The clock has gone past 2 am and my eyes are watering with fatigue. The temperature inside the room is perfect. Outside my window, Chennai is already asleep. There are no silhouettes on the street. Passing showers come in light percussion patterns on the roof. The leaves on the neem tree outside, wet with fresh rain, are rustling softly enough to not disturb the stillness of the night. The air-conditioner remote is kept somewhere, I don’t know where. On nights like these, the soothing sea breeze makes all electrical cooling devices redundant. Yawn after yawn opens up my jaw, pleading, begging me to look left towards my neatly laid out bed, before receding in temporary frustration.
The LED screen of my laptop is glowing brightly in swathes of green. It is the first day of an entire week and a half long carnival of European football. The pandemic has forced the final stages of Europe’s two premier continental club competitions to be held at an accelerated pace. The prospect of a knock-out match every day should ideally be exciting, but I am 29 and have professional commitments in the mornings, so the unabashed enthusiasm of carefree college days isn’t quite accessible. I run some weapons-grade calculations in my head about picking my battles.
There is little to no chance of me staying up all eight nights. Manchester United and Lionel Messi walk into the must-watch list. For the remainder — some, I will straight up give the slip; some others, I’ll let my body decide. Atalanta vs PSG seemed a tie perfectly suited to the latter. Neither team deserves an outright snub.
In between yawns and fleeting glances at the bed and clock, I am on the edge of my chair, willing Atalanta on. As much as my eyes and back plead for rest, I ignore. Staying up for half an hour more isn’t as big a challenge as seeing Atalanta through. I have watched them only a handful of times this season, but right now, I am invested in their success like a bonafide Bergamo resident. I gasp when they almost concede, scream when they score, and crash back on my chair when, with a few seconds remaining to go in regulation time, their opponents stick the knife in.
“I’m a poor underdog,
But tonight, I will bark”
The underdog syndrome, the David against Goliath narrative, is powerful and evocative, proven through college surveys, election polls, and Robert Frost’s pen. Tugging the rope from the crowded end has never been much fun. The real thrill lies in getting behind a line scrawny tourists and pulling over a bunch of Nordic strongmen.
Atalanta tick all the underdog boxes, but I don’t think the overwhelming love for them can simply be categorised as supporting the lesser likely candidate to win. We often search for stories at unlikely corners, and it’s Atalanta’s story which makes them special and gives fans like me something to hang on to.
Football has been an industry for a while. Ever since a bunch of marketers and broadcasters decided to tap into a global thirst for premium quality sport, it has turned into a money-making machine. It is only natural that overzealous industrialists and oligarchs harbour hope of tapping into the power of the world’s biggest sport while making some neat cash.
But what we see now, especially in the last two decades or so, is the era of superteams. Most leagues are dominated by a select few teams rich in bank balance and talent. This, then, results in the best players landing at their doorstep for shinier trophies and fatter cheques, leading to a substantial imbalance in the ecosystem. The same few teams then dominate the continental competitions too. There have also been efforts to draft a cash-rich competition involving only the most elite teams — a lavish, exclusive, invite-only club.
Paris Saint Germain, Atalanta’s opponents on the night, are a perfect picture of this imbalance. They are bankrolled by the Qatari state and dish out monthly paycheques that would make Hollywood actors rethink their purpose in life. The current PSG side are less a team and more a gold-plated, manufactured-on-a-whim, Lego set.
(Image credit: Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
Atalanta present a complete contrast of this. They come from Bergamo, a small, fortified city in northern Italy. In February, while large parts of the world could still nonchalantly swat away questions and concerns about this new virus, Bergamo’s hospitals were overwhelmed. The streets were packed with police and army vehicles. People slept and woke up to the shrill, pulsating sound of ambulance sirens. Atalanta’s last game before lockdown hit Italy, a match they had to move to Milan because Bergamo was already shut down, briefly earned the epithet of a biological bomb.
Atalanta aren’t rich, not by a long shot, and neither do they have players that you would go looking out for on your next video game save. Chances are, they get to retain a large chunk of their current core, because this is already a team of rejects and afterthoughts. Mario Pašalić spent 6 years on the Chelsea rosters without getting a minute to play. He scored the goal that put Atalanta ahead against PSG. Their head coach looks like someone who will help you out with choosing breakfast cereal at the neighbourhood supermarket.
**
In a utopian world, sport is fair and pure. Winners and champions are decided by performance, and performance alone. In this world, you could fill up the coffers of a team with as much gold as you want, it will not guarantee success. Things like grit and perseverance matter as much as the ability to rest a ball dead on your left kneecap.
So when a team like Atalanta comes along to reclaim some of this land, people like me become their cheerleaders. At odd hours of the night, we write tweets and inconsequential blogposts in their praise. Teams like them give us a tiny ray of hope that football still has a place for purity. That a team of journeymen could take on the best of the world and hold their own. That any group of players, if they can get their act together, can dream of reaching the front tables of European football’s royal gala. These are things that don’t happen very often in the dystopian, neon-lit, 2020 world.
And I haven’t even begun on the thrilling style of football Atalanta play. Maybe I’ll write a paean to their formations and mazy patterns of play some other night, with chirping crickets, a calm sea breeze, and passing showers for company. I hope their story can continue till then.
This Week
Articles:
A trip into the disappearing religion of Zoroastrianism
Been sitting at home during lockdown? There are people who are cycling through hills in repeats to cover the distance of climbing Everest
Indian readers, remember Amar Chitra Katha, that comic we couldn’t stop reading as kids? Well, it perpetuated communal discrimination
Samanth Subramanian writes on the things we need to get in place for producing and distributing a vaccine
Books:
The Dhoni Touch by Bharat Sundaresan: The big man has hung his international gloves, and this book is the closest you’ll get to understanding how and why he operates the way he does.
Fin.