This penalty is easy to find on the internet and there is no doubt that no penalty has ever been missed like this one. So silly and yet with the greatest conviction, so high over the goal, a sensation. But: If Roberto Baggio hadn’t missed this penalty in the penalty shootout at the 1994 World Cup, Italy would have become world champions and this play wouldn’t exist. The theater loves tragedy. When he was still playing, Baggio was one of the most admired strikers of his time. He won almost nothing – he single-handedly shot Italy into the final in 1994, but there was no World Cup title. But now a piece bears his name, “Roberto Baggio” by Davide Enia.
Enia is a magician, a flâneur in the imaginative realms of the mind, an incredible charmer. So you believe everything he says. Also the story of Roberto Baggio, the anesthesiologist who works in war zones. In Afghanistan, a young surgeon has to operate on a boy whose body has been torn apart by a mine; the surgeon is about to give up. So Baggio tells him about Baggio, 1994 World Cup again, Italy against Nigeria, Italy is behind. Hopeless. Until Roberto Baggio, the soccer player, suddenly appears in a gap that isn’t actually there, receives the ball and strokes it into the goal. With Enia it all takes longer and should never stop because he can describe scenes from a football game as if you were taking part in it like a drama. The surgeon understands the power of tenderness through the story of Baggio’s goal. The boy is saved.
Great football scenes and tough experiences
Yes, drama. In the black box in the former Gasteig, Robert Dölle is alone with two chairs and plays and talks in the only great way that there is someone who has something to tell you. No matter which characters Davide Enia invents in this text, all of the voices are idiots and everyone is attached to them. The hopelessness of this Dölle immediacy opens up space for many great football scenes – and for many very hard experiences that the other Baggio, the doctor, has to tell about his wars. Raped children in Sudan, torn bodies. Football? Is it still suitable as a counterpart, as a metaphor? Ah, no, nonsense, you want to scream, if you don’t take football seriously at all. But Baggio, the footballer, had a badly battered body made of glass, was often injured, and he knew the tears of fate.
Gino Strada, the surgeon, peace activist and founder of an aid organization who died in 2021, crossed the border between Kurdistan and Iraq in one of these damned wars when everyone else was stopped, had to pay money, was subject to the arbitrariness of the war because he had a photo with him . It showed him with Roberto Baggio. The footballer. The passage was clear. Can football save lives? Yes. Football and footballers can do that.