Silvio Berlusconi, in the Monza players' dressing room in 2020.
AC Monza were on the brink of direct promotion to Serie A a week ago.
He was missing a win.
It was almost impossible for Silvio Berlusconi's new toy to lose in Perugia when he caressed the premier class for the first time in 110 years.
ll Cavaliere
bought it three seasons ago with his friend Adriano Galliani.
He put in a fortune, went down to tell jokes in the locker room, gave public tactics lessons to his coach and promised the
tifosi
that he would take them to the First Division.
To see him again in a Serie A box, even against his old Milan... A perfect story.
But he evaporated with the game at the last minute.
The first day you set foot in the newsroom and you were too smart, someone reminded you that a newspaper is more important for what it doesn't publish than for what arrives at the newsstand the next day.
For that principle of not choosing according to what voices, for an ideological prudence that counts more than being left or right.
Also for imposing yourself to keep in a drawer what you could not contrast, although nobody could deny it.
Big stories that would have given for thousands of different covers go into that black hole.
And also, of course, those sports reports ready to send and that a goal in discount time sent to the toilet of history.
I always imagined Ramon Besa or Pepe Sámano disassembling and reassembling the
puzzle
with the stadium lights off and the beadle whistling.
The other day there were fabulous articles about the end of Madrid's game against City.
Too bad we didn't read the ones that were already on the page before Rodrygo's goal.
Time kills almost everything.
But recently we went too far with an obituary of Mino Raiola.
All the newspapers in Italy had rushed to bury him when the
clickbait
bugle blew.
And the guy was still alive (he died two days later).
That's another: the obituaries of those who refuse to die when you've already built them a beautiful box.
Survivors whose existential stubbornness transforms the chronicle into expired yogurt in the overcrowded journalistic fridge.
And sometimes they burn us in the hands.
Le Monde
, for example, announced the suicide of Monica Vitti in 1988. In the end she left this year so calm, with 90 tacos.
John Paul II, whose obituary was like a mobile application that was being updated, died and was resurrected several times in the transalpine press.
The genre is known in Italy as
Coccodrilo
and basically consists of writing an article about a dead person who is alive.
The principle of the method would respond to the fact that the reaction time of the journalist in the face of a death is incompatible with that of a worthy preparation of the live news.
Something that generally requires documentation and calls (fortunately there are people who are willing to talk about relatives and friends who are still alive as if they had already been beaten).
The
crocodile thing
It has to do with that very poetic thing of shedding a stream of journalistic tears designed as if they were very heartfelt and spontaneous.
The idea, obviously, is to provide that feeling of speed that one lacks when it's time to start writing without looking back.
Just what only some chroniclers know how to do when reality insists on going against you in added time.
Imagine the chronicles already finished in the 93rd minute of the Champions League final between Madrid and Atlético in Lisbon, before Sergio Ramos' header.
The tension to send fast already happens in all journalistic fields.
Audiences, positioning techniques.
Let's not mention the uncertainty that a motorcycle or car race generates in a chronicler until the last second.
Or an election.
But football has that mania of passing sentence at the close of the paper edition.
And capturing the swirl of emotions that forms in those minutes is a suicide mission.
Many times, also a refusal to publish a chronicle a hundred times better than the one that the stoppage time has destroyed.
Berlusconi's Monza, at least, has the
playoff
left for promotion.
On Wednesday, to Brescia.
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