Matches like that of Napoli-Milan won by the latter with the resounding score of 4-0 are very interesting in revealing how the power of the collective mind can foster unexpected results.
Someone, paraphrasing a famous phrase might say, “This is sport, beauty.”
The lesson here is that even the strongest team can lose a game by conceding four goals if … if they do not play as the strongest team. This is the lesson that Spalletti and the team should take home after this match. Absolute level soccer, puts us in front of these psychological experiments that no research could build in a laboratory. What if these conditions arise: the strongest team is now certain to have won the championship, its equally elite opponent wants at all costs to achieve a prestigious result, whatever the result this will not affect the likelihood of winning the Scudetto. Hypothesized outcome: it is likely that the stronger team will enter the field certain that the gap inflicted on their opponents will be enough to make them play with the idea that a draw will be a great result and that we will win because we have been the strongest so far.
This is what did not happen because the supposed victim, on the other hand, had prepared as well as possible to deliver an optimal performance and entered the field with this kind of winning mentality. What happened teaches us how difficult it is to change the mindset during the match and tells us, in a nutshell, that becoming as proactive and aggressive as you started by entering a different program is not exactly obvious, in fact it is very difficult and with ease we move from disbelief to surrender.
Competitions are brutal events and if you do not show up ready, what you want will not happen. This reminds me of a thought Gianni Mura had about Platini, when he said that when he retired he still wanted to play but not to suffer. This happens, sometimes, to strong teams.
