No defender has had a more special relationship with sliding tackles.
What is the most brazen gesture that comes to mind when you think of a defender?
The first answer could be the advance. The risk assumed by the marker, i.e. the possibility of going empty, of revealing himself vulnerable and uncertain, is directly proportional to the aesthetic and moral result. In short, the advance is still a torture of the attacker, one of those duels invisible to the eyes of the spectator that hide the details of a football match. However, I believe that there is an even more punk, more uncertain and therefore aesthetically beautiful gesture with which a defender could uproot the ball from the feet of a centre-forward.
That’s why I’m writing about Fabio Cannavaro and of his relationship with the slide, the technical gesture that most of all elevated him to one of the best defenders of his time and which allowed him to bridge the physical gap with much more structured and violent colleagues than him. Cannavaro has basically shown that his size only matters up to a certain point, up to the demarcation line of technical and mental talent. For a defender normal, used to managing the attacker by meditating on the least risky choice to make, it would have been impossible to touch the peaks of Cannavaro. First of all for a physical question: Cannavaro is 176 cm tall, and if in contemporary football we might not be surprised by such a figure, it should be remembered that in his era Cannavaro was on average shorter than the least performing centre-forward in the league.
It is also for this reason that his game has always been lucid, but with a courageous lucidity. The most famous speech of Cannavaro’s career is the advance on Podolski in the semi-final of the 2006 World Cup. If you don’t remember it – I really think you do, but for the purposes of the piece it’s only fair to describe it – well, it’s always a good idea to watch it again. Cannavaro with haunted eyes, fixed on the ball. Cannavaro with the religious attention of a shaman, who somehow already knows how Podolski would have behaved. And yet, although it is a historic intervention, sublimated by Fabio Caressa’s commentary, it will have been nothing new for Cannavaro.
Cannavaro risked in every game, we said, and the same argument can be extended to his way of sliding. Obviously Fabio Cannavaro’s slides they had something unique, i.e. of inimitable, such as Robben’s movement to return to the left or Messi’s conducting the ball and chain. They cannot be replicated by other defenders, contemporary or future. They weren’t precise interventions or made at the right time. They contained something gory, splatter: when Cannavaro slipped, his foot resembled the blade with which the protagonist of Kill Bill he slices the arms and heads of his enemies.
Cannavaro slips like a pulp gesture that does not allow for nuances. It’s either her go or break it.
I recently thought about this peculiarity of Cannavaro’s game when Youtube recommended the video below. And if the title is already evocative and kitsch in itself, “Duel of Legends”, they are however 4:53 minutes of pure enjoyment, of violent and at the same time elegant clashes. On the one hand there is the impossible talent of Ronaldo, always standing with his back to the goal and ready to trigger his hyper-powerful accelerations, and on the other Cannavaro who spends half the match lying on the ground, constantly sliding to prevent the other than turning to face the door.
My favorite moment of the video is at 0:08. Italy-Brazil, played on 8 June 1997 for the French Tournament, started a few seconds ago and the Selecao manage possession on the right. At one point Dunga verticalizes for Ronaldo who, just inside the midfield circle, leans his body slightly to the left to control the ball in an oriented way and target Italy’s defence.
Ronaldo motionless wondering what happened. With legs slightly bent he stares at the origin of the movement of air that he felt behind him before losing the ball like a child teased by his father in the backyard. In this case, however, the adult is Fabio Cannavaro, and the teasing is an absolutely free advance. One of those gestures that football school coaches would never, ever accept from a kid.
To arrive first on a harmless ball in midfield, Cannavaro slipped about ten millimeters from Ronaldo’s leg, risking a card after a few seconds or, worse, going empty and leaving the trocar behind him uncovered. This one-on-one has something of Russian roulette in it, exposure to gratuitous and irrepressible danger. Yet it is thanks to such an extreme and spectacular intervention that Ronaldo will spend the rest of the game receiving the ball with his back to goal, fearful of the brutal presence of a defender who doesn’t play like everyone else.
Sometimes it seems that for Cannavaro the slip is something personal, almost a way of expressing yourself on a football field. He uses the tackle beforehand, in steals when he’s at a disadvantage, but also when he has to intercept or dirty a shot towards goal. Indeed, the closer he gets to the heart of the area, the more reckless and acrobatic Cannavaro’s interventions are, because in his defensive aesthetics it is not enough to stop the attacker, but it is important to do it with style.
That remake of Italy-Brazil has gone down in history as the match of double tackle Maldini-Cannavaro about Ronaldo. The manifestation of the psychological power of attackers over defenders, therefore. The Caravaggesque portrait of a desperate intervention, in which the two best goalscorers in the world make use of the most complex gesture to perform to stop a single human being in possession of the ball. Pay attention to the looks of Maldini and Cannavaro, though: their eyes fixed and focused on the ball, as if Ronaldo were just an obstacle to their daily tasks. Italy in the late 1990s was dismissed by critics and fans as ultra-defensive, but how could something different be done with those players?
Cannavaro in particular showed us how much a defender can be a protagonist. In 2006 he won the Ballon d’Or, and even if that award came for the extraordinary month at the World Cup in Germany, we can expand its meaning to his career. Cannavaro started playing in scoring football to man and established himself in that the area. He went through twenty crucial years for the evolution of the game: in his small way he was an innovator. Without Cannavaro would we have ever seen central defenders who continually dare with tackles, like Koulibaly or van Dijk?
A few years ago, the Champions League collected a few interventions by Cannavaro for the column Flashback. In certain closures Cannavaro really resembles an acrobat. My favorite slides are the ones where use the outside of the foot to block the opponent’s shot, as if defending were a mission, a spiritual gift for which Cannavaro would have gladly sacrificed a limb. Sometimes he also deflects the ball with his sole, as in the save on Berbatov in the Bayer Leverkusen-Inter match in 2003.
In the song George by Moroder by Daft Punk – contained in the 2013 album Random Access Memories – there is a phrase that Moroder himself says about creativity: «Once you have freed your mind from the concepts of harmony and music right, you can do whatever you want.” Here you are, it seems to me that Fabio Cannavaro’s defense was based on such an unabashedly libertarian vision. We remember Cannavaro as a symbol of Italy in 2006 and therefore of the very meaning of Nationalbut his style had nothing to do with our football.
As he himself once said, while he was attending the coaching course in Coverciano, Renzo Ulivieri was talking about the way to defend: «You never risk your advance». A rigid indoctrination, to which Cannavaro apparently replied: «Well, misterwithout advance I was a normal defender». To become one of the best defenders of his time, Cannavaro had to put aside the typical reactive teachings of the Italian school, to arrive at defending with the same playful soul with which the attacking wingers try to dribble.
🇮🇹 Legendary defender Fabio Cannavaro back in the day 🔝@fabiocannavaro | #FlashbackFriday | #UCL pic.twitter.com/0kllrzkN4G
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) March 26, 2021
It is inevitable to note that even the most agée Cannavaro, the one who moved to Real Madrid between 2006 and 2009, was an instinctive and spectacular defender. There is an intervention on Benayoun in the match against Liverpool fifteen years ago that we can take as proof (in the video it is at 0:50). Benayoun leads the ball down the right wing, and once he crosses the field he sees Cannavaro come out in pressure. He tries to dribble past him, but the defender manages to touch the ball with his toe, and it slides towards the midfield line.
It’s a trivial contrast, as we see dozens of them during a game. Even if he had recovered the ball, Benayoun would have found his back to goal after losing the meters gained. Was it really essential to go into the slide so roughly? No high-level defender would say yes, except for Fabio Cannavaro, who built himself on his unique way of playing.
Fabio Capello, who coached Cannavaro at Juventus and Real Madrid, described him in a rather suggestive way: «he had so much vitality, especially in recoveries». Here is the other mental characteristic that makes the slide so carefree and technically sublime: for Fabio Cannavaro, stretching his thigh to the maximum on the grass, feeling the touch of the ball with his studs and ousting the attacker from the game was no job. was a fun. Contrary to the tradition of those humble and pale defenders, just waiting to collapse like Boateng against Messi, Cannavaro was the first active defender, who felt he was the protagonist of the game and of the show as much as the strikers he marked. Someone who was bored when his squad wasn’t in the trenches.
It was precisely Fabio Cannavaro’s tendency to be unleashed – that is, without any hesitation in performing crazy stunts even in the heart of the area to block shots or crosses – that made his goalkeeper (who in most cases was Buffon anyway) superfluous. In this sense, Cannavaro was a defender generational not only for the World Cup won as captain, but above all because he embodied the whole epic of football defense: a perennial one-on-one with the attacker to mark, and from which at the end of the match even when he came out defeated, he came out happy. Happy because he always found a reason to slip.