A Short Course of Italian

The Romanian football team missed the chance of revenge in front of Italy, which defeated us twice over last year. The big majority of the Romanian football fans were really coveting a victory and many were thinking, inertially, in its possibility to occur. Even the one who signs this comment expressed his conviction that the Romanian team might defeat the strong Italian national team. But I have to admit that, like all the incurable football fans in this country, I was wrong. Besides the fund differences between the Italian and the Romanian football, besides the unfavorable tradition, elements we surpassed over the years, in crucial moments, the Romanian team, at its present level, could not surpass Italy or France, Brazil or other major force of Romanian football. And this out of objective reasons, related to the phase of transition between the previous epoch, dominated by the extraordinary personality of Gheorghe Hagi, and what will follow.
Spotter Ladislau Bölöni’s tactical conception for the game was much criticized. It was said that we should have played more defensively, to let the Italians the initiative, so that we could strike by counterattack.
Let’s play as for the last 30, meanly speculating the adversary’s errors. It happened just the opposite way. The ones who assailed the opposite gate were the Romanians, not the Italians. Ideal tactics for the Italian players, who master perfectly the art of defensive and counterattack for more than 40 years, since the cynical Helenio Herrera launched the device "the best attack is the defensive. Two counterattack actions were sufficient, all that during four minutes, and the whole edifice built up by Bölöni fell like a send castle. Actually, up to point, Bölöni’s strategy was generous and bold at the same time: to attack the Italians from the beginning, to score quickly, obliging them to come out and then to change the game, playing the Italian way.
Unfortunately for him and the future of our football, we didn’t manage to score immediately. We had no possibility anyway, with Italy.
On a long run, the Romanian national team could only learn form the Italian lesson. Even if Bölöni was wrong in the game with the European vice-champions, the way he took could be considered the good one. Romania’s team had Gica Hagi for 15 years, no matter what coaches might have come and gone. In other words, Romania’s team used to be subordinate in its playing style to a captain, a super-class "play-maker". This "play-maker" doesn’t exist any more and unfortunately, at present at least, he cannot be replaced with someone else with his gift and, above all, his authority over the other teammates.
For a year, since he took over the national team, spotter Bölöni tries to replace Hagi not with someone else but with something else. And if he cannot bring a new Hagi in the field, Bölöni wants a Hagi on the reserve, that is himself, trying to supply the absence of a game conductor.
Maybe this is the source of the spotter’s intransigence, maybe this is the source of some players’ opposition accusing Bölöni of tyranny
Football is an activity where patience is not very demanded, and this is not true only for Romania. Short term results are looked for, the future is not an issue of debate so much. A defeat in the game with Georgia too might abolish the little done by now, in the period after Euro 2000. And the danger that some players sabotage the coach’s authority, even with the risk of a defeat, is not to neglect. If so, we are left one single thing. To convince Hagi to play till he gets old and to send Bölöni back to France, or Hungry, or wherever he wants.
(Nicolae GRECU)