live in fear

Pablo Aimar burst into tears like a child when Messi whipped him in the 72nd minute from the edge of the area and undid the spell that would have cost him elimination against Mexico.

Aimar is the second coach of Argentina.

He sat there as a professional.

And he was supposed to be thinking tactically and not suffering like an amateur.

In the image you can see the coach, Lionel Scaloni, yelling at him.

He looks like he chides him.

Then he clarified it at a press conference.

“We should have a little more common sense and think that it is just football.

It is difficult to make people understand that the sun rises tomorrow, win or lose”.

He was saying it for Aimar, presumably.

But, above all, for Argentina, a nation almost always on the wire of a nervous breakdown.

A very useful place, too, to decipher the European version of him, somewhat calmer,

Italy will be 12 years without playing a World Cup.

So the other day I went to delve into a national wound on the skin of my friend Francesco, an imperturbable guy for anything that doesn't have to do with football.

"How's the tournament going?"

He, far from being bothered, replied that it was one of the best World Cups that he had enjoyed since he can remember.

My friend, a prodigy of refinement and Roman irony, did not speak double-talk this time.

He had just seen a fast-paced Serbia-Cameroon game, was dwarfing the 11am match without his family at home, and had suffered a bout of amnesia that allowed him to forget all the criticism of Qatar's human rights violations made in bars and

the previous weeks.

No feeling of guilt.

But the best thing, he confessed to me, was the relief and relaxation for not risking anything.

What Scaloni was talking about, being sure that the sun was going to rise the next morning no matter what happened on the pitch.

“Living without fear”, he confessed to me at the end.

Italy is so carefree about the tournament.

And at this point, they have had to make strange decisions about their preferences.

A poll by the Izi company reveals that the majority will support Argentina (with 22.4% support).

The memory of Maradona, the admiration for Messi or the grandparents who migrated make up the recipe (for example, the crazy reaction of Lele Adani, RAI commentator, after Messi's goal).

The second place in sympathy would be occupied by Spain with 14.7%: any Italian with common sense knows that they unfairly won the semifinals of the last Euro Cup.

The fundamental thing, however, is what is clear to the majority: that France should not win the World Cup (22% want it with all their might, according to the SWG political polling company).

And more so now that things with Macron have heated up again since Meloni arrived.

Italy had four World Cups and an innate class and cockiness that allowed it to win endless games with its head that perhaps it did not deserve with its legs.

But something is broken.

Sacchi says that it is a reflection of the country, of a systemic rascality that has exchanged knowledge for acquaintances.

A certain trilerism, he says, which is no longer enough.

But it seems that it is something worse.

A matter of the head.

Another friend of mine says that love is just the fear of losing something.

That until one experiences that atavistic terror, affection has to be called something else.

But it's not love.

So the bad thing would be that Italy, my friend or Pablo Aimar, at the end of this break, have lost much more than some World Cups.

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