Reasons to Fall in Love with Cobolli, the B-side of the Italian Job of Tennis

The whole world is a village, to say that children are pieces of the heart for anyone and at any latitude. Wherever you come from. From Val Pusteria or southern Rome. And whatever runs through your veins, Teutonic or Latin blood. Whether your name is Siglinde Sinner or Stefano Cobolli, whether you prepare pork shanks or teach tennis, in the end, you are incapable of holding back your emotions, you lose all modesty, you let yourself go. The way, yes, is absolutely personal. Siglinde, with that name of a rock mother of a Germanic tribe, vents by going back and forth, in and out of the stands, like those mothers who cannot see their children coming downhill on skis, or going three hundred on a motorbike. At the Foro Italico, they saw her in this state while her son lost a set to the American Paul. Stefano, on the other hand, remains firm in his seat, but opens the taps, like a dam, and a river of tears comes down. Yesterday, sitting in the corner of court number 2 reserved for the Italian tennis player (a crowd of people, family, staff, his best friend Edo Bove, the only thing missing was a second cousin), he was touching as he hid his face in the embrace of Guglielmo, his youngest son, and looking at him brought to mind that song in which Concato recalls the moments when he spoke to animals and was moved by a film.

Now, one would like to escape from this constant comparison with Sinner, his habits, his extraordinary regularity (which lately, in truth, has jammed a couple of times), the enormous wealth of his staff (and here too, for some time now the choices have not always been happy), but telling their diversity is a way to broaden horizons, and understand how there is not only one way, the one beaten by the red-headed Teutonic who to celebrate at the most drinks a mineral water and a ride in an Audi, to reach success. We had already achieved it with Alcaraz, we have confirmation of it with Cobolli.

The Roman Cobolli, who started out in the deep south of the Capital, where the city slopes not always gently towards the sea of ​​Ostia, and became a tennis player among the posh kids of Parioli; the Roma player Cobolli, who after a thousand trips to Trigoria left his place on the right wing, astounding a certain Bruno Conti (“I’ve never seen someone with that talent choose another discipline”), because, he says, “team sports weren’t for me, I wanted to be able to decide for myself” (Sinner, on the other hand, has always gone alone, with skis on his feet or with a racket in his hand); the fragile Cobolli, that somewhat mummy’s boy talent who, when he plays in front of his home crowd, feels he has to give more and, punctually, gives less (at the Foro Italico it happened again this year); the son of art Cobolli, who at a certain point risked being crushed in this relationship with the master-father and instead now seems to have found the measures, not only those of the field (an undertaking that the other did not have to attempt, "because my parents always left me free to do what I wanted", and thank goodness, by now he would be a champion of canederli).

So, if we want to consider Jannik Sinner and Flavio Cobolli as the a and b sides of the Italian job , the brutal summary is that we do it better. Tennis. Even at Wimbledon. Especially at Wimbledon (if Flavio beats Djokovic...).

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