Off to Bologna with a heavy heart
This time no one said it. Luckily. This time, on Friday evening, neither journalist, nor fan, nor anyone 'on the inside’ let pass their lips - or cross their mind - one of the oldest and most banal phrases from the world of show-business (and sport): “the show must go on”.
All of us said and thought together that things had to stop there. That it was right to go home and set aside the desire to play, and win, the game. As it happens, it was the first time this season that Juventus were coming into a game as leaders. And the big players were on their way back.
But not a single one of them would have managed to play the ball around or attempt to score a goal. It was, and still is, a time of pain and suffering. Both private and collective, for the families and the team mates of the two boys, for the senior players who remember the passion and the gaze of those two boys and for the countless sportsmen and women who still can’t believe that something like this could ever have happened.
Alessio and Riccardo are no longer with us. Today that is all that matters.
The first team training in a deserted Stadio Olimpico is perhaps the image which best illustrates the emptiness, the desolation, the loss. Empty terraces and heads bowed low. And then at Vinovo, on the immense field where Alessio and Riccardo left behind their dreams, there no longer seems to be room for crosses and volleys, tactical drills and goalkeeping exercises.
There is a cold and unreal silence, which says more than a thousand words.
It won’t be easy to start again. For Del Piero or for the boys from the Berretti. It won’t be easy to get back to work and it won’t be easy to forget.
Perhaps it will all make more sense if we turn our thoughts to Alessio and Riccardo and the desire they both had to play the game. As if they themselves were on the pitch, fighting for every ball.
It’s in Bologna tomorrow that it all starts up again, with a suffering that weighs down both legs and stomach, because the pain - the real pain - will never go away.
But tomorrow Alessio and Riccardo will take the field alongside us.
And this one is for them.
www.juventus.com
--------------------------------------------------------
RIP, boys. Forza Juve !!!