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If Pablito will stay forever, it is not because of the familiar taste of affectionate exoticism but because everything that Paolo Rossi has given to the world took place in Spain, in the few days of the 1982 World Cup, precisely in that short series of only four games in which he scored systematically, or better yet, in the ninety minutes of his three goals against Brazil. Indeed, be rigorous and really respect the dizzying character of being Paolo Rossi, in the scarce seventy minutes in which the goals were concentrated: an apparently easy header at the beginning, a good shot generated by the usual Brazilian defensive nonsense in the middle, finally the most decisive and underrated goal in football history when all seemed lost.
The context is known at least to those who have memorized the epic story of that feat. A modest-looking national team, still clouded by the embarrassment of betting on football, perceived as mediocre on defense, built on unpopular elections. Technician Bearzot – fixed defendant of a popular Process Television – aimed at the public’s contempt and attacked in the street for his elections in the call. The unsatisfactory and in some cases suspicious results in the first rounds of the tournament seemed to confirm the fate of the team. Half of Italy began to cheer, mostly preferring South American football, according to a more artistic and spectacular old prejudice, or anticipating the superiority of the perfect German organization. In reaction, the Italian team fell back on itself, feeding the most perverse hypotheses about the nature of isolation, proclaimed a press blackout, definitively antagonizing the timid tribe of information, and more or less consciously contributed to the erection of a wall of strangeness and antipathy. (For those who find this synthetic summary cryptic, I hope that the admirable and detailed book by Vittorio Sermonti is still available, which with great culture and five hundred dense pages documents ravings, innuendoes, grotesque predictions).
This weather spawned the incredible day (actually an afternoon – in fact: seventy minutes) of July 5, 1982. Almost a formality for the Brazilian team packed with champions, who needed a draw to open the way to the predictable final with Germany. . or rather the challenge that everyone expected, the expected confrontation, partly competitive and partly metaphysical, between art and organization. But the Brazilians do not know how to draw and in the machine of soccer history that was advancing triumphantly towards its predictable end, the minute and trivial center forward, until now unfinished and ridiculed, slipped away like a speck of dust. The car derailed, Italy won that match and the World Cup, Paolo Rossi became Pablito.
Paolo Rossi against Brazil on July 5, 1982 (DPA / LAPRESSE)
And Pablito stayed forever, precisely because everything that happened to him (and to us) afterwards is insignificant (he even remained the same in physique and temperament, without those dramatic falls that have melodramatic and spectacularly transformed other champions, attracting the public ). ruthless global hypocrisy). But those three goals, the times and the ways in which they occurred, are there in the pantheon of the few things that happen to witness in life and that can never be forgotten. It is their exemplary character that surprises each of the countless times that he sees them again. The third goal above all, the one that comes when the dream seems to have already faded, a quarter of an hour to go, the two teams draw, Brazil seems to control the game and the fate of football. A lens without quality but of infinite beauty and importance. There was a corner kick, a ball gently returned by the Brazilian defense, a shot from the outside into an undefined area of the penalty area. But there, strangely apart from the blue and green-gold mass that remains to dispute a ball that will never arrive, there is a forgotten and lonely center forward. Quickly correct the crooked shot and make it the most fatal of goals.
There is a detail that illustrates well the unpredictable intensity of what happened. Near the goal line (and his goalkeeper) a Brazilian footballer invokes an incredible offside (for the layman: if you are on the goal line with your goalkeeper by your side, offside is impossible, and you know it) . But what is that Brazilian defender trying with his pathetic gesture? He doesn’t just cling to the unprovable to nullify the goal and stop the story (or rather, allow him to get back on track). That anonymous footballer is expressing the bewilderment of all of us: why is Paolo Rossi there, how the hell did he end up there, how did he manage to carve a niche for himself in the place that was probably the busiest in the world at the time (the fifteen-minute penalty area) ). finals of a decisive match of the world soccer championship)? In what way, with what strategies did you get to that point at that moment, to finally allow yourself that quick, unexpected, almost unnoticed but irreparable and final gesture?
Paolo Rossi is that gesture forever. It is cunning, speed that infiltrates the machine of history and derails it (or at least manages to dodge it to survive it: Pablito forever). It is the instinctive wisdom that rests its own meager strengths on the weaknesses of others, that makes its way into the distractions of talent and destiny, discovering a possibility where there seems to be no more. He is the most Mediterranean footballer (despite having worn city shirts that in the years following the World Cup triumphs that sea seemed to reject). It is the singularity that – in the name and on behalf of all those who will embrace him on the lawn of Sarrià in Barcelona on July 5, 1982 – changes destiny even though it is irreparably marked by the dominance of the great racing machines and narratives. If in the history of football with his indifference for a scheme that was not his gesture and his game, Paolo Rossi slipped between the splendor of the Dutch collective and the obsession with the Sacchiano device, by the imagination of a time he Aloud, more than showing how somewhere, somewhere, where everything seems busy and decided, another space is always possible.
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