From: marco@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (Marco Petroni)
Subject: Re: Only one great side these days
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines, Montreal, Canada
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 23:24:56 GMT

For starters, I agree with what Loris Magnani wrote in his response to
this article entitled simply "AC Milan", so I won't repeat his thoughts
here. That being said, here are my $0.02:

In article <GRC.93Jan12102807@bhars109.stl.stc.co.uk> grc@stl.stc.co.uk (Gary Cook) writes:
>
>Yeh funny that. Spend grillions of pounds on the best players in the
>world to get the best team in the world, and hey-presto, your
>undefeated for a year. Really brings *excitement* into football
>doesn't it. 

Come on, Gary, you know as well as I do that throwing money at a
team does not turn it into a winner. I can mention a few examples in
other sports where the owners spent tons of money to buy good players
only to do poorly when push came to shove. Juventus, for example,
has also spent lots of money, although not to the same extent
as Milan has, and is currently 11 points behind the "red and black".
Not too good for a team which was supposed to be Milan's main
contender for the title, wouldn't you say? This is not meant to
belittle Juventus, but this is just one current example of a team
which has also spent lots of money recently, but who hasn't been getting
the desired results.

In any case, Milan has not become a powerhouse overnight; they have
had their ups and downs over the past few years, but for the past few
months, they have been doing well. It's been far from a "hey-presto"
sort of thing, believe me. IMHO, good players does not a good team
make; it also depends on how a group of players interpret the intsructions
of their coach, and also if the coach plays his players in positions
where they are most comfortable and at their best. Lastly, team
cohesion is very important. Remember that the bulk of the Milan side
has been playing together for the past 5 years -- far from a "hey
presto".

>I geuss it's a pity Italy can't discover that all of the AC
>Milan foriegn players have Italian grannies and get Milan to play
>their national games ( actually , Milan could probably afford to buy
>some Italian grannies for their stars !!!)

This might work for the hockey team but not for the soccer team; if
players have already played for another national side, they couldn't
play for the Azzurri. This would eliminate all their current foreign
players from playing for Italy...

>Same old story in many countries , the rich get richer, the poor get
>poorer.

This is true, but you do get teams like Parma, Atalanta, Cagliari,
and Foggia who can pull some surprises at times.

I have to add that I do disagree with big teams who buy promising young
talent, only to let them waste away on the bench, when they could
be easily be starting for other weaker teams and improving their skills
further.

Regards,

Marco...
--
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- Marco Petroni - VE2VTN - "Forza Milan! En ROUGE et BLACK." "Forza Ancona!"
	-- McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines (McRCIM), 
                         McGill University, Montreal, Canada.  
 INTERNET/BITNET: marco@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu  or marco@mcrcim.mcgill.ca
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