening the resistance of those who started to stay ahead of everyone, Napoli always finds the right set-up not to lose balance, even when it seems one step away from stumbling.

The ten consecutive victories, impressive in a row, do not represent a novelty in the career of a coach who has often amazed, but without ever reaching that piece of tricolor fabric that in the logic of the result is the emblem that separates winners and losers. But this Napoli enters the straight that leads to the long world stop with a margin of eight points on the pursuers and everything seems to work wonderfully. While the others complain of absences, Spalletti finds solutions. He played without Osimhen and without Anguissa, he has been without Rrahmani for a month. Has anyone noticed? The last obstacle had to be the forfeit of Kvaratskhelia, which in a few months passed from an unpronounceable name to an object of worship. He presented himself in Bergamo with Elmas and against Empoli with Raspadori, because in current football, as per the recent Spallettian teaching, the schemes no longer exist: “The spaces are not between the lines but between the opponents and it becomes essential to recognize them in time. righteous “.

Napoli plays a different script each time in terms of timing and intonation, but the underlying structure remains the same. He wants to control the ball and knows how to do it in many different ways, winning it back with the pressure of Anguissa and Zielinski, managing it with the support of the full backs, taking it from one area of ​​the field to another with the management of Lobotka: 20 years from Udine and 17 from Rome, Spalletti has found a new Pizarro. If the pirouette in possession of the ball was the symbolic play of the Chilean, the Slovakian has fallen perfectly into a new era: he always seems close to losing control of the ball, but just close your eyes for a few seconds to find him master of the game times. and the ball about fifteen meters ahead. Two years ago he was an outcast, now he is one of the reference players of a team that has lost only when it was allowed this season: in Liverpool, with the qualification already in his pocket and the first place to be defended by a wide margin. Even from that defeat, Napoli came out stronger: for 85 minutes they looked the Reds in the eye at their home, playing evenly without the slightest fear.

The skepticism of the beginning of the year has vanished. Kvaratskhelia did not take long to make Insigne forget and the same goes for Kim, called if possible to an even more thankless task: obscuring the memory of Koulibaly, of his closures, of the ability to eat the field ball and chain making Maradona roar. Now the Napoli fans can enjoy this strange example of a human being, at ease both when he has the field to defend behind, and when he has to withstand the impact of a continuous assault, flawless in aerial duels and in making people feel to the attacker an unbearable pressure.

Spalletti is a firefighter, but drives a perfect car. Osimhen is a striker designed around one of his favorite beliefs, the man who goes to see “what’s behind the opponent’s defensive line”, a concept he has taken up so many times over the course of his career that it has made him a smash. Looking back, selecting one by one the scenes of a film of a championship still stopped at just over a third of its development, we can already find the clips of an ideal scudetto film, and the Napoli fans can produce themselves in spells of every guy. But how else to define the goal by Raspadori who uncorked Maradona after 90 minutes of agony against Spezia? Or the head of Simeone at San Siro, so similar to those of dad Diego that it made those used to see those of the Cholo jump? Or the lightning bolt with which Osimhen struck Rui Patricio and smashed Mourinho’s plan, who at the Olimpico had renounced any offensive ambitions in order to lock down the 0-0? Even in that twisted penalty kicked by Lozano and only touched by Vicario you can smell the scudetto. The only enemy on the horizon is this infinite stop, which can lower the tension of a team up to this impeccable moment, as well as revive the legs and the head of those who had to try to keep the wake. An unprecedented stop, which could change the cards on the table and reshuffle the balance of the first slice of the season. And then there is the memory of last year, of another sprint start (eight victories in the first eight days) which culminated only, so to speak, in a Champions League position: a Naples so surprising as to deceive its own fans, without aspirations and ended up regretting a scudetto chance that vanished in the space of two cursed weeks. Spalletti knows this and drifts away the questions about the stop, takes refuge in the refrain of “it is valid for everyone, not just for us”. But so far, like Napoli, there hasn’t been anyone.