[Sports] Euro 2020: Chiellini, Bonucci and the joys of pushing back

[Mr.Talha]

 

https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/football/euro-2020-chiellini-bonucci-and-the-joys-of-pushing-back-7399192/

 

There are plenty of stories. Some of them are so far-fetched that, if it were not for the eyewitness testimony or the video footage, the natural instinct would be to assume they are apocryphal. The best of them, though, the most illustrative, is the one about the garlic tablets.

In 2014, before Juventus was scheduled to play Roma in a crucial game at the summit of Serie A, Leonardo Bonucci ate a handful of garlic tablets. His motivational coach, Alberto Ferrarini, had given them to him, later explaining that “hundreds of years ago, soldiers ate garlic to keep them strong, healthy and alert.” The tablets were intended to give Bonucci the same traits.

There was, of course, another benefit. Ferrarini also told Bonucci to “breathe in the faces of Gervinho and Francesco Totti,” Roma’s star attackers. The ploy worked — Juventus won 3-2 and Bonucci scored the winning goal — and the myth crystallized just a little more. There was nothing Bonucci, like his Juventus and Italy teammate Giorgio Chiellini, would not do in service of victory.

Italy’s run to the final of Euro 2020 has, in many ways, highlighted a drastic shift in the country’s soccer culture. Roberto Mancini’s team is young, vibrant and adventurous, designed around a slick and technical midfield and imbued with a bright, attacking style.

If it was that vision of Italy that carried the team through the group stage and helped it sweep aside Austria and then Belgium in the knockout rounds, the team’s semifinal victory against Spain was built on a more familiar iteration: ruthless and redoubtable, cast not in the porcelain image of Lorenzo Insigne and Marco Verratti, but in the unyielding concrete of Bonucci and Chiellini.

It is that Italy that England must overcome Sunday evening if it is to lift the European Championship trophy: the Italy that not only finds pride in its defending, but treats it with genuine relish. As Bonucci has previously said, “As a defender, you always like winning 1-0.”

In the tournament’s opening game, with Mancini’s team up 3-0 on Turkey and cruising to a victory, Chiellini and Bonucci celebrated an injury-time goal-line clearance with the sort of vigor more traditionally reserved for last-gasp winning goals.

It has been that way for years, of course. Chiellini made his Italy debut in 2004; Bonucci, only two years younger but a much later bloomer, joined him in 2010. Between them, they now have made 219 appearances for their country, the vast majority of them in tandem. They are so inseparable, at both club and international level, that one of Google’s suggested searches for them is: “Are Chiellini and Bonucci related?”