The misunderstanding of Riccardo Saponara | The paper

The problem for those who play football in that small patch of grass that is between the forwards and midfielders, or wide on the side bands – as is the modern use – but with the same attitude as those who should move in that middle ground, is expected, because that’s how it is and that’s how it goes and there’s nothing you can do about it, always a twist, an invention, a play that can generate a wowa ohhhthat you force yourself to applause.

Richard Saponara he started kicking a ball for real in that middle ground. Then, like many others, he had to expand, look for new pieces of lawn to conquer and conquer himself to conquer those who, from the side and above, have always felt the need to be enchanted and to hiss and curse those who do not know how to enchant. He started with Alfredo Aglietti in Empoli, continued in Tuscany with Maurizio Sarri, before the coach now at Lazio found the definitive dimension of his game which often tries, perhaps too much, to elevate itself to a Hegelian philosophy. And with Sarri, perhaps also thanks to Sarri, he found himself to be what he had never been and perhaps he had never even thought of being: a player capable of generating those wow and those ohhh that fans want and need.

It’s not easy, at the age of twenty-two moreover, going from Empoli to Milan, on the AC Milan side, with the wrong label, playing in front of a stadium full of people convinced they know better than you what type of player you are and expecting to be amazed and delight in the simple fact that a player who plays in the middle ground between forwards and midfielders cannot afford not to amaze and delight.

Because one thing was clear, it’s still clear today that a decade has passed since then, Riccardo Saponara knows how to play with the ball, he knows how to caress, control, kick like few others, the problem is that he doesn’t do it, he never did it, in the way the people in the stands wanted him to do it.

Riccardo Saponara is not and never was a tightrope walker. Nor an acrobat, a snake charmer. If he were a circus performer he probably would have been a lighting technician, he would have valued that of others with his work. What he does on the pitch, which he has always done on the pitch. A gregarious. And it’s a bad thing that often reading the word gregarious the first thing that comes to mind for many, most of them, he is an athlete of modest talent, only able to help the captain. It is not so. It has never been, it is even more wrong in recent years, a period in which the immense media exposure of sport has made it clear, in cycling as in almost all team sports, that the strongest talented capable determined only imposes itself provided you have people you can trust blindly. And that’s even if your name is Remco Evenepoel, Tadej Pogacar or LeBron James.

Riccardo Saponara is someone who has always played for others too, who has always preferred choral utility to the coup, rather than generating wows and uhhhs, the observation that there are ten other people in a field wearing the same shirt as you (which would then be nine, the goalkeeper has always been better dressed) and usually at least one is marked worse than those who have the ball at their feet.

It’s a misunderstanding, always been a misunderstanding, Riccardo Saponara. Because from someone like him one would want the stage presence, the bravado of the star, certainly not the subtle and refined, at least in football, a community spirit, the socialist-like disposition for personal sacrifice for the good of the team. At the age of thirty-one, however, Riccardo Saponara has finally managed to free himself from the obligation of having to amaze and has begun to be appreciated for what he is, someone who knows how to play with the ball but in his own way, in his own time, for other goals other than exaltation of talent. In Florence, after years and incessant wanderings like any Dante, Vincenzo Italiano finally appreciated what had escaped many. And if even Fiorentina is going like this, if it constantly seems like a construction site that keeps postponing the construction of a splendid cathedral, Vincenzo Italiano and Riccardo Saponara know in their hearts that sooner or later the time will come to be satisfied with the time taken. time that seemed lost, but never really lost.

Olives is the address book of John Battistuzzi on the (not necessarily) protagonists of Serie A. In the first episode there was talk of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (Naples), in the second of Emil Audero (Sampdoria), in the third of Boulaye Dia (Salernitana), in the fourth of Tommaso Baldanzi (Empoli) , in the fifth by Marko Arnautovic (Bologna), in the sixth Gabriele Spangaro entertained you with Beto (Udinese), in the seventh by Christian Gytkjær (Monza), in the eighth Armand Laurienté (Sassuolo), in the ninth Sergej Milinkovic-Savic (Lazio ), in the tenth Sandro Tonali (Milan), in the eleventh Cyriel Dessers (Cremonese), in the twelfth Tammy Abraham (Roma), in the thirteenth Stefano Sensi (Monza), in the fourteenth Federico Baschirotto (Lecce), in the fifteenth Moise Kean (Juventus) , in the seventeenth Rasmus Hojlund (Atalanta); in the eighteenth M’Bala Nzola (Siena); in the nineteenth Federico Dimarco (Inter); in the twentieth Cyril Ngonge (Hellas Verona).