Bivio Volante, real football played on provincial pitches
Football, the true one, it is not so much played on millionaire fields, lined with green dollars, as on provincial pitches, with tufts of lush and proud grass, also green, but with a green that changes with the sun and the heat, like shamrocks, like certain sweaty sweaters, fields that seem to have always been there, like the one that Pianello Val Tidone every day he takes care of Mr. Renato, a lively fan of the village, who receives his salary by inciting his idol, bomber Benzi, from the stands every Sunday.
And so, between a greedy prosecutor, a wrong and suspicious draw or a draw in Ireland of fickle champions with large portfolios, it happens to discover stories of friendship and sportsmanship, such as that of the Bivio Volante, free-range team and more fighting than ever, founded in 1977 just like that Paris Saint Germain who now gathers fine businessmen more or less retirement age or young alleged talents with a lot of arrogance and some problems with history books.
In Bivio it works the other way around: you pay no one, not even one euro. Those who play there do it for the pleasure of running on the field surrounded by friends. Forty-four years, all in the third category, among the hills that start from the Po and reach the Apennines, degrading between valleys and scales of gray and green, shades that are now off and now on, depending on the season, and sometimes white, like snow which covers them in the winter months.
Horizontal stripes, which chase each other like waves of rounded peaks and valleys, always and only green, still green, like these boys’ shirts. About thirty friends who train twice a week, after work, on the pitch lost in the Wordsworthian mists, to Campremoldo, where there are perhaps sixteen cases and two taverns, a church, whose parish priest manages the keys to the field and the passion for that 5-gauge sphere.
Nowadays almost everyone, who officially and who not, pay the players, in any category. Almost all of them, except for rare white or white-green flies. Who takes the fifty euros of the increasingly expensive gasoline, who a few thousand coins from one euro of reimbursements, because how Messi he decided to end his career in a comfort zone where everyone looks at you as a half legend, albeit a local one. A bit like the country bully who no longer hits anyone, but spends his evenings at the bar recounting his old fights, between a beer and a slightly crooked cigarette.
There is in fact a curious parallel between PSG and Bivio Volante, an oxymoron, a bipolarity made up of antipodes. On the one hand, a rich sheikh, who craves glory through the large ears of a cup that seems to have a soul and that certain locker rooms do not love them, and for this purpose justifies the means in a Machiavellian financial effort, practiced by a Leonardo who it does not come from Vinci and that in the end it does not even win. On the other hand, a president, Graziano Bobba, who works as a tributary, does the accounts, and puts all his commitment and passion into a team of good guys, as if they were thirty children, not just the one who usually wears the shirt number 8.
There is a coach, Simone Schiavi, who has a body shop and who has always played football. He has been at the crossroads for three years, with the spirit and desire to keep alive a small reality that is now a small family for all of them. Simone is one who holds the group together, who loves more than anything to spend time with the boys, dinners all together, the matches on Friday and the tension on Sunday.
Graziano who does all he can to make sure nothing is missing, Simone who acts as the fulcrum, as a point of balance between those who have had, over time, a role and a history, just as happens on the pitch.
There is also a boy of Senegalese origin, Mohamed Dabo. For the president it is like a second child. He almost always enters the second half, runs along the right wing. He runs very fast, looks like Jacobs. When he starts, the grandstand lights up, because seeing him run is impressive. Moh, as everyone calls him, is a boy who is always smiling, like Rafa Leao, a little shy, full of friends, because just looking at him makes you sympathetic. Perhaps he lacks a bit of malice, of competitive grit, but he will do it. He is only twenty-two and has a lot of ideas in his head.
(The story follows …)