The Three Tenors who made Napoli sing
Edinson Cavani, Marek Hamsik and Ezequiel Lavezzi in Naples
During the half time break at Coventry Sphinx’s game against Coleshill Town on Saturday, I was told that Bobby Charlton had passed away.
Charlton retired four years before I was born, at the end of a 25-year career. He survived the Munich air disaster and went on to reach the pinnacle of competitive football with both Manchester United and England. He was a leader for both. He became a respected and admired ambassador for both.
I’d bet his career ended before the time of most of this newsletter’s readers but football icons don’t get bigger in England than Bobby Charlton. The game is already a different place without him.
In the last week of this short run of articles from the archive, we’re going back in time to Napoli a shade over a decade ago. At the time I was an obsessive watcher of Serie A with a longstanding affection for Napoli. The team that featured in this week’s main piece had me transfixed.
Away from my gaze, Napoli have gone on to bigger and better things. Let’s look back nonetheless.
The Three Tenors who made Napoli sing
Classic football matches are rarely deemed so because of their defensive proficiency. It’s not that football supporters can’t enjoy the triumph of defence over attack, but only a game with goals can create the rollercoaster ups and downs that bring about the fullness of football’s drama.
Napoli’s 4-3 win over Lazio in Serie A in April 2011 was, defensively, every bit as sketchy as its final scoreline suggests.
Salvatore Aronica’s own goal, which made it 3-2 to Lazio after the Biancocelesti’s defensive frailties had allowed their hosts at San Paolo to overcome a 2-0 deficit, was a particularly fine example of the genre.
It’s in such twists and turns that football comes into its own. Defensive excellence is an art and for those of us who like to stroke our chins in knowing appreciation it’s as good as a goal blitz. But it seldom generates the same kind of visceral thrill as a match with fundamental flaws.
Napoli 4-3 Lazio is remembered for the Partenopei’s resilience in coming back from the dead. Walter Mazzarri’s side had much to play for and the Scudetto still in their sights. They combined guts and good fortune and were rewarded with a late winner.
Mazzarri’s Napoli was more than its collective strength of character. Perched in between Edy Reja’s beautiful pretenders and Rafa Benitez’s genuine contenders - by way of an unfortunate diversion into the managerial career of Roberto Donadoni - they were the team that led a resurrected club through its transition from could to should.
Against Lazio, by now coached by Reja , their starting line-up was built around two key trios. Aronica, Hugo Campagnaro and Paolo were Mazzarri’s preferred back three, with Fabiano Santacroce, highly rated under Reja, relegated to the bench and not long for the club.
Further up the field Napoli were able to field a lethal attacking triangle. Uruguayan striker Edinson Cavani, signed the previous summer from Palermo, had quickly developed a terrific relationship with Ezequiel Lavezzi and Marek Hamsik.
Napoli became the closest thing to a challenge faced by the domination of Juventus in the second half of the 2010s, their progress fired by a multitude of ambitious influences from the boardroom down but catalysed by their golden attacking three-piece.
In the post-Mazzarri years the profit from two of its components and the loyalty of the third helped Napoli to treat their achievements together in the blue shirt as a springboard, not cause for celebration in their own right.
Yet celebrated they were, for this Napoli was fantastic to watch and never more so than the afternoons where their attacking interplay sparkled and their defending did not.
Cavani scored more aesthetically attractive goals for Napoli; lots of them. But it was in performances like his hat-trick half against Lazio that he showed his true value. When his team needed him to stand up and be counted he was there.
The movement to allow him a simple header into an unguarded net. The strength and skill to win a penalty, nervelessly converted. The vision to lob his advancing compatriot, Fernando Muslera, to win the game. These were typical Cavani moments in a season filled to bursting with them.
He arrived in Sicily in 2007 and made his name in Serie A by scoring goals by the boatload and because of his playing style, a combination of strength, skill and swagger, and somehow uniquely South American.
Napoli paid a considerable fee for his services in the summer of 2010, and his relationships with Lavezzi and Hamsik seemed to make him even better; they became known as The Three Tenors and the goals just kept on coming.
Cavani was the marksman-in-chief. His 25 goals in 2010/11 were a Napoli record, a total greased by further hat-tricks against Juventus and Sampdoria.
Cavani played 138 times for Napoli before being sold to Paris Saint-Germain in 2013. He scored 104 goals, five of them in the UEFA Champions League as Napoli continued to break new ground.
After picking him up from Palermo, Napoli got three fabulous years from one of Europe’s most exciting strikers and then sold him for almost £60m in Qatari cash. They were able to spend handsomely to replace him.
Argentine forward Lavezzi linked well with Cavani but it was his on-field understanding with Hamsik that really helped to jump-start something special at San Paolo.
After a planned move to Genoa – aborted because of the Grifone’s involvement in a match-fixing scandal and resulting relegation – he finally found his way to Italy in 2007, signing for Napoli from San Lorenzo.
As Napoli soared from 13th in 2008/09 to third in 2010/11, Lavezzi’s steady supply of goals and assists was a reliable source. But he wasn’t much of a spreadsheet footballer. He married skill with tenacity, working himself into the ground and buzzing with energy.
Lavezzi was a fiery presence at Napoli and controversy found a way of following him throughout his career in Europe and Asia, and with the Argentina national team too.
During Reja’s reign at Napoli flash-points within the squad were reported in the Italian media. Santacroce and Lavezzi were involved in one oft-noted incident at a dinner. Santacroce later accepted his share of the responsibility. Footballers being footballers; it was a storm in a Coca-Cola can.
Like Cavani, Lavezzi left Napoli for PSG. He moved to France a year earlier than the Uruguayan, commanding a reported fee of £27m in 2012.
Given the divergence in their fortunes after leaving Napoli it’s easy to assume Lavezzi was easier to replace than Cavani, but his impact over the years was significant.
The money made on those two players, after both had made such contributions to the club’s rise back to the top, undoubtedly played a part in Napoli’s ability to challenge Juventus season in and season out.
But the real star of Napoli’s Three Tenors played his part not in one brilliant, ultimately profitable burst, but through years of service.
Hamsik, a Slovakian midfielder who joined Napoli from Brescia in 2007, is held in extraordinary esteem in Naples.
San Paolo had enjoyed the likes of Careca, Ciro Ferrara, Gianfranco Zola, Giuseppe Bruscoletti, even Diego Maradona. Hamsik was up there with the very best of them. In November 2018 he passed Bruscoletti to become Napoli’s record appearance maker. In 2017 he overtook Maradona as the club’s all-time leading goalscorer.
And, while longevity and reliability are certainly among his core strengths, scoring goals wasn’t even the main ability Napoli supporters value in Hamsik. Rather, he was a leader. He guided the team to a position of real potency, occasionally dragging them over the line almost on his own.
There’s an odd truth at the heart of Hamsik’s reputation on the world stage. Supporters who watched him every week understood and adored him. Regular watchers, though, even those who might see seven or eight Napoli matches in a season, might never experience him at his finest. Never the twain shall meet.
But he was and is a classy player, to say the least. His awareness, his passing and his ability to exploit space provided the basis for Lavezzi’s energy and Cavani’s power to thrive. He makes the players around him better, and he made Napoli better throughout the 2010s. More than that, he made Napoli his.
Since that disorientating, exhilarating match against Lazio, Napoli have pushed on even further, anchored by Hamsik and lubricated, in part, by the PSG petrodollars generated by the other two-thirds of The Three Tenors.
In 2004 Napoli were declared bankrupt, reformed and placed in the third tier. In 2007 they signed Lavezzi and Hamsik and never looked back.
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“Others have called not lighting the arch shameful, but the FA was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t. There is a wider conversation about what to commemorate and what not to. Sometimes it seems so straightforward; it will never be absolutely consistent. The administrators are wrestling with the same dilemmas as all of us. The inalienable truth is that living in peace is an accident of birth and an extreme privilege.”
I contend that Max Rushden (for whom I once assisted a goal, if you can imagine such a thing) remains a good egg.
Salty beef extracts
Sandro Tonali saga shows football’s relationship with gambling is close to breaking point (i)
Jude Bellingham, England’s perfect 10, can light the torch at Euro 2024 (The Guardian)
Bobby Charlton’s hug with Jack was a pure moment for two tangled brothers (The Guardian)
The sweeper-keeper is redefining soccer’s sense of risk (The Guardian)
777, the Neighbours of the Beast? (Unexpected Delirium)
Midweek Mashup – Aston Villa, 1999-2001 (Museum of Jerseys)
Dark times: shitty behaviour, Part 379 (Referee Tales)
The Long Road (Terrace Edition)
Dessert
Look. I’m not going to buy any of this stuff. I’m not going to wear it. After today, I probably won’t think about it again. But I like adidas and I generally like KoRn, so here’s the adidas x KoRn thing.
By the way…
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