After what feels like an eternity, football is back! The Bundesliga was a nice little warm up, but now our league is finally coming back from its hiatus, and in absolute full force! With 13 matchdays to squeeze into roughly 40 days it’s going to be a full onslaught. And if you’re lucky enough to work from home, it’s an opportunity to drop your productivity to zero and spend nearly every day experiencing the next 40 days of Serie A fury.
With an unprecedented run of games, it will be interesting to see how teams cope with the lack of rest between games, plus how teams cope with the prolonged layoff. Will the football be sloppy at the beginning, will there be increased injuries, how will lack of crowds affect home field advantage, will hot or cold streaks be amplified due to the crunched timetable? All questions I’m extremely interested in, and will probably be key in determining the Scudetto race. With Juventus and Lazio basically neck and neck, and Inter looming in the background still, we’re gonna have one wet hot Italian Summer.
What Does This Mean For Atalanta?
Atalanta, with a game in hand, are still 3 points clear of Roma for the all-important 4th place and according to fivethirtyeight.com still have an 88% chance to qualify for Champions League next year, by either holding onto 4th or perhaps eclipsing Inter again and sneaking into 3rd place. Getting off to a hot start against Sassuolo this weekend is essential, and with a full squad (Toloi is healthy to my knowledge) I’m confident they can pick up where they left off against Lecce. That 7-2 scoreline feels like years ago now!
An added benefit for La Dea, is they’ve got Champions League Quarterfinals locked up, and don’t have to worry about extra matches until the Serie A season is over. Perhaps luckily, the clogged schedule they’ve already endured all year should yield fruit and prepare the club for the bloated fixture schedule, while teams used to playing once a week may perhaps struggle with fewer rest days. Again, only time will tell, as we’re in uncharted waters.
Lest we forget, and most important in this whole scenario, is what this means for the city of Bergamo. Bergamo and greater Lombardy were by many considered the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak not just in Italy but all of Europe. While football is a minor blip on the radar in the greater scale of what the world has had to endure recently, La Dea can proudly represent their city and region and help to usher in a return to normalcy for everything the citizens of Bergamo have had to endure. And while Il Bergamaschi can’t cheer on the squad from the Curva Nord, it’s spirit (along with the spirit of Andrea Rinaldi) will live on inside Gewiss Stadium and continue to support our boys.
2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year, and who knows what’s coming in the second half of the year? But for now, I for one, am glad to sit back again and enjoy football, and cheer on La Dea as they continue their quest to become the darlings of Italy and Europe in the Champion’s League. Make sure to buckle up, because it’s going to be a wild ride! y
