The rhetorical paraphernalia to belittle Napoli is increasingly in difficulty

In cycling they call them bin escapes: in the middle of a transfer stage someone without warning takes, leaves and leaves, while the leaders of the general classification do not feel they have to move a muscle and waste precious energy: where you want them to go, so much we continue, and at worst the Giro is still long. And instead they arrive. One of the most famous bin-escapes of our sport was the one that a semi-unknown Claudio Chiappucci managed at the second stage of the 1990 Tour de France: he reached the finish line of Futuroscope, an amusement park north of Poitiers, with over ten and a half minutes on the big group, laying the foundations for a surprise protagonist Grande Boucle in which he wore the yellow jersey until the penultimate day, until Greg Lemond asserted his supremacy in the time trial and forced him to a splendid second place.

The escape-bin is the stuff of heroes by chance, ephemeral workers of the two wheels awarded by a day of free exit, and it goes without saying that if a drain-bin becomes something bigger – as in the case of Chiappucci – it stops being such . It takes a cool head to identify it when it is happening. The great favorite coexists with the risk of underestimating one and throwing away a stage race prepared for months. Now Napoli has escaped and the laziest observers have been asking themselves the same questions for weeks: but will they last? But where do you want them to go? Or have the oxen already escaped? Now the rhetorical paraphernalia to belittle the third best team in Serie A history in the medium term of the 15 days – 41 points, the same as Juventus 1949-50, one less than Juventus 2005-2006, two less than Juventus 2018- 19, then all behind – has been reduced to some shattered cliché that is increasingly listless and improbable. Let’s review and deny them one by one: this spectacular team, machine with 57 goals and 18 victories in 21 matches between the league and the Champions League, does not deserve to be in the basement of the ordinary administration of Serie A.

But Spalletti collapses on the way back. Often placed but never successful in 25 years of career, Luciano Spalletti lives with prejudice as happened last year to Stefano Pioli and before that to all his colleagues – from Carlo Ancelotti to Sven Goran Eriksson – who had not been saddled by immediately the deadly and mellifluous label of “winner”. The reality is that Spalletti has never coached a first favorite for the title: he was not in Rome, in the years of Inter’s overwhelming power after Calciopoli, he was not in an Inter in total reconstruction that he brought back to the Champions League after seven years, not him. it was last year in Naples and not even this year after the mass departures of the summer. So what would be the many scudettos faded on the return, the “punctual collapses” in January that occurred only at Inter, and in at least one of the two cases – the ugly mess of Icardi 2019 – had very well-founded alibis? Indeed, last year in the second round, Napoli made one point more than in the first leg, when they lost six points out of six at home against Empoli and Spezia after two games dominated for a long time. And it was very constant in the 2016-17 season at Roma, that of 87 points, a year that was vulgarly gone down in history only for the Totti affair from which – can we say it or are you still offended, dear friends inside the Gra? – came out with his nerves in pieces, but in hindsight as a triumph.

But De Laurentiis ruins everything. Certain Elon Musk-like mad guappo attitudes may have damaged the image of Aurelio De Laurentiis, but there will be a reason if today Napoli is the Italian team with the most consecutive qualifiers in the European Cups: thirteen seasons in a row, from 2010 onwards, and this year they will become fourteen. It is also said: for now De Laurentiis is silent, but sooner or later … It is true that the self-destructive impulse is a faithful travel companion of many men of power, but at this point you really do? One of the most modern football models that there are today at a high level in Italy continues to be diluted in folklore, the only one together with Milan that had the clarity to decline the market to the future, unloading without worries some very heavy media dead weights (Insigne and Mertens, just not to mention names), monetizing big and superbly replacing an apparently untouchable like Koulibaly. To replace KK and Insigne Giuntoli he drew two champions from the periphery of great football, showing the rest of the sporting directors the vastness of the boundaries of modern football, without looking to the past or forcing his gaze into the blinkers of the barren Serie A garden. cold blood in the last days of the transfer market and bought three luxury spare parts on the gong such as Raspadori, Simeone and Ndombele, all three left yesterday from the bench to confirm the unexpected depth of the best squad in the league.

But the environment of Naples is not ready. That is: in Naples they have not won a Scudetto since 1990 and therefore it will go for ever and ever. Can the Milan-Turin dichotomy, not exactly a panacea for the product-football in the last thirty years, can therefore never be broken? Beyond the legitimate antipathies for the president or the coach, beyond the less legitimate idiosyncrasies for an entire city (there is also a little bit of racism in considering Napoli a nice little speck without any credibility in the long run), the blue scudetto would be great news for the whole Serie A too long fossilized on the usual notes: four consecutive different winners did not occur from the 1999-2002 period. As for the elusive “environment” that in the long run would cloak the entire Napoli squad with appocundria, of which the first subtle warning would be the notorious car theft from the players (but they also steal cars in Sondrio and Pordenone, if we are not mistaken) , suffice the Instagram message of South Korean Kim Min-Jae, who a few minutes after the first seasonal mistake made four lines of apology on Instagram as if he had been guilty of excessive blood clotting of San Gennaro. An alien in Naples.

But after the World Cup you will see. Here, a trivial statistic: Napoli brings five players to the World Cup (Anguissa, Kim, Lozano, Olivera, Zielinski), none of whom should be destined for too glorious a path. Milan and Inter have seven each; Juventus even eleven. To name four of a certain importance, Osimhen, Kvaratskhelia, Lobotka and Di Lorenzo will spend a carefree Christmas like not even in the president’s most brutal cine-panettone. If Napoli is destined to give in with a crash – and in January we will find out immediately, since at the first of 2023 there is Inter-Napoli and at the third Napoli-Juve – it will certainly not be the fault of Qatar 2022.

The same author of this article three months ago doubted very much the new deal Neapolitan, so much so that he did not even place it among the first four classified at the stop: but give that poor fellow at least the benefit of the asterisk, because on 12 August Napoli still had several uncovered boxes and seemed feverishly looking for a new goalkeeper (who then has not bought anymore). Broadening the view a little, perhaps in the anti-Naples snobbery of certain insiders (less and less) who continue to relegate him to page 14, there is the human gnawing for not being able to recognize the sudden and blinding spark of what is ‘is on starting from the mid-August barbecue in Verona-Naples. A magnificent team that, in the manner of surprise leaders Arsenal in the Premier League, practice technical football on the move with a very rare fluidity across the continent and so far has never sent any signs of even the slightest mental breakdown.. And when he did it, yesterday afternoon in the last quarter of an hour at 3-0 for human relaxation after 75 minutes as a great team, he didn’t even pay duty. And what more do you want from life? A Luciano.