[RIP] Enzo Bearzot (1927-2010)

[Ucup Carrick]

Milan - Italia berduka hari ini. Pelatih yang mengantarkan Gli Azzurri menjuarai Piala Dunia 1982, Enzo Bearzot, wafat dalam usia 83 tahun.

Enzo Bearzot lahir pada 26 September 1927 di Aiello del Friulli. Ia wafat di Milan 21 Desember 2010 pagi hari di Milan. Selama karirnya sebagai pelatih timnas Italia dari 1975 hingga 1986, prestasi terbesarnya adalah menjuarai Piala Dunia 1982.

Dikabarkan Football Italia, Bearzot telah bertarung dengan penyakit untuk beberapa waktu belakangan. Namun, kondisinya semakin memburuk akhir-akhir ini.

Selama karirnya sebagai pemain, Bearzot dikenal sebagai seorang pemain tengah yang andal. Tapi, dia juga dikenal dengan permainan catenaccio selama masanya sebagai pelatih Italia. Hingga akhirnya sempat muncul istilah Catenaccio Bearzot.

Kemenangan Italia di Piala Dunia 1982 dikenal sebagai momen paling membanggakan di dalam sejarah 'Negara Spaghetti' itu. Yang paling diingat dari kejayaan di Piala Dunia itu adalah kemenangan atas Brasil dan Jerman Barat.

Selamat jalan, Bearzot.
( roz / a2s )

[ferly_Liemz]

RIP For Enzo Bearzot....

Publik Italy dan dunia pada umumnya telah kehilangan salah satu org terbaiknya dlm dunia sepakbola...

[Ucup Carrick]

December 21, 2010, 9:53 pm
Bearzot’s Defiant World Cup Triumph Changed Soccer in Italy
By JEFFREY MARCUS

The Italy team that won the 1982 World Cup in Spain outpaces the 2006 championship squad in celebrity, even 28 years removed from the Azzurri’s triumph. The ‘82 team defied both convention and expectation under Coach Enzo Bearzot, who galvanized a group of players beleaguered by scandal and criticism, including the excitable striker Paolo Rossi and the Bunyanesque goalkeeper Dino Zoff.

Under Bearzot’s stewardship, the team defeated Argentina, Brazil and West Germany on its way to a dramatic triumph in Madrid. On Tuesday, that group of players and the soccer-mad if cynical Italy fan base mourned the passing of Bearzot, who died in Milan at age 83.

“He leaves an amazing legacy which peaked one very hot summer, built bit by bit on the strength of the group,” Gaetano De Stefano writes in Gazzetta dello Sport, the Italian daily. “A group of players whose names have become legendary: Zoff, Collovati, Scirea, Cabrini, Gentile, Bergomi, Oriali, Conti, Tardelli, Graziani, Rossi, Altobelli, Antognoni. Imagine how many times he must have said those names. He was like a father to them.”

Indeed, Bearzot protected his players from criticism and instituted a style of play at the national team level that allowed them to express themselves in ways they were not allowed when playing for their club teams. He got the most from his players when it mattered most.

“It was a group that has never melted, even when someone was moved away from the game (like Paolo Rossi) or taken away prematurely by death (as Gaetano Scirea). A group that had maintained contact with the man who shaped it and who will continue to consider him alive,” the obituary in Corriere dello Sport says. “There was very special bond that tied the Azzurri to Enzo Bearzot, thankful because before taking them to the most important goal of their career, he was able to protect them from fierce criticism.”

At the time of the ‘82 World Cup, Rossi was coming off a two-year ban for his role in a match fixing scandal, but his ultimate accomplishment and the team’s success didn’t seem to carry the same stain as the calciopoli scandal that clung to the 2006 team. That was due in large part to Bearzot’s character. His team showed how emotion and will can impact the course of the game when skill and strategy come up just short. It’s a point made poignantly in this elegant profile (in Italian) produced by RAI, the state TV channel in Italy, which shows the enthusiasm Italians had for the ‘82 champions and their mentor.

“Italian football has lost someone responsible for one of the greatest and most emotional moments in its history,” Cesar Prandelli, Italy’s current national team coach, told the Italian soccer federation’s Web site. “Above all though we have lost a football maestro, who by the way he used his philosophies to shape his team, is someone that all Italian coaches will look to emulate.”

Bearzot accomplished this in the face of persistent media criticism, something all coaches in Italy can relate to.

“The miracle in Spain in 1982 took place, despite fierce criticism by journalists (who led him to introduce the novelty of the press blackout),” according to the Italian magazine, Oggi, which added in a blog post: “he managed to lead the national team to the top of the world thanks to moral preparation, based on the strength of group, as well as technical.”

What so angered the Italian press at the time was Bearzot’s insistence that the Italy team play an entirely different style from the defensive, conservative version of soccer practiced by most of the country’s professional teams.

“Enzo Bearzot transformed Italian football from a deadly labyrinth of ultra-defensive tedium into a modern compendium of lightning skills and progressive strategy which restored World Cup-winning glory to his country,” writes Jeff Powell, sports columnist for the Daily Mail in London, who covered Bearzot during the ‘82 World Cup.

“The morning after they scraped into the knockout stages, I had breakfast with Bearzot,” Powell recalls. “When we came out of the hotel the Italian press corps formed a corridor and spat at the feet of their national team manager.”

But Bearzot was deaf to criticism. An average defensive midfielder for Inter Milan, Torino and Catania from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, he had a tactician’s acumen and an aficionado’s affection for the creative aspects of the game.

“For me, football should be played with two wingers, a centerforward and a playmaker. That’s the way I see the game. I select my players and then I let them play the game, without trying to impose tactical plans on them. You can’t tell Maradona, ‘Play the way I tell you.’ You have to leave him free to express himself. The rest will take care of itself,” Bearzot had said.

He had only one cap for the national team and came up through the coaching ranks at the youth levels, where he developed bonds with some of Italy’s top players, which enabled him to win their confidence and get the most from them on the field.

“Enzo Bearzot was one of Italy’s greatest figures in the 20th century,” Rossi told the Italian news agency ANSA. “He was like a father to me and without him I would never have achieved what I did.”

Bearzot led the national team for 11 years, an unheard of tenure in today’s peripatetic atmosphere. He holds the record for the most games in charge of the national team, 104, and he won 51 of them.

[finza_13]

RIP Bearzot

pahlawan Italy 1982 nih

[marsel david]

Turut berduka cita..

pernah denger nama Enzo Bearzot
tapi kurang ngerti sepak terjangnya...

[VaDLi]

walaupun ga begitu kenal, diriku mengucapkan turut berduka cita
R.I.P