by Andrea Pirlo
27. Zdeněk Zeman, the much-travelled Czech-Italian football coach famed for his adventurous, perhaps cavalier, approach to the game
Chapter 11
“Andrea, we’ve signed this guy Huntelaar so you’ve got to stay.”
Silvio Berlusconi smiled as he handed me a bit of paper he’d just pulled from his trolley case. It was a page crammed full of statistics along with a photo of a blond bloke: the lowdown on the new striker he’d just signed for Milan.
The Pen Guy was sitting beside him, staring intently at me in the hope of spying a positive reaction. It was just the three of us in Milanello’s hall with the hearth, even if everyone outside knew that we were in there.
Here’s the deal: Klass-Jan Huntelaar is an excellent player. He knows how to score goals, loads of goals and, at that point in time, he was playing for Real Madrid. But he’s not the type of guy who’s going to win the Ballon d’Or.
“Well then, Andrea lad?”
Our president had a difficult task that day – convincing me to stay. Persuading me to reopen a suitcase that was already on the check-in belt, ready to be weighed and then sent on its way.
It was August 2009 and I’d reached agreement with Chelsea, the club where Ancelotti had just come in as manager. Carlo was like a father and a teacher for me, a kind, friendly man who knew how to make things fun. I’d spent the best years of my career with him. If you’re a player who wants to get on and give everything, you won’t find anyone better than him.
Ancelotti’s even more impressive than Carlo Mazzone back in my Brescia days. You wouldn’t see the latter on the training pitch right up until the Thursday. He’d stay in the dressing room, wrapped in a massive jacket out of the cold while his assistant took the session.
Carlo Ancelotti was my motivation for agreeing to head to London. But, in the meantime, Berlusconi had pulled out a second piece of paper. This time there were loads of names with ticks next to them, and one that had been circled.
“Stay. We’ve signed Huntelaar.”
Huntelaar…
“We could have brought in other guys, people like Claudio Pizarro,28 but we chose him.”
Huntelaar...
“Listen, Andrea, you just can’t do this, damn it. You’re the symbol of Milan, a standard bearer for this team, and we’ve already sold Kaká. You can’t jump ship as well. It’d be a terrible blow, to our image as much as anything. We can’t have everyone leaving.”
During the Confederations Cup that I’d just finished playing, Ancelotti and I spoke a fair bit on the phone, not least because there wasn’t much of a time difference between South Africa and England. There was no need to get up at the crack of dawn to hear this particular serenade.
He wanted to bring me to London at all costs, and cost was indeed the last hurdle still to be overcome. Insurmountable, as it transpired. Milan wanted too much cash, and they were also pushing for Branislav Ivanovic to be included in the deal. Chelsea hadn’t the slightest intention of letting the defender go.
“Mr President, I really like all this talk of being a standard bearer. But my contract here is about to run out, and those guys are offering me four years.” At five million euros a season. It wasn’t money that had convinced me, more the length of the deal. That’s always very important.
“Where’s the problem, Andrea? You can sort all that out with Galliani, can’t you? Take it as read.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely positive.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he shot out of the room to tell the media: “Andrea Pirlo is not for sale. He’s staying with Milan and he’ll finish his career right here.”
As it turned out, I moved to Juventus. That’s Berlusconi all over, though. He’s theatrical and knows exactly what he wants. It’s what makes him such a fantastic president and lover of pure, beautiful football. Winning isn’t enough for him.
When he was at his busiest with political commitments, we didn’t see that much of him. He’d only come to the really big sold-out games like the Milan derby and when Barcelona or Juventus were in town. He’d go whole years without coming to see us, and we certainly felt his absence, but that was all blown away on the rare occasions when he did drop in.
It’s perhaps difficult to understand, and even harder to explain, but whenever we heard the whir of his helicopter at Milanello, it sparked a positive feeling deep within us. We were like abandoned dogs furiously wagging our tails at the return of our master.
Once he was on the ground, he’d speak with the players and soon have us wound up like coiled springs. From that point of view, he’ll always be the best; a presidential version of Conte. He’d call us individually into a small room a few metres along from the training pitch. He loved those one-on-ones, and he’d usually spend a little bit of extra time with Inzaghi, whom he also phoned on occasion.
They had a lot to talk about. I, on the other hand, have never taken a call from Berlusconi. I’ve voted for him in the past, even if he never asked us to directly. Often he’d say that football was sacred and politics profane. Naturally, he’d explain why his plans would make Italy great, and he’d also compare the team’s success with the flourishing of his companies. We’d hear him talk about creating a million jobs. Minus one: mine. Every so often, he’d update us on the stats, which proved somewhat different to those of our friend Huntelaar.
Huntelaar…
If he saw that you were interested, he’d go into detail on a topic, like you’d see him do on Bruno Vespa’s TV show.29 And then, out of the corner of his eye, he’d spy that Ancelotti was about to walk past and suddenly he’d break off. “Carlo, son, remember that I want to see the team play with two strikers.”
How could he forget? He’d heard it a billion times. He and everyone else.
“Another thing, Carlo. We need to own the pitch and boss the game. In Italy, in Europe, throughout the world.”
They’d debate tactics, but the final decision always lay with the coach. If you’ll pardon my French, Ancelotti had massive balls. A big guy with a big personality.
He and Berlusconi had a few differences of opinion, in particular towards the end of Carlo’s time at Milan, but theirs is an enduring, mutual affection. The same can’t be said of certain other coaches, for example the Turk Fatih Terim, whom Ancelotti ended up replacing. He was a remarkable person, a really strange fellow who seemed allergic to rules. It was obvious from an early stage that he wouldn’t last long and sure enough he was fired.
Before Milan, he’d been with smaller, less stately clubs who’d allowed him to do as he pleased. The environment was different at Milan. He’d arrive late for lunch, turn up for official engagements without a tie, run off and leave Mr Bic on his own at the table just so he could watch Big Brother. You’d see him walking around Milanello with garishly loud clothes, looking like John Travolta.
He had this mad translator, practically his shadow, who at one point advised him to cut off relations with the media. Indefinitely. At Milan. The club where communication is always par excellence.
The translator also had a few problems getting across Terim’s message to those of us in the dressing room. The coach would be gesticulating and talking away in Turkish: “Boys, we’re about to play one of the most important matches of the season. Lots of people are criticising us, but I believe in you. We can’t give up now. There are great expectations upon us, and we’ve a moral obligation not to disappoint. Let’s do it for ourselves, for the club, for the president, for the fans. There are moments in life when a man has to lift his head. I believe that moment has arrived for us. Go on, boys. Go on.”
The translator, standing there quite motionless, would then say in Italian: “Juventus are coming tomorrow. We need to win.” One of them spoke for five minutes, the other for five seconds.
Terim: “Andrea, you’ll be the focal point for our game. You direct our play, but take your time and don’t force it. Weigh up the situation and give the ball to the team-mate who
has the fewest opponents around him. We’re relying on you: you’re absolutely fundamental for this team and the way we want to play. But I’ll say it again: don’t force it. Calm and cool are the watchwords here. First think, then pass: that’s the only way we’ll get the right result and show the whole of Italy we’re still alive. That we won’t go down without a fight. Right, now, everyone out on the pitch. Let’s see an amazing session with real intensity. I want it to be right up there with the best we’ve had this year.”
The translator: “Pirlo pass the ball. And now let’s go and train.”
Some of the team meetings, especially in the early days, were absolutely unforgettable. Terim would stand in front of the tactics board, take out a piece of chalk and draw 11 circles. Each circle represented a player, but it got to the point that there were so many notes and scribbles, you couldn’t tell which circles were the defenders, which the midfielders and which the strikers. Total chaos: only the goalkeeper wasn’t in doubt.
He’d point to a circle and say: “Okay, Costacurta, you need to go here.”
And I’d be forced to pipe up: “But boss, that’s me.” It was even worse when he mistook the defenders for strikers – I began to suspect he was doing it on purpose. Four forwards on the pitch and only two defenders: Berlusconi’s forbidden dream.
But even Terim was aware that without the president, that type of president, Milan would have been nothing, both in terms of money and power. Without his cash and commitment, they’d have ended up like lots of other clubs.
Berlusconi would go mad, quite literally, when we won in Europe or on the global stage. He’d burst into song, strum along with his mucker Mariano Apicella,30 tell jokes. Under his command, Milan became the most decorated club in the world, just as it now says beneath the crest on the players’ shirts. Berlusconi, by extension, is the most decorated president.
And he signed Huntelaar.
28. The Peruvian striker who has scored prolifically for Bayern Munich and Werder Bremen either side of an unsuccessful spell with Chelsea
29. Bruno Vespa is the host of a long-running news and politics programme Porta a Porta (Door to Door) shown on the Italian state-owned channel Rai Uno
30. An Italian singer famous for performing songs written by Berlusconi
Chapter 12
There was a time when I thought about quitting football, but Huntelaar wasn’t to blame. I just didn’t want to have anything more to do with it – the mere thought turned my stomach. I’d eaten too much already; I was on the verge of throwing up.
It wasn’t even the fault of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Oguchi Onyewu, two of my former team-mates at Milan. One of them is the only mean Swede, the other the solitary American who prefers football to baseball, basketball, gridiron, ice hockey and even hamburgers from McDonald’s.
During a training session at Milanello, I saw them laying into one another like two bully boys from the roughest estate. They looked like they were trying to kill each other: there were definitely some broken ribs, despite silence and denials from the king’s buglers who said it was just a “lively confrontation”.
Those of us who’d witnessed it were put in mind of a Mafia-style settling of the scores. It was like something out of Highlander – there can be only one. That pair certainly caused me alarm, but it wasn’t them who killed my desire for a footballing future. If anything, they were too busy trying to bump off one another.
I thought about quitting because, after Istanbul, nothing made sense any more. The 2005 Champions League final simply suffocated me.31 To most people’s minds, the reason we lost on penalties was Jerzy Dudek – that jackass of a dancer who took the mickey out of us by swaying about on his line and then rubbed salt into the wound by saving our spot kicks. But in time the truly painful sentence was realising that we were entirely to blame.
How it happened I don’t know, but the fact remains that when the impossible becomes reality, somebody’s fucked up – in this case, the entire team. A mass suicide where we all joined hands and jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge. The famous strait proved narrow in the extreme. So narrow, in fact, that if the whole Istanbul experience was a suppository, it could find no escape once inside us. Every now and then, I feel it move, letting me know it’s still there, asserting its presence. It calls me by name and it’s a pain in the arse in the truest sense of the term.
When that torture of a game was finished, we sat like a bunch of half-wits in the dressing room there at the Atatürk Stadium. We were bloodthirsty zombies faced with an unforeseen problem – the blood was ours and they’d drunk every last drop. We couldn’t speak. We couldn’t move. They’d mentally destroyed us. The damage was already evident even in those early moments, and it only got more stark and serious as the hours went on. Insomnia, rage, depression, a sense of nothingness. We’d invented a new disease with multiple symptoms: Istanbul syndrome.
I no longer felt like a player, and that was devastating enough. But even worse, I no longer felt like a man. All of a sudden, football had become the least important thing, precisely because it was the most important: a very painful contradiction.
I didn’t dare look in the mirror in case my reflection spat back at me. The only possible solution I could think of was to retire. And what a dishonourable retirement it would have been. My last performance had been so comically pathetic they wouldn’t even have taken me on Zelig.32
I glimpsed the end of the line: the journey was over. The story was finished and so was I. I walked with my head bowed even in the places I hold most dear. It wasn’t to avoid sympathetic glances, just that when you don’t know where you’re going, looking ahead makes you tired and worried.
People talk about performance anxiety. Well, ‘non-performance’ anxiety is the perfect description for those of us who simply vanished from the pitch sometime during that final. The match in Istanbul was on May 25 and the Italian championship had yet to finish. We had to go back to Milanello to carry our cross for four more days, right up until Sunday, May 29, when we played our last Serie A match against Udinese. That parade of shame was the toughest punishment. A cavalcade of disgrace with us placed front and centre.
It was a brief, intense, shitty period. You couldn’t escape or pull the plug on a world that had turned upside down, and you were forever surrounded by the other guilty parties in this theft of our own dignity. We always ended up talking about it. We asked each other questions, but nobody had any answers. We were a group of Gigi Marzullos33 called to a collective psychoanalysis session with one fairly sizeable flaw: there wasn’t any doctor, just a bunch of madmen. One thought he was Shevchenko, another Crespo, another Gattuso, Seedorf, Nesta, Kaká… I thought I was Pirlo. A gathering of impostors, too many to get away with it.
I could hardly sleep and even when I did drop off, I awoke to a grim thought: I’m disgusting. I can’t play any more. I went to bed with Dudek and all his Liverpool team-mates. The game against Udinese ended 0-0, goals a perfect stranger. A nightmare is a nightmare because you know it’ll start when you close your eyes but won’t stop when you reopen them, and so the torment went on.
We Milan players still had Italy commitments to (dis)honour, and it took Lippi only a few seconds to see precisely how things stood. “My boys, my boys, you’re in bits.” Congratulations on your intuition, Marcello. A blind man would have noticed – our devastation was legible even in braille. “Thanks for coming anyway,” he said.
None of us could think straight. I greeted the staff at the training centre as if it was the last time I’d see them. In my head, that was the last time. Going off and doing something else with my life had to be better than feeling like this.
Painfully slowly, things started to improve during the holidays, even if the wounds didn’t heal completely. The first day, I wanted to throw myself into a swimming pool with no water. The second day, there’d have been water, but I still wouldn’t have wanted to re-emerge. The third day, I wanted to drown in the kids’ pool. On the fourth, I’d have preferr
ed to suffocate giving mouth to mouth to a rubber duck. I was getting better, but pretty much imperceptibly.
I’ll never fully shake that sense of absolute impotence when destiny is at work. The feeling will cling to my feet forever, trying to pull me down. Even now if I mess up a pass, that malign force could be to blame. For that reason, I steer well clear of the DVD from the Liverpool game. It’s an enemy that I can’t allow to wound me a second time. It’s already done enough damage: most of it hidden far from the surface.
I’ll never watch that match again. I’ve already played it once in person and many other times in my head, searching for an explanation that perhaps doesn’t even exist. Praying for a different ending, like with those films you watch a second time hoping that you misunderstood the final scene. Surely the good guy can’t die like that?
We rose again two years later, 2007, when we beat the self-same Liverpool in another Champions League final. We won in Athens thanks to an Inzaghi double – one of the goals was a free-kick from me that hit off him and went in.34
The intensity of our joy was nothing compared to the deafening sound of our weaponry crashing to the ground a couple of years earlier. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. Well, there was still a little warmth left in the corpse at that stage and, as such, we celebrated but didn’t forget. We wanted to, but couldn’t. The stain remained.
So much so that it was suggested we hang a black funeral pall as a permanent reminder on the walls of Milanello, right next to the images of triumph. A message to future generations that feeling invincible is the first step on the path to the point of no return.
Personally, I’d add that horrendous result to the club’s honours board. I’d write it slap bang in the middle of the list of leagues and cups they’ve won, in a different coloured ink and perhaps a special font, just to underline its jarring presence. It would be embarrassing but, at the same time, it would enhance the worth of the successes alongside.