Serie A

They call him “Braveheart.” Of course they do. What else would you call a Scotsman from Livingston, some 15 miles west of Edinburgh, who came up through the ranks at Celtic before making the somewhat unusual move to Bari in Italy’s Serie B during the January transfer window?

However, Liam Henderson’s signing with the club based in southern Italy was/is not a gimmick, and there are many around Celtic who think the Glasgow giants made a mistake in letting him leave. And, it’s important to note, that Henderson is not the first Scot to make the jump.

Reading about a scoreless draw is pretty boring, right?

No goals, no costly mistakes, no tactical masterstrokes which decide the game. We might as well not bother. But here we are, with an article about a nil-nil match which happened on Saturday night when most people were somewhere having much, much more fun.

If last week’s round of Serie A fixtures was dominated by tragedy, then this week’s matches were defined by flashes of beauty peering through the gloom. Across a number of games, there were flashes of brilliance which pierced through the fog for vastly different reasons. Even if, ultimately, the moments meant nothing, the surge of emotion and energy was undeniable.

Let’s begin with the most astounding of all.

The death of Davide Astori was announced on the morning of March 4. The club captain of Fiorentina, he had been expecting to take part in a run-of-the-mill away game against Udinese. Instead, every match in Serie A was postponed in the wake of the news. 

The night before, Astori had been playing videogames with the Fiorentina goalkeeper, Marco Sportiello. The next day, as the players sat down to breakfast, his absence was noted. According to coaches, the center back was typically one of the first to rise on a match day. 

We were all wrong. Let’s take a moment to come together, as a community, and admit that we all assumed the appointment of Gennaro Gattuso as AC Milan manager was absurd to the point of hilarity. Our sides were splitting. Our guffaws echoed along the corridors of the internet. We laughed and we laughed and we laughed. 

But we were all wrong. 

You see, it turns out that Gattuso might just be exactly what Milan needed.