 When later tonight two men lead out their charges for the World Cup
final showdown at Berlin Olympiastadion, football aficionados would be
scrutinizing their every move on the touchline to see how these affect
the direction or outcome of the game. Though this encounter may have
thrown up seemingly different characters at the helms in each camp,
Raymond Domenech, the phlegmatic Frenchman with origins in Catalonia
and Marcelo Lippi, the urbane, cigar-loving Tuscan with the patrician
looks may however share a lot more in common as suggested by their
circumstances. While for both winning the big prize is indeed their
biggest prayer right now, it may not even be enough to redeem their
well-filleted reputation in their respective countries. For different
reasons, both have been thoroughly undermined by their countries’ media
and their publics before even setting foot in Germany, and even as
progress on the field is being achieved, huge doubts remain.
Curiously, Domenech, the no-nonsense left-back as a player and
Lippi, the cultured centre-back, do not even rate football as their
first love. For the former, it has to be acting, while the latter would
give anything to go fishing. However, in coming to lead their
respective countries to the pinnacle, both arrived at the job via
different routes. In a country where almost half of the working
population is employed by the state, Domenech rose through the ranks of
football bureaucracy. While he’s had stints as coach with Mulhouse and
his hometown club, Lyon, he actually made his name as one of the
football eggheads at the popular Clairefontaine academy and as coach of
French youth teams, where he’s had the opportunity to groom generations
of French football superstars, including most in his present team. In
1998, he was an assistant to the World Cup-winning Aimé Jacquet and
who, despite formidable opposition from the likes of Michel Platini and
some other influential ex-players, insisted on the appointment of
Domenech as the national coach to succeed Jacques Santini. On the other
hand, Marcelo Lippi took the seemingly poisoned chalice of the Azzuri
coach from a formidable background in club management, having been one
of the most successful club coaches in Italian football history,
especially with his time at Juventus. Though, he’s worked throughout
his life in Italy, he’s well-renowned internationally for his coaching
techniques, emphasis on players’ fitness and his motivational methods.
As stated earlier, both didn’t come into the tournament with great
confidence from their countrymen; in fact, calls for their sack were
ringing in their ears as they landed in Germany. Domenech’s problem is
not only because of his questionable dependence on tarot cards and
horoscope (which is said to be the basis of his dislike for Scorpios
and Leos – the former more than the latter) or what is considered to be
his disrespectful way of picking the team; there is a general consensus
in the French press, following the not-so-glorious qualification
campaigns that the man is tactically naïve. When Zidane, Thuram and
Makelele retired from international football shortly after his
appointment, the press interpreted this to mean they were actually
protesting his appointment. And when they decided to return, the story
is that they did so irrespective of what he thought. Makelele’s
revelation that he spoke to Zidane rather than the Domenech before
returning to the national team seemingly confirmed the widely-held view
that the returning senior players under Zidane have seized control of
the team. Domenech did very little to change this perception,
especially when some of the players he’d originally chosen for pivotal
roles, for instance, Vikash Dhorasoo consequently got relegated to the
nether regions of the bench. To add insult to injury, his whole
pre-tournament mountaintop happy-family retreat idea for the French
team backfired when Gregory Coupet, the Lyon goalkeeper (whom most
people expected to take the No1 jersey) rebelled against the idea of
the coach anointing Barthez. It didn’t help that the press reported
Barthez’s choice as imposed by the ex-retirees. Domenech’s only
response was to say Coupet had lost his head.
If Domenech’s idea of success is to play along as prisoner of the
most influential group in his camp, Lippi was, in spite of his jolly
uncle demanour, a strict disciplinarian who leaves no one in doubt as
to what he wants, even though he isn’t averse to arms-around-
the-shoulder treatment when he thinks it necessary to achieve the aim
of the group. From the very beginning, he showed that he knew the
problem was not only that of age, but of mentality. He quickly decided
that the 2002 World Cup scar was still there and that it was important
to discard members of the team more vulnerable to that trauma, bring in
fresh hungry faces and develop a new group culture. Apart from the blip
of losing 1-0 to Slovenia, Lippi’s team breezed through qualifiers and
they were just about feeling confident enough to dream big when the
Italian football scandal struck.
The scandal drilled a huge hole into Lippi’s reputation, even at
the pre-trial stage. Lippi’s relationship with the man at the centre of
the scandal, Luciano Moggi had him talking to investigators for hours.
Luciano Moggi is suspected to have pressurized Lippi over players to
choose for the national team and on when to play or not play Juventus
players in the squad, depending on Juventus’s needs. Also being
investigated is GEA, the biggest football agency run by Moggi’s son,
Alessandro, which is suspected to have been used by Moggi to control
and intimidate players and coaches. There’s also suspicion that he’s
used the company to control the transfer market and also as an
instrument to manipulate the outcome of matches. Lippi’s son, Davide is
an employee of the company and Lippi himself is said to be in the
company’s books, but he’s strongly denied this. The mess is such that
calls for Lippi to resign and for some of the players being
investigated to be dropped were the popular views as they departed for
Germany. In fact, it took the personal intervention of Guido Rossi, the
newly-appointed Italian football federation commissioner for Lippi to
remain at the post for now.
Once in Germany, both teams started off rather dully, France more
so than Italy. The games against Switzerland and South Korea were so
bad, that there were genuine fears that France might not qualify for
the next stage, even though to have a chance depended on beating the
hapless Togolese team. Italy won its first game against Ghana, but it
witnessed an out of character Lippi getting animated on the touchline.
The second game against USA was a tough encounter which saw De Rossi
sent off for deliberately elbowing McBride. Reminiscent of Domenech’s
comment that Coupet had lost his head, Lippi said De Rossi needs the
computer chips in his head changed. In the meantime, he said he’d left
the player “to boil in his own soup”. Lippi quickly passed the message
to the squad that the last thing they needed was to be upbraided for
unwholesome play with the pressure they were already under. He reined
in his own emotions and used the game against Australia to show the
depth of his tactical knowledge, even though they were down to ten men
before the hour mark.
Just as the second half began, Lippi had substituted the wasteful
Gilardino with the pacy Iaquinta and then six minutes later Metarazzi
was harshly sent to an early bath. But Lippi did not panic. He waited
another four minutes before sending in the only other fit centre-back,
Barzagli in place of Luca Toni. And this was at a time Italy had looked
more dangerous in attack. Having used up two substitutions, Lippi
waited for twenty minutes without Australia making any substitution. He
knew immediately by then that Australia weren’t very keen on winning in
regulation time. They were working on the notion of breaking down the
ten men of Italy, even if it means doing so in extra time. Hiddink,
himself a wily campaigner, was saving his fresh legs for that period.
However, at that point, Lippi made the decision to substitute the
shocking Del Piero, replacing him with Totti. Some of the Italian fans
actually greeted Totti with boos, but Lippi knew he was taking a
calculated risk. Totti is the Captain of the side and he was one of the
worst affected by the debacle of 2002. He had deliberately not showed
too much faith in him in the two earlier games, so if there was a game
for him to prove himself, it was this one that could determine whether
Italy make the next stage or not. He banked on the idea that the
pressure of sending Totti on when he knew he had only fifteen minutes
to change things with a man down and with no wish to go into extra-time
or penalty shoot-out could work positively. When Grosso galloped into
the Australian box in the dying minutes of injury time and earned that
penalty for Italy, Lippi, Totti and the whole of Italy knew everything
depended on the Captain. Totti calmly soaked in the pressure and
slotted the ball in the net. At that moment, Lippi knew he’d killed the
ghost of the Far East and that it was time to put into effect the
second stage of his plan.
This second stage meant Lippi turning his attention to managing
off-field affairs to the team’s advantage. He knew he had to take a
leaf from Enzo Bearzot’s book of 24 years ago, but the more crucial
thing was how he was going to adapt this to his own experience and
personality. Like Bearzot, he converted the Italian adversity and
pressures of the scandal at home to strength by creating a siege
mentality; but, unlike Bearzot, he paradoxically didn’t blank out the
media, because he knew he had to craft an image to win minds at the
same time. His media conferences increasingly became exercises in
self-deprecation, charmingly moaning about the walking wounded in his
squad and generally lowering expectations, while calling for national
support. He threw open Italian training sessions to fans, publicly
declared his group “a family” and then made certain members of the
squad, like Del Piero and Zambrotta go back to Italy on a highly
publicized emotional visit to Gianluca Pessotto, the Juventus team
manager recovering in hospital after falling from the window of his
office in Turin. Thereafter, Lippi dedicated the quarter-final victory
over Ukraine to Pessotto. All this further strengthened the group and
the effect of such careful psychological knitting was to be seen in
that game against the Germans.
Before the game, Germany had all the obvious advantages. They had
the massive support of the whole country and they were playing very
attacking football and had just beaten the dreaded Argentines. They
also knew that if it came to penalties, most people would vote for them
to win it. Moreover, in spite of the 3-0 defeat of Ukraine, the
Italians by this time hadn’t convinced most people that they were in
Germany not to play negative, defensive football. When the German media
began the mind games by labeling Italians lazy parasites, Lippi did not
immediately respond. But on the eve of the match, he had his captain,
Cannavaro and the non-playing Nesta respond in high moral tones.
Gattuso, whose parents had actually worked in Germany and who indeed
had lived there himself added his own tuppence for good measure. Lippi
was building something inside the players, but his own mien betrayed
nothing. While Klinsmann was boasting of a German win, Lippi was
talking about Frings’ absence being of no consequence to the Germans
(even though everyone knew he was a key player).When the German media
and players declared Dortmund a luck venue because they haven’t lost
there, Lippi retorted that as a club manager, he’d twice won there.
Sven Goran Eriksson could have learnt a thing or two from Lippi
about how to use your calmness or cool temperament to good effect.
Lippi stood throughout on the touchline, with the pained, anxious
expression of a father expecting his children to bring the bacon home.
But as much as the worries were written all over his face, he wasn’t
stomping around, barking orders or kicking water bottles. None of his
players looking over would have failed to notice his expression. It was
a combination of cultured pressure and confidence - a look that fired
the boys on the pitch, but which the German bench misread with
Klinsmann doing all the theatrics. Lippi knew that the Germans were
expecting to see Italians engage in gamesmanship and all sorts of
underhanded tactics to win, but instead, Lippi instructed his players
to concentrate on the football. He knew the eyes of the world were on
Italy and with what is going on at home, playing to the stereotype
won’t help. He knew the Germans were expecting a very defensive Italy,
but he surprised them by taking the battle to them from the world go.
He did this by making sure he had an extra man in midfield, instructing
Camoranesi to stop the German left-back, Lahm going forward to join the
German attack.
Lippi didn’t make any substitution until he was sure what the
Germans were doing. He was content to push his team on the attack,
asking all the questions, because he knew that was bound to bring a
response from the Germans sooner or later. Surely, in the 72nd minute,
Klinsmann finally realized he needed to bring in Schweinsteiger whom he
ought to have started on the wings in the first place. Borowski is a
central midfielder who could also play in front or at the back, but
playing him on the wings and indeed starting him ahead of
Schweinsteiger was indeed a disaster. So, when the latter came in for
the former, Lippi’s response was to replace the tired Luca Toni with
Gilardino. The Germans thought nothing of this since it was seemingly
like for like, but Lippi’s idea was to increase the tempo of the
Italian attack even more. Klinsmann then recalled Schneider and
introduced the pacy Odonkor who began to have some joy on the right.
But Lippi didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he used the cover of the
90th minute yellow card against Camoranesi, who was already losing his
discipline, to introduce Iaquinta. To the Germans, this must have
seemed like a panicky move to protect Camoranesi from another yellow
since it was obvious by this time that the game was going into
extra-time. What they didn’t know was that it was a well-calculated
move by Lippi to exploit the space always left behind by Odonkor while
bombing forward and at the same time use Iaquinta’s pace to provide
support for Gilardino and other players moving forward. By the time
Lippi was going to make his third and final substitution of bringing in
Del Piero in place of Perrotta almost at the end of the first
extra-time period, the Italians had an all-attacking formation that
simply camped in front of the German goal area. The Germans held on as
the Italians bombarded the area But less than two minutes before the
final whistle, just as the Germans were thinking this surely was going
to a shoot-out, Lippi urged his men forward and Pirlo, who had been
anonymous throughout the extra-time period and who was seen last
limping around the pitch, suddenly popped up outside the German box to
intercept a clearance; he found Grosso and the wingback found the only
part of the net Lehmann couldn’t reach. It was 1-0! An attempt by the
shocked Germans to immediately rally round by pressing forward was
immediately punished when the immaculate Cannavaro who found Gilardino.
The latter ran down to the edge of the German box, got blocked by
Mertesacker, but managed to feed the onrushing Del Piero who blasted
the ball into the underside of the roof of the net for the second goal.
It was a quintessential Italian job on the enterprising Germans, but no
one could begrudge them that victory.
In the meantime, Domenech suffered through 90 minutes against Togo.
But in the end, he was salvaged by two goals from Vieira and Henry, two
players he’d chosen himself, even though the latter is a Leo. Domenech
admitted his relief and went into a Vieira praise- song via a swipe at
those who didn’t trust his judgment when he chose him. But in typical
Domenechspeak, he showed his fear of playing rampant Spain in the next
round by stating: “I expected to play them but not in the same
scenario. I thought they would finish second and we would finish
first”. To Domenech, it didn’t matter that his projections would still
have had both teams meeting at that stage, what was important was for
him to use that opportunity to deploy a Gallic putdown against the team
from his parents’ country. In Domenech’s mind, everything French is
first, others are only ever good enough for second place. But in the
mind games business, Domenech, the good actor that he is, never play
the same role, depending on the opponents. For instance, after
dispatching Spain to be confronted by Brazil, he made a great show of
telling the world how his aged stars are at a disadvantage against the
young, celebrated Brazil. Yet, even though France had the oldest squad
with an average age of 29.8, Brazil weren’t far behind with 28.5. But
Domenech’s statement was aimed at lulling Brazil into a sense of
self-defeating comfort. Now, while it was obvious that Zidane pulled
the strings that sent out the Spaniards and the Brazilians and
converted the all-important penalty that took out the Portuguese,
Domenech, unlike the rest of the footballing world, had not been
forthcoming with praise. Rather, he chose to remind us all that the
match against the Azzuri is a World Cup final and not Zidane’s
testimonial!
In the mind games and media build-up to today’s final, the
Italians’ strategy has been to overwhelm Zidane with high praise, which
could be interpreted as an indirect way of saying they know he’s the
one in charge of the French team and not Domenech. Whatever the motive,
it’s bound to put huge pressure on Zidane and the French. And judging
from the French reaction, this may indeed be the case. Zidane refused
to appear at an already scheduled pre-match press conference and
Domenech was left trying to justify his absence (and that of other
players) by claiming they’re only focusing on the final game and do not
need any distractions. “They’re preparing in their own bubble. They
suffered so much criticism after the last World Cup. They are in their
fortress they’ve built around them. Until the match is over they’ll be
inside this vacuum”, he said. On Zidanes absence at the conference, he
explained: “I can understand why he didn’t come. Like with all the
players he doesn’t feel the need to explain what he’s doing, he just
wants to get on and do it”. As for himself: “I’m sticking to my focus.
I’m not listening or reading anything about the World Cup, it’s been
like this for the past month. If you start looking left and right you
can get overtaken by psychosis. I’ve been there, I don’t need this
outside pressure”.
It would be a great fairytale ending for Domenech, the bumbling
professor and the stone that has been rejected to lead Zidane’s Dad’s
Army to victory here, but my head tells me the Italians are more
mentally prepared for this. I also think they have more goals in the
team than France, considering that 10 different players (comprising 3
defenders, 2 midfielders and 5 forwards) have scored 11 goals. The only
goal they’ve conceded is the Zaccardo own goal against the US in the
group stages. On the other hand, the French have scored only 8 goals,
all of whom are scored by only 4 players – Henry (3), Zidane (2),
Vieira (2) and Ribery (1). They have also let in two goals, one against
South Korea and the other against Spain. Some of us may want to argue
that the French had tougher opponents, especially in their last three
games, which could be a fair point; but there’s no doubt that without
Zidane, Vieira and Henry being at the top of their game, France would
struggle. I don’t think their bench inspires much confidence, though
one would expect Trezeguet and Wiltord to do a decent job when called
upon. Yet, whether that would be enough is another matter.
No doubt, the French have the players and flair to overwhelm the
Italians, but are they really as united in this mission as portrayed?
Reading between the lines of Domenech’s statement, I do not think he’s
fully in charge of what is going on there. Zidane, who claims to have
returned to the national team because a dead friend appeared to him in
a vision and urged him to do so may be inspired to give his all for a
last hurray; but this is a team game, if you aren’t all working from
the same sheet, things can quickly go pear-shaped on the big stage. So,
the two amateur mystics leading the French better get their act
together, otherwise the solid Italians would seize the day.
Whatever happens though, this is bound to be a great spectacle.
|
RSS Feeds | Podcasts
# 
Your Comments
Please make The Square an enjoyable experience for everyone by refraining from gratuitous ad-hominem contributions, defamatory comments and off-topic posting. Such posts will be removed.