CorSport – Napoli, Conte faces the tough crowd: the ultimate lone winner | OneFootball

CorSport – Napoli, the moment of the “unlikeables’ stand” has arrived for Conte: the ultimate solitary winner

And here we are at the long-awaited moment after the overwhelming disaster in Eindhoven, the moment to put Mr. Antonio Conte on the eternal stand of the unlikeables, more than that of the accused—the ultimate unlikeable, who dispenses no affability from his armor as a man alone against everyone, sometimes even against himself, the most solitary winner in football history, who always wears an ironic grimace when he smiles and, when he speaks, strikes at a hypocritical and complicit world. Always awaited at the threshold of a crash, a fall, a misstep to pin him to his unmatched strategist’s arrogance, a winner who wins and leaves, who does not bask in glory, does not wink at success, does not embrace easy popularity, does not court the environment. Antonio Conte, an eternal man-against, more than a troublemaker, in a circus that demands accommodating and available protagonists in the football lounge. But Antonio Conte could not be otherwise, having sweated much as a player and worked hard as a coach, a man of toil, suffering, sacrifices, in perpetual struggle—not a showman as the media circle would like, with that mark of Juventus-ness that irritates the anti-Juve side and disappoints the black-and-white side for a return that never happened. Conte has remained on Neapolitan soil, a volcanic land, the most difficult, contradictory, and emotional, little protected by editorial megaphones, with a team barely tolerated if it lifts its head and wins because it doesn’t make the audience of the historic “big” clubs. With a cold heart, Conte would have liked to say goodbye after the scudetto. With the warm heart of the shared triumph on the promenade of Via Caracciolo and the broad credit opened by De Laurentiis, he stayed, well aware that repeating the victory would be difficult. Having achieved the maximum with a poor but concrete team, a scudetto of pure resilience against stronger opponents, Antonio wanted to go further, imagining a bigger, dominant, European Napoli, a team that played matches keeping them in hand, no longer subject to suffering and risk. An ambitious project, Conte’s second step in Naples, which would have needed three or four champions to hit the target. Today, the boldness of a coach who has opened up to a new vision of football, surpassing the caution and limits of previous experiences, is under discussion. He would like a more authoritative, credible, prestigious Napoli, consistently at the level of the great teams. With the Fab Four, he imagined a Napoli in command. Numerous injuries have hindered the project. But perhaps the time and the signings are not yet ripe for the “big leap.” Eindhoven was a bad collapse, but it cannot be a sentence. Conte will find—must find—a solution, more unlikeable than ever. Unlikability as the fortress of his solitary labor, a fortress in which the players must, however, be convinced warriors and solid allies.

Carlo Gioia

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇮🇹 here.