Atalanta's fairytale overwritten by tragedy but momentum continues

Not even Gian Piero Gasperini knew if Bergamo was ready to start watching football again this June. Before the coronavirus outbreak, his Atalanta team had been enjoying the finest season in their 113-year history. A club representing a city of 120,000 people sat fourth in Serie A, outscoring the giants from Milan, Rome and Turin. Competing in the Champions League for the first time ever, Atalanta reached the quarter-finals by smashing Valencia 8-4 over two legs.

Theirs was the latest great footballing fairytale. And then it was overwritten by tragedy. Bergamo became the one of the cities worst hit by the pandemic, with an estimated 6,000 deaths. It is feared that their first leg against Valencia – played in neighbouring Milan, as all of Atalanta’s European home games have been this season, to allow for bigger crowds – contributed to the virus’s rapid spread.

This agonising twist was not lost on the players. Atalanta’s captain, Alejandro ‘Papu’ Gomez, told the Argentinian newspaper Olé: “I think it’s all down to that first game against Valencia”. As images of Italians singing on balconies went global in late March, his wife Linda shared a video of a trip to buy baby formula through abandoned streets. “In Bergamo we do not sing at 6pm,” she wrote. “Here, at the moment, there are only two things: silence and ambulances”.

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Starting up again after such a shared trauma could never be straightforward. As Atalanta prepared to resume with a home game against Sassuolo last month, Ultra groups hung banners of protest outside. During an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, Gasperini was asked whether the people of Bergamo were yet in a place to be able to enjoy football again.

“We’ve asked ourselves that question many times over,” he replied. “Some people consider it amoral to restart. [But] I saw people singing on the balconies of Italy while Bergamo was filling up trucks with its coffins. I did not consider that ‘amoral’. I considered it an instinctive reaction, an attempt to hold on to life, to react. Atalanta can help Bergamo to start over, in respect for the pain and for grief.”

The one thing he was sure of, was his players. Gasperini had seen them return to training with the same furious commitment as before. The only challenge, he believed, would be to get everyone’s core muscles back into peak condition to avoid injury. “Playing football is just like riding a bike,” he insisted. “You don’t forget how to do it.”

Those words were vindicated as Atalanta resumed with a 4-1 rout of Sassuolo. They followed up by recovering from 2-0 down to beat title-chasing Lazio 3-2. Udinese were defeated by the same scoreline. Three games, three wins, 10 goals. It was as though they had never been away.

Thursday’s game against Napoli represented their most important challenge yet. Here was a team that aspired to dislodge them from the top four, one that lifted the Coppa Italia before Serie A even restarted this June – defeating Juventus in the final. Napoli were themselves unbeaten in four games since the coronavirus interruption and, with a Europa League spot now guaranteed, could treat this as a free hit: a chance to push for an upgrade to the Champions League instead.

They arrived with a plan to suffocate Atalanta, congesting the middle of the pitch and denying Gomez those spaces that he is so adept at finding behind the attack. For 45 minutes, it almost seemed to be working. Atalanta, who lead Serie A with an average of 19.4 shots per game, managed just five before half-time – and only one of those on target.

Gomez, notionally starting on the right of a front three, had been driven back so far that he was operating more like a deep-lying midfield playmaker. Then again, the flexibility of this Atalanta team, and especially the captain, is precisely the point. He, more than anyone, has freedom to go where he needs to be. The game within a game here might simply have been to stay away from Diego Demme, whose shielding presence in front of Napoli’s back four has been crucial to their recent successes.

One way or another, Gomez found himself back out on the right flank two minutes into the second half. Accepting a pass from the wing-back, Timothy Castagne, he looked up once before delivering a precision cross to Marko Pasalic, who headed it home from six yards. It was Gomez’s 15th assist of the season – a Serie A record, according to the stats service Opta, since they started tracking such numbers in 2004, though Lazio’s Luis Alberto is only one behind.

The killer blow followed soon after. Rafael Tolói exchanged passes with Castagne down the right before serving Robin Gosens to score on the far side. That was his ninth league goal of this season – an outrageous return for a wing-back who holds both German and Dutch passports but is yet to receive a call-up to play for either national team.

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It is so easy to get lost in the numbers with this Atalanta. They have scored 40 times in their last 11 competitive games, either side of the coronavirus interruption. Most crucially, they have given themselves a 15-point buffer over Napoli, and 12 over fifth-placed Roma, who lost to Udinese on Thursday night. A return to the Champions League next season already feels assured.

Yet what was impressive was the maturity of the performance, that they remained unfazed even against opponents who denied them the chance to play their usual helter-skelter game. Napoli had more of the ball, and more shots on goal, yet rarely threatened to score.

Where Gennaro Gattuso lamented his players’ inattention, accusing them of giving the goals away, Gasperini’s only regret was over another lost opportunity to share the joy. “Imagine what nights like this could have been like,” he said “with our people here with us in this stadium.”

Roma 0-2 Udinese, Atalanta 2-0 Napoli, Fiorentina 1-3 Sassuolo, Lecce 1-2 Sampdoria, SPAL 2-2 AC Milan, Verona 3-2 Parm, Bologna 1-1 Cagliari,Inter 6-0 Brescia, Genoa 1-3 Juventus, Torino1-2 Lazio