WORLD CUP USA ’94 / THE FINALS : By Sacchi’s Decree : Players, Press and Public Were Slow to Accept Visionary Coach’s Mercurial Style, but He Has Won Their Respect and Now All of Italy Is Along for the Ride
As you focus on the ballet of 22 well-shod Italian feet in the Rose Bowl on Sunday, spare a thought for the man to whose tune they dance.
He is Coach Arrigo Sacchi, and it is easy to find him, for he sports a gleaming pate with a fringe of hair that is white before its time.
Look at the end of the Italian bench closest to midfield. Sacchi wears lime-green sweat pants, a light blue shirt, sunglasses and a chess player’s mask of total concentration. But he is never still.
Italy plays to Sacchi’s visionary beat. Reluctantly sometimes, imperfectly often. But loyally. Always. As Pope of the Italian team playing for an unprecedented fourth Cup title, Arrigo Sacchi is more ayatollah.
Sacchi is 48, a small-town boy from the Romagna region of central Italy who gladly swapped selling shoes for coaching soccer 18 years ago. He climbed quickly, making AC Milan, a billionaire’s toy, the best club on Earth. Then he left because it was not challenge enough.
“I needed new motivations as a coach.” says Sacchi (pronounced Sa- key.)
In countries like Italy and Brazil, where seasons, governments and people come and go but soccer is eternal, the post of national-team coach is a crucible for which there is no real American parallel.
“It is the most difficult profession,” analyst Gianni Rivera says.
It also can become an excruciating burden when the ball bounces wrong. Sacchi knows. Harvesting some of the world’s premier soccer talent and wrapping it around a veteran corps of AC Milan stars, Sacchi was nevertheless slow to bring the results that Italians are weaned to expect.
Sacchi demands a new style of play: total soccer based on midfield pressing, zone defense and quick moves. Run, run, run. He tried out more than 70 players and demanded a convert’s commitment from the team he eventually selected and dictatorially commands.
“My schemes are demanding and players must be in their best condition to accomplish them,” he says. But in the heat of an American summer, even the superbly prepared Italians have been unable to sustain Sacchi’s game for a full 90 minutes. They sag in the second half.
Sacchi sometimes seems to be seeking a perfection that only he understands. He brought 22 players to the Cup and thus far has played 20, an extraordinary feat, considering only three substitutions, including the goalkeeper, are permitted a game.
“The most predictable thing about Sacchi is that he will be unpredictable,” says commentator and former Italian star Giorgio Chinaglia. “He’s always thinking. He’s also very lucky.”
Sacchi hails from the close-to-the-earth town of Fusignano (pop. 8,000) where, La Voce of Milan reports, two cloves of local garlic sit atop every television set during Italy’s games. The garlic is a portafortuna, or talisman, whose origin is lost to history but important to Sacchi and his neighbors.
Noting that Sacchi has changed his lineup every game, the newspaper Tuttosport says he “changes not just for the whim of changing but in accordance with the situation . . . the adversaries and the physical conditions of the players. He seems to have broken through the old strategy of having 11 players and 11 reserves. He has 22 players.”
Says Antonio Matarrese head of the Italian Soccer Federation, “From him you can expect everything and the opposite of everything.”
Sacchi is a classic one-game-at-a-time coach. Focus, focus, focus, he demands.
“When you think you have won is when you lose,” he told reporters during preparation for Wednesday’s semifinal with Bulgaria. “You must keep dedication and concentration. Every team should do what it does best and this can be achieved by controlling the tempo of the game.”
Sacchi brought his newfangled ideas to work with him in 1991. But until late in the tournament, the Sacchi System never quite ignited. Italy limped into the Cup and staggered through the first round, a third place also-ran.
Press and public screamed for his scalp. The charge: unnecessarily complicating a simple game.
“Sacchi is now poised between sainthood and a lynching,” said a smiling Chinaglia as he watched Italy last-gasp past Spain in the quarterfinals.
But Sacchi never blinks. Affably, almost offhandedly, he outflanks blindsiding reporters, artfully turning aside criticism and nasty questions of the sort that sometimes leave his Brazilian counterpart Carlos Alberto Parreira red-faced with anger and frustration.
As the Cup progressed, Sacchi’s Italy labored on. There are prima donnas on the Italian team, and bullies, and workmen earning a day’s wage, and a magician or two. But they are all consummate professionals. With the final at hand, one ’94 Cup lesson is plain: Money on the table, pride on the line, Italy finds a way to win.
It is not always Sacchi’s way, but it has been enough to earn him applause from fans and barbed-tongued sportswriters who demanded his ouster less than two weeks ago.
“The Resurrection of Arrigo,” proclaimed one headline as Italy marched triumphantly toward California.
“Goodby misfortune, catcalls, resentment, Sacchism and anti-Sacchism,” wrote Gianfranco Teotino in Corriere della Serra as Italy assumed an accustomed place in the final four.
Sacchi leaves nothing to chance, thinking, planning, organizing, instructing, demanding. Italy took the field against Spain arrayed more exactly than any Roman cohort, but within a minute of the opening whistle there was Sacchi, repositioning a midfielder with loud calls and broad gestures.
In the second half against Bulgaria when one of his defenders missed a pass, Sacchi came surging a few reflexive paces toward the ball as it neared the sidelines.
“He is a like a puppet master, pulling the invisible strings” of players who have been sometimes too tired to respond, notes Italian observer Vittorio Zuconi.
You look tired, a reporter told Sacchi minutes after the sapping semifinal victory against Bulgaria.
“I’m thinking of the final,” Sacchi replied.
Was this an easier game than some of the others?
“I don’t know. They’re all exhausting.”
Are the players more relaxed now?
“I hope not. I like them tense.”
Sacchi himself emerges at game’s end looking as physically and mentally drained as his players.
“By now they are no longer games but wars,” Sacchi had observed as Italy advanced deeper into must-win competition.
An apt metaphor, for the Italian press, having long ridiculed him as Custer, has now reincarnated Arrigo Sacchi as Patton. But he’s not listening.
“I’m used to settling accounts at the end of competitions,” he says.
His strategist’s eye, far-sweeping like Napoleon’s, fine-sighted like Wellington’s, is focused precisely now, seeing only Pasadenaloo.
