Qatar 2022, what a disappointment! Melancholic defeat of Italy in Vienna
Finally the real protagonist appears: the game of the ball. Which is like this: brutal, cynical, peremptory in its simplicity. After so many disquisitions, after so many debates on rights and on business, after a magnificent opening ceremony that seems more Olympic than football (with the poignant and slightly rhetorical words of the great actor Morgan Freeman (“what unites us is greater than what divides us”), in the end the World Cup in the desert really begins in this future container called Al Bayt Stadium in a space odyssey sky with skyscrapers that shine like spaceships.
All very beautiful, all very emotional, almost poignant like Freeman’s dialogue with a charismatic and communicative young man like a rock star. Even the audience, divided between local and Ecuadorian fans, seems authentic and not made up, as the malicious ones murmur, of extras hired ad hoc to be quickly sent the next day to another stadium to fill it again.
Ruthless start
All beautiful, we said. Except that then the opening match, Qatar-Ecuador, with the hosts making their debut against a team by no means unprepared, has its beginning. And it’s a ruthless start, a brutal slap of sincerity: after only 120 seconds, under the bewildered eyes of Emir Hamad Al Tani, Qatar is already one goal down due to a sensational “butterfly exit” (twentieth-century lexicon , but always valid) of his clumsy goalkeeper, Saad Al Sheeb, which allows Valencia, the striker from Ecuador, to hit the net.
It seems like the beginning of a nightmare, or a fairy tale in which the naive boy, to the astonishment of the courtiers, exclaims that the King is naked. Fortunately, to make the Emir Al Tani catch his breath, the Var intervenes which, with the new application of the semi-automatic offside, catches a millimetric irregularity putting the result back on a par.
A break is a must to rekindle our national pride: because this start of the World Cup is all Made in Italy. The referee, who accepts the decision of the Var, is in fact Daniele Orsato, a highly appreciated local black jacket. The assistants are Carbone and Giallatini, also “compatriots”, as our president of the Senate Ignazio La Russa would say. And also the employees of the Var, Irrati and Valeri, are two thoroughbred Italians. If we then add that the desert tent-shaped cover of the stadium is by a company from Pordenone, and that the evocative opening ceremony was entrusted to Marco Balich, number one in the world, we can then say, with a certain pride, that the best Italy also emerges among the treasures of the desert.