Dec. 9 – New ideas for the bank holiday: take a trip to Milan to watch padel. Once upon a time, Dec. 8 marked the opening of ski slopes. Today there is another highly coveted “slope”: the blue one at Allianz Cloud, which will host the P1 Premier Padel champions until Sunday. The semifinals on Saturday, the final on Sunday, and we’ll start with good news for latecomers: there are still a few tickets available. A few dozen, but for those who want to give a different Christmas gift, well we gave you an idea. Someone, however, has already thought about it, like Roberto, from Vicenza, who left home at dawn to enjoy the quarterfinals: with him, his wife and son, who still hasn’t tried padel but “will soon.” The atmosphere is the one we were used to seeing at the big tennis tournaments: the maxi-balls for the champions to autograph, the line in the Expo area for a photo (by the way, the entrance for the commercial area is free, and you can even try to hit the ball thrown by a ball-shooting machine), the food trucks where you can eat and drink something crowded. Padel fever has no territorial borders: on the stands one hears Roman, Bolognese, Tuscan, Neapolitan, with groups coming from the same club and wearing, of course, their tracksuit One expression, however, binds everyone: “Oooh,” of amazement, when seeing these champions play. “They play another sport, what do we play, really?” whisper two spectators in the first ring. But instead of wanting to quit because of obvious inferiority, they’ll rather take notes on leg and racket movements, to put them into practice from Monday on the fields scattered around Italy. There are, of course, former soccer players, who have begun a second career with padel: from Esteban Cambiasso to Demetrio Albertini, from Alessandro Matri to Marco Parolo, and again Beppe Bergomi, Dario Marcolin, Alessandro Budel, Nicola Amoruso, and who knows how many more will come. There is a lot of people who have gone from football to padel ball, who get amazed by the acrobatics of Galan, Lebron and Paquito Navarro, by the power of Coello and the endless, innate class of Fernando Belasteguín. And at every change of end, the playlist coming from the console of Carletto, voice and music of Milano Premier Padel, which has also caught the attention of Gianluca Vacchi, another “padel addicted” who has been visiting Allianz Cloud for a couple of days. Last night, as soon as he won his match, Joseda Sanchez – alongside Miguel Semmler is the only non-leading pair qualified for the quarterfinals – went to hug him. Sanchez was almost in tears, who knows what it will do to him to face Belasteguín, the goat, on the Central tonight.
If all the padelists of Italy meet in Milan: The Italian holiday leads to Allianz Cloud
