The Viola’s rebirth started from the outskirts of European football.
In the unexpected spring renaissance of Italian football, there is one company that stands out more than others. There Fiorentina which overwhelms the St. Jakob Park in Basel, after a 129-minute long theatrical tragedy, is a moment destined to remain in the almost centennial history of the club. The final that Vincenzo Italiano’s team reached late at night is the first European final for Viola after thirty-three years and it goes hand in hand with that of the Italian Cup which will be played next Wednesday in Rome against Inter.
A milestone, that of the two finals to be played in the same season, which Fiorentina had reached only once in its history: it was the 1960-61 year and the Viola led on the field by Kurt Hamrin first won the Italian Cup and then the Cup Winners’ Cup – the only international trophy in the club’s cabinet. Translated to the present day, the now prehistoric Cup Winners’ Cup can be compared to the Conference League and the path of the Viola, sixty-two years later, seems superimposable. In the Conference this Fiorentina has found its perfect dimension, a further step of growth for a group that has never stopped improving since the advent of Vincenzo Italiano.
From Enschede to Prague
After six years of absence from the European cups, last season’s seventh place was celebrated almost like a title in Florence. The environment and the team immediately looked to the European path as a priority: this was evident from the statements made last summer in Moena, when Italiano, in his second season in viola and making his personal debut in Europe, spoke of the play-off in August against Twente as a final that would change the face of the year.
The double crossing with the Dutch began with a 2-1 draw signed by Arthur Cabral and Nico Gonzalez, in the midst of a mid-August summer storm. But it is in the second act, in Enschede, that the sliding door of the European path arrives. We’re in full stoppage time, the score is 0-0 but the Viola are up to ten due to a silly red card received by Igor. Twente charge with their heads down and a cross from the left rains down in the penalty area. Brenet escapes the marking of Martinez Quarta and gore with a sure blow a few steps from the small area. Terracciano unleashes a Curtois-style save and pinches a ball directed to the corner with the tip of his gloves, deflecting it for a corner. At the end of the game, the club’s social accounts, quoting Dante, they celebrate the save as the gesture that allowed Fiorentina to “going out to see the stars”.
Fiorentina’s run-up to the final in Prague was therefore born from the gloves of a goalkeeper who was only an excellent second for the first part of his career. The magic of the Conference League, on the other hand, is precisely that of enhancing “normality”, and so Terracciano also becomes super on European Thursdays. A statement that until a year ago seemed utopian.
The path in the Conference acts as an anchor for a Fiorentina that in mid-season, at the turn of the national break, risks getting lost between a gray Serie A standings and some thorny market cases: Nico Gonzalez, who in January seems one step away from Leicester , and Sofyan Amrabat, who after the World Cup is already being treated like a Barcelona player. Thursday’s matches, in which Fiorentina face off against qualitatively inferior opponents, serve to acquire confidence, above all for an attack that shoots blanks in the league but soon becomes the best in the competition in the Conference.
In the Thursday evening matches, the Italian experiments; try new solutions. Against Basaksehir, in October, for the first time in his career, he put aside the 4-3-3: he moved back Amrabat and Mandragora in a two-man midfielder and advanced the third midfielder on the frontline to increase central connections and limit the tendency of possession to wander around. A small change that triggers, at least in part, the spring rebirth. In mid-February the change of pace that leads the Viola to ride a series of fourteen consecutive useful results between the league and cups.
Vincenzo Italiano is probably the main architect of the Renaissance viola. Last year he arrived in a Fiorentina team that had been fighting not to relegate for several years and achieved European qualification in the first attempt. This year, however it goes, has raised the bar even further. His coaching career so far has been a continuous crescendo: five years ago he won the Serie D play-offs with Arzignano; the year after those of C with Trapani and, a year later, those of B with Spezia. Three times out of three he won on his first attempt. And also in Europe, at the first attempt he reached another final, showing that in the elimination rounds he obviously has an edge. Numbers in hand, since he has been the Fiorentina coach, he faced twelve rounds of knockouts, managing to pass on eleven occasions; the only elimination dates back to last year’s Coppa Italia semi-final, lost against Juventus.
A rebirth that passes from individuals
Il “boost” in terms of results it is given above all by some gears that start to turn in the right direction: one above all is Dodo, whose value has always remained unknown until the beginning of February, in the play-off against Braga. Since then, in just a few months, the Brazilian ex Shakhtar has turned into a leader. Florence, who was expecting the classic explosive Brazilian winger, found himself a surly defender, who in a few weeks became a hero with his runs and dyed purple hair.
He also lived a similar path Arthur Cabral. And, for him too, redemption came against Braga, with a brace as a substitute that was decisive for directing the match. He then added another on his return, after which he imitated the gesture of the Var, author of a sensational mess shortly before which had in fact caused the cancellation of one of his goals. The Brazilian is the first to change his face in Thursday night matches: this season he scored 7 goals in the Conference – the same ones he scored in the whole championship – which, adding the 5 last season, make him the competition’s all-time leading goalscorer; a sort of minor Cristiano Ronaldo.
Another footballer who must bless the iconic anthem of the Europa League – and therefore of the Conference – is Nico Gonzalez: the Argentine has been living with the label of the most expensive purchase in the history of Fiorentina for the past two years and never before has he seemed to suffer as much as in the first part of the season. He had a very difficult year, with even the stain of a World Cup missed a few days before his debut due to yet another physical problem.
Redemption has come for him too, after so much criticism and so much effort, in one match on Thursday evening, specifically in Poznan, in the quarter-finals against Lech: first with the post from which Cabral’s umpteenth goal arrives and then with a beautiful suspended header to decide the first leg. After the psychodrama touched in the return match, he has replicated in Basel offering yet another response to criticism and also becoming a face of the great comeback of Fiorentina. Ultimately, the Conference was, for Nico, the ideal stage to silence the grumblings of the square about his card and his performances.
Europe as an opportunity
If we go back once again to mid-February, the breaking and breaking point of the season, the same Commisso was in the eye of the storm for the investments made and above all for some sales – Vlahovic in the first place – still painful for the Florentine people. After the draw against Empoli in mid-February, the Images of a heated quarrel outside the Franchi between Joe Barone and a Viola fan seemed to testify to a difficult-to-heal break between the club and the square.
On the other hand, the images of another post-match, decidedly different, are from yesterday, with Commisso and Barone who descend on the St. Jakob field to celebrate together with the 2,000 Viola fans present. In this endless season – which Fiorentina will conclude having played a record 60 games – the journey in the Conference has made all the difference in the world: more than that in the Coppa Italia, the Viola journey which started this summer from Enschede and which will end in Prague on June 7th he restores dignity to a season which, stripped of the Conference, would be one of the many experienced in recent years in the Tuscan capital. Regardless of how the two finals go, especially the one in Prague, 2023 will be a year that Florence will still remember for a long time.
Fiorentina’s vintage is a hymn to a competition that can make you dream of realities normally excluded from the football elite and, in this, even its final act, with the crossing with West Ham, gives even more value to this Conference: two of the teams that were among the favorites at the starting line find themselves at the bottom, having had the strength not to get lost in the most remote corners of the continent, in a perfect triumph of the middle-class.