Admit guys webmaster is right about

[Keshwardoost]

This about injuries and timing made me remember this part of a great article. I posted it few years ago.



Chiellini thrived on these direct confrontations, and he was good at them. He had never seen himself as particularly talented - "the football god didn't kiss me" - but now he understood that there were different kinds of talent.

He had incredible endurance, a high pain threshold and an ability to convert his fears into energy. It helped him make himself a bulwark, a roadblock, a barrier.

The opponent who was going to the goal had to get past him, and not very many succeeded. Giorgio Chiellini sacrificed his own body to prevent it. He took the cracked eyebrows, knocked out teeth and broken noses without blinking.

He even put pride in the scars and fractures, in his willingness to sacrifice himself for a greater cause.

•••

Football and defense is a take-no-prisoners battle. If they win, I'm dead. If I win, they die. Sports is an arena where death is small and symbolic, but when you lose, it really is like dying a little. If you then win, you rise like Lazarus. There are no intermediate positions. It's heartbreaking, but it's also life-giving. It is brutal and beautiful.

•••

It was, of course, Fabio Cannavaro who made Giorgio Chiellini examine himself, to change his way of prioritizing and functioning.

By the time the two started playing together, Chiellini had already broken his nose four times. Cannavaro shook his Neapolitan head, asked if bravery medals or football trophies were the goal.

- Even today, I should give Cannavaro part of my salary for everything he taught me. He said to me: "It's your own fault that you break your nose all the time". He was right. It is not the right attitude to constantly look for situations where you can dive in head first - on the contrary, it is the wrong approach to defensive play

---

[Keshwardoost]

Full article translated to English

ague


European Football Championship 2021
Document: Chiellini - the complete defender?

Erik Niva
Published 2021-07-10


Foto: Claudio Villa / Getty Images Europe

The smiling giant, the soft tough, the thinking fighter.

The complete defender?

After 20 years at football's premier defensive university, Giorgio Chiellini is now ready to graduate.


A few years ago, José Mourinho said that the Italian national team's centre-back pairing should teach defense at Harvard, and although he is a little too unassuming to buy into the whole idea, Giorgio Chiellini liked the very premise.

He also sees defensive play as a craft, a specialty, a subject of study – something that should be passed down from master to apprentice, from generation to generation.

For him , Fabio Cannavaro was the mentor, the consummate professional. They had a couple of seasons together in Juventus and a few years together in the national team.

Chiellini marveled at how Cannavaro could win all the duels despite being only 175 centimeters tall. He was amazed at the ability to direct the defense, to bind the team together, to see the games as a long series of details and a big whole at the same time.

He himself had made it some way on his defense journey, but now realized how far he still had to go. Fabio Cannavaro was the conclusion. He was the captain who led his national team all the way to World Cup gold, the only defender to win the Ballon d'Or in the last 25 years.


- In the defenders' encyclopedia, only he can write the first chapter.

Mom was a shot putter, dad was a doctor
So Giorgio Chiellini saw and learned, absorbed everything Fabio Cannavaro did. He studied out on the pitch, he studied in the dressing room and he studied in the hotel.

This thing about playing centre-back was not something that was improvised based on the mood of the moment out there on the pitch. It was something he took very seriously, for which he prepared as seriously as ever.

•••

We live to live, to build and create - but also to protect, to maintain and preserve. We live to defend, and defending is an art: My art. Defend values, a legacy, big and small achievements. Defend a border. Defend the people we love, their health and well-being. Defending is work, a consistent choice. To defend the life we have imagined, designed and built together.

•••

In her spare time, Giorgio Chiellini's mother was a shot putter, during working hours his father worked as a doctor. There is something in that combination that sums himself up quite effectively.

Half strength athlete, half bookworm.

He was not born to be a defender, but was an inside midfielder well into his teens. Then he became a winger, then he was moved down to fullback and finally he was moved into central defence.

When he says it changed his life, he is not being ironic. When he claims that it made him see the whole of existence in a new way, he himself does not think that he is exaggerating.

- When I became centre-back, everything turned upside down. It sparked a will to defend my territory, an almost animal instinct to guard my den.
image.png

Photo: Valerio Pennicino / Getty Images Europe
From the start, it was that instinct that guided Giorgio Chiellini's new life as a defender. It was physical, emotional, bordering on primitive. He was at his best when he targeted a specific opponent, turning the football match into a one-on-one duel where anything was allowed.

- My enemy was born to cause me pain, he was designed for that. And I was created to prevent that. You have to make the weight of your body felt by your opponent, to weigh against him. The contact, the friction, the body mass. The elbows, the pushes, the kicks. The looks, the grimaces and the words.


Chiellini thrived on these direct confrontations, and he was good at them. He had never seen himself as particularly talented - "the football god didn't kiss me" - but now he understood that there were different kinds of talent.

He had incredible endurance, a high pain threshold and an ability to convert his fears into energy. It helped him make himself a bulwark, a roadblock, a barrier.

The opponent who was going to the goal had to get past him, and not very many succeeded. Giorgio Chiellini sacrificed his own body to prevent it. He took the cracked eyebrows, knocked out teeth and broken noses without blinking.

He even put pride in the scars and fractures, in his willingness to sacrifice himself for a greater cause.

•••

Football and defense is a take-no-prisoners battle. If they win, I'm dead. If I win, they die. Sports is an arena where death is small and symbolic, but when you lose, it really is like dying a little. If you then win, you rise like Lazarus. There are no intermediate positions. It's heartbreaking, but it's also life-giving. It is brutal and beautiful.

•••

It was, of course, Fabio Cannavaro who made Giorgio Chiellini examine himself, to change his way of prioritizing and functioning.

By the time the two started playing together, Chiellini had already broken his nose four times. Cannavaro shook his Neapolitan head, asked if bravery medals or football trophies were the goal.

- Even today, I should give Cannavaro part of my salary for everything he taught me. He said to me: "It's your own fault that you break your nose all the time". He was right. It's not the right attitude to constantly look for situations where you can jump in head first - on the contrary, it's the wrong approach to defensive play.

Mathematics was my first love
Although he was endowed with the heart of a lion, perhaps Giorgio Chiellini's most important quality was the humble ability to listen and learn.

He has never had the omniscient arrogance of the super talent, instead understanding that he can learn things from those who have gone before. In addition, he has an aptitude for understanding connections and contexts, for distinguishing cause from effect.


In school, mathematics was actually his first love. The methods of creating order out of chaos gave him a satisfying calm, yet he was early resigned to his own limitations.

The central riddles of mathematics were beyond his reach. He needed too much help and guidance to see the patterns of arithmetic, but he still wanted to continue to challenge and develop his intellect.

It had to be economics. And defensive play.

Chiellini tackled both fields of study with roughly the same enthusiasm and roughly the same approach. The physical training sessions in the mornings were replaced by the intellectual ones. In the afternoons he opened the books for the sake of numbers, in the evenings he opened the computer for football.

Simply put, he started using the inside of his head rather than the outside, and he still does. Nowadays, he sees his understanding of the game as his absolute greatest strength, but it is also not something that comes automatically and for free.

It requires work.
image.png

Foto: Christof Stache - Pool / Getty Images Europe
When the game approaches, Giorgio Chiellini always shuts himself in his home office when the rest of the family go to bed. There he then sits for the last three quarters and studies video clips of the opposing team collectively and their center forward specifically.

How do they move? What fits are they looking for? Which automations are they based on?

- Before, I always looked for body contact - but your gaze also gives a kind of contact. The look at the ball, the look at the opponent, the vigilance to open up a surface that gives you the opportunity to move 360 degrees. As a defender, your body position, your body angle is crucial.

Every match and every situation is unique - but to some extent everything is a repetition of what happened before. Giorgio Chiellini believes that the really great defender borders on being psychic, a sort of football medium.

- Prevention is better than cure. It doesn't really happen anymore that a situation arises where I don't know where I need to place myself. And I don't think - I know.


•••

When we concede a goal, I feel almost abused, victim of both physical and mental pain. It's like lying in bed with an elephant on your stomach.

•••

When he's not studying opponents, Giorgio Chiellini is scrutinizing himself, both thoroughly and ruthlessly.

It's not a chore he enjoys, but it's also a job that has to be done. If he's forced to pinpoint his drive, it's not actually winning – it's avoiding conceding goals, avoiding losing, avoiding that all-consuming feeling.

Every mistake he makes eats him up from the inside. Each defeat literally sends him into a shorter life crisis.

- I feel the losses much stronger than the wins. The admitted goals are like an obsession, like a disease that needs to be cured. And the losses bring with them an inner rage, a storm that destroys everything.

"My conscience is very critical"
Ahead of a Champions League match against Borussia Dortmund in the spring of 2015, a material manager at Juventus had changed the soles of Chiellini's shoes without notifying him. The consequence was that he slipped, giving Marco Reus free access to a goal. In any case, this is how his own assessment looks like, that the millimeter changes inside his shoes affected his balance.

Juventus won the match 2-1 – the doubleheader 5-1 – but the mistake still annoys Chiellini today. The anger for that he turns inward. The fault was not the materialist's, it was his own for not checking his equipment properly.

- My conscience is very critical, I would say merciless. I never think: "The teammate next to me, in front of me, behind me would have done this or that". If anything, I think: “What could I have done? What should I have done?”.

Otherwise, the gross and clear mistakes do not occupy a particularly large part of the self-analysis. Partly because they are not committed very often, and partly because they evaluate themselves. Instead, Giorgio Chiellini talks about "the half mistake", that which may not even be visible to the audience, but which makes all the difference.

- 90 percent of all goals are due to a defender taking up the wrong position or making the wrong decision. Sometimes they are because someone has moved instead of understanding that he should stand still. Sometimes because someone gave up when he realized he wouldn't reach the ball, rather than still trying to close down the angles for the shooter and make it easier for the goalkeeper.


•••

We are creations of dreams, hopes and fears. We need to imagine what we want and how to keep what we have. We are created to preserve as much as we are shaped to push forward. Protecting and nurturing is also the future.

•••

The last time Italy crashed out of a European Championship, Giorgio Chiellini returned to his hometown of Livorno shrouded in a fog. In silence, he walked back and forth with his little daughter in a pram.

- I was almost like a stranger to myself, didn't understand where I was and what I was doing there.

Channeling disappointment constructively has been the great challenge in the latter stage of Giorgio Chiellini's career, mastering the fear of error and loss in a way that leads forward.
image.png

Foto: Claudio Villa / Getty Images Europe
His most painful defeat is still fresh, even though almost four years have passed.

- The failure in the WC playoff against Sweden will never end. It was our own fault, and it will remain unforgivable, impossible to erase.

Unless Italy was unlucky over two games? Maybe so, but Giorgio Chiellini basically doesn't believe in that sort of thing. He sees bad luck as "a loser's alibi."

- You have real bad luck once or twice in your life - no more.

Today, Giorgio Chiellini no longer sees the fight against the opponent as the decisive duel, but today his entire career is based on the war against himself.

Soon to be 37 years old, he must first and foremost make sure he gets out on the field in the condition he demands of himself. The day the body or head can't take it anymore, it's over.

Basically, he sees himself as a rather problematic person, but in recent years he has made an active choice to choose optimism. Today, he makes sure to always start the day with a smile, and it's not just a saying. It's real, and it's mandatory.

"The most important thing is empathy"
On August 24, 2019, he tore his cruciate ligament in the league opener against Parma. He was 35 years old, knew immediately that he would miss most of the season. But give up, quit? Never an option.


It was six in the afternoon when the cruciate ligament broke. Before seven o'clock Giorgio Chiellini was already laughing again, joking with both the doctor and all those who contacted and apologized.

When the national team captain Roberto Mancini called, he almost wondered if his cheerfully chirping defense general had ingested some type of nitrous oxide.

- Mister, now I'm resting a bit. Then I will be fresh as a rose for the EC.

The EC would indeed be postponed for a year, but that did not make Giorgio Chiellini's prognosis and self-diagnosis any less correct. In the summer of 2021, he has now taken his national team almost as far as Fabio Cannavaro did, all the way to a championship final.

He does it based on newly acquired beliefs about the possibility of energizing a team simply by smiling, laughing, enjoying himself and infecting himself with his charisma.

Sometime a year it happens that Chiellini, Bonucci or one of Juventus' other senators act as ambassadors at a type of exclusive networking meeting with the club's major sponsors. The questions tend to be roughly the same every time: Can business learn something from top football? What really separates winners from losers?

- The most important thing is empathy. How do you create it? How do you maintain it? If there is empathy between coach and players and between players, you will play better, win more often.

Once upon a time, Giorgio Chiellini believed that defensive play was based on body contact. Actually, he still does, just in a different way than before. In the past he focused on the melee with the opponent, today he actively seeks physical proximity with his teammates.

A hug here, a high five there, a chest bump when the ball is covered to the corner.

- This sort of thing breaks down walls, makes people open up. It's an effective way to build empathy out there on the pitch.
image.png

Foto: Claudio Villa / Getty Images Europe
As Giorgio Chiellini himself likes to say: strikers sell tickets, defenders win matches. He often and willingly campaigns for the need to give slopes more attention and greater appreciation – if nothing else because he wants so badly to see the legacy live on.


In an era of Guardiola football and VAR assessments, he sees the traditional Italian defender as endangered. He likes to express himself both bigoted and bloated about the small spiritual dimensions of the defensive - the italicized quotes in this text are taken from his autobiography - but of course he still understands what rules of the game apply in this fight.

If the defensive game is to have a renaissance, the defensive game must clearly lead to victories. Preferably on as often as possible in as big matches as possible. Preferably in, say, a European Championship final at Wembley.

Giorgio Chiellini would love to decide such a match. Not by scoring, no, in that case he would mostly just see it as a coincidence. In that case, much better through a decisive sliding tackle or a dramatically blocked shot.

Or most preferably – by the fact that nothing special at all happens inside the Italian penalty area. That's when he and his comrades really did their job, practiced their craft, created something that is invisible and spectacular at the same time.

- For me, defense is an art form, a way of being, a way of understanding my existence. Scoring is fun, but it's not my life. Preventing goals - that's my life, my reason for living


https://www.aftonbladet.se/sportblad...rsvarsspelaren

[webmaster]

This is serious guys
afc will continue to do this

<------------- As long as we have these people we don't need enemies (my avatar)

[webmaster]

1.before even qf begins he said ac it is set up
2.before all talks of bribes come out he said it about the players
3.sepahan getting Robbed by refs in acl

There is nothing wrong about being wrong.
Look at peiman92 all his predictions are wrong.
what is wrong is not admiting you are wrong.
Just say u are right webmaster and move on .

Iranians are more ready for a sudden death than ever saying they were ever wrong :-)

[webmaster]

That is exactly the problem.
they dont give it because is not important, then once they feel the danger they give the red to kill the match......

People forget that all these refs have headphones and take exact orders from someone we don't see. The VAR or whoever. Please grow the F up. You think they are gonna let a nobody screw up their party?? Come on! they spend the money to take the girl home.In the Asian cup it was so funny they even took the top scorer award from the nobody Iraqi. Just imagine that guy was you... lol

I decided that I am gonna bet and win from now on instead because I know the drill now. If you are smart, you will use the system to beat itself. Up to you. I will let you guys know at least my tears will turn into silver or gold this way so I can suffer less. :-)

[oracle]

People forget that all these refs have headphones and take exact orders from someone we don't see. The VAR or whoever. Please grow the F up. You think they are gonna let a nobody screw up their party?? Come on! they spend the money to take the girl home.In the Asian cup it was so funny they even took the top scorer award from the nobody Iraqi. Just imagine that guy was you... lol

I decided that I am gonna bet and win from now on instead because I know the drill now. If you are smart, you will use the system to beat itself. Up to you. I will let you guys know at least my tears will turn into silver or gold this way so I can suffer less. :-)

Qatar couldn't buy the results in wc(remember 3 days before Ecuador match report was Qatar tried to buy 3 Ecuador players🤣🤣 news disappeared right away) instead was awarded ac2023 trophy.

FACT QATAR BRIBED HIGH FIFA OFFICIALS to host wc.

Qatar attempted to buy ecudor players=but failed

Why is hard to believe they paid for ac trophy...

[webmaster]

Why is hard to believe they paid for ac trophy...

There is a big difference between a boy and a man. That's all.

[sedee91]

This is serious guys
afc will continue to do this

- The chances that our federation and players got bribed are higher than Qatar rigging the Asian Cup.
- GN got fired in 2007 but he maintained his role after this Cup is ridiculous.
- The players also sang the national anthem in all the games, except for Saman Ghoddos.

Quite a big change of heart from the World Cup, I would say. Only Ferdosipour and Football360 can help uncover more details because they no longer work for IRIB and have a private show. Even Shoja didn't seem too "Shoja" when he knew they were real reporters. I would say we wait and see because more details will eventually come out.

[Pluto2000]

- The chances that our federation and players got bribed are higher than Qatar rigging the Asian Cup.
- GN got fired in 2007 but he maintained his role after this Cup is ridiculous.
- The players also sang the national anthem in all the games, except for Saman Ghoddos.

Quite a big change of heart from the World Cup, I would say. Only Ferdosipour and Football360 can help uncover more details because they no longer work for IRIB and have a private show. Even Shoja didn't seem too "Shoja" when he knew they were real reporters. I would say we wait and see because more details will eventually come out.

Take a look at CQ thread. The reason why the boys sang anthem this time (and against Wales and US in WC) is because after the England match they were threatened by Basij and IR agents who go to every TM camp to watch them and make sure they don't do anything out of pocket. See for example Ghoddos' interview from a few weeks ago where he was asked why someone was watching him during the interview and he replied "Because they wanna make sure I don't say anything wrong" or something along those lines

[sedee91]

Take a look at CQ thread. The reason why the boys sang anthem this time (and against Wales and US in WC) is because after the England match they were threatened by Basij and IR agents who go to every TM camp to watch them and make sure they don't do anything out of pocket. See for example Ghoddos' interview from a few weeks ago where he was asked why someone was watching him during the interview and he replied "Because they wanna make sure I don't say anything wrong" or something along those lines

Easy fix. Don't play for the national team. As much as I would love to see our boys play, they are better off not being bullied by saying Goodbye and retiring gracefully or going on hiatus until a better fix/alternative comes along. If we accept this "normal" behavior, it will only get worse.

[persiangodfather]

Why dont you ask me how i was so sure we wouldn't win

[Pluto2000]

Why dont you ask me how i was so sure we wouldn't win

The moment we beat Japan, we weren't the underdogs anymore

[webmaster]

^ lol that was also planned :-) your tomorrow's lunch is planned too. he he

[Pluto2000]

Easy fix. Don't play for the national team. As much as I would love to see our boys play, they are better off not being bullied by saying Goodbye and retiring gracefully or going on hiatus until a better fix/alternative comes along. If we accept this "normal" behavior, it will only get worse.

Its difficult situation because its become "normalized" years ago already. They were sending basijis and agents all the way in 1998 world cup with the team. Only solution is for jomhouri es-hali to get flushed down the toilet to save us from this laughing stock we have become

[oracle]

Easy fix. Don't play for the national team. As much as I would love to see our boys play, they are better off not being bullied by saying Goodbye and retiring gracefully or going on hiatus until a better fix/alternative comes along. If we accept this "normal" behavior, it will only get worse.

If all current players retire
another 25 will be called u
And if they refuse to come
Another 25 will come