Afflicted Saint-Germain prepares tomorrow for the "Conqueror of the Big" in the European Champions
Italian Atalanta faces Paris Saint-Germain tomorrow in the quarter-finals of the Champions League in football, and he bears the characteristic of the surprise of the Italian and European football for this season. After the elimination of Juventus, the giants of Italy and Napoli in the final price, Atalanta remained the representative of Italy, looking for its first title since 2010 with Inter in the first continental competition.
While the injured striker Kylian Mbappe and Italian midfielder Marco Verratti are likely to be absent, and doubts are surrounding a number of prominent players, Atalanta misses his Slovenian goal-scorer Josip Ilicic, who has 21 goals this season in various competitions, including five in the Champions League. "We will miss Ilicic a lot, his season until February was the most successful attack we have," his expert coach Jean-Piero Gasperini said in a press statement.
The 32-year-old shone so much that the new Corona virus struck Italy, especially Bergamo, the headquarters of the team, where the army was sometimes called to take the deaths away because the local morgues were not expanded. Ilicic was overcome by personal and psychological difficulties, so he stayed away from the last matches of his team locally.
Atalanta's strength lies in the large number of its players who are able to reach the net and have scored 118 goals in various competitions, and was behind the overthrow of a large number of Italian teams, especially the major ones, until it became known as the conqueror of the big players in Italy, including Juventus, Milan, Lazio and Rome. The Colombians, Dovan Zapata and Luis Morial, scored 19 goals, the Croatian Mario Pasalic 11 and Argentine midfield dynamo Papu Gomez added eight, in addition to nine goals for Ukrainian Ruslan Malinowski.
The strange nature of the season gave Atalanta additional hopes to continue the dream in his first continental participation, while in his 112-year history he only achieved the title of the 1963 Italian Cup. Gomez said in a press statement: "Atalanta belongs to the city and you feel that you are part of it." The distinguished midfielder added, "We know that we are a team from a city with a population of about one hundred thousand people, and we are not a team from the capital. But we know where to go and what we want." "We learned a lot on this trip, from the first match in the Champions League, when we conceded four goals against Dinamo Zagreb (Croatian)," the player added. "We raised the level and now they are calling us the Champions League. Achieving this goal is priceless," he added.
And Atalanta turned from a midfield team in Italy to a competitor for the title, by ranking third in the last two seasons, under the supervision of the billionaire president of the club, Antono Percassi, who carried the club's colors as a defender. The sixty-seven-year-old assumed his position in 2010, and by working with his two sons, he raised the club to the ranks of the leaders, like Juventus, Inter, Lazio and Napoli.