Carlo Ancelotti (12 page)

“All right, I’ll make do with what I’ve got in the clubhouse,” which is to say, with Apolloni and Minotti, who were playing for the national team, Cannavaro, Bucci as goalie, and Zola. There was also Crippa—a tough player, for real.

The idea was to fight for the Scudetto, but we’d started out badly. I didn’t know much. I could see Chiesa had enormous potential, but relations with Zola were becoming troublesome. I didn’t want to abandon the 4-4-2 formation, so I tried moving Gianfranco to the left side of midfield, even if that wasn’t his position. I hadn’t yet guessed that the pair of Thuram and Cannavaro had limitless potential. I’d gotten a few things backward, which was absolutely my fault. Then Zola left, we sold Amaral, and we acquired Mario Stanic. So things were finally under control. At that point, this is what my Parma looked like: Buffon in goal; a four-man defense with Zé Maria, Thuram, Cannavaro, and Benarrivo; in midfield, from right to left, Stanic, Dino Baggio, Sensini, and Strada; Crespo and Chiesa as strikers. I still stand by it today. I was no visionary; back then, they were completely unknown. An incredible team, I know, but it’s easy to say that now. In the first few months, we just couldn’t work together; we were five teams from the bottom. Cavaliere (another knight of labor …) Tanzi got a new idea: “Let’s get rid of Ancelotti.” The usual earthquake, the usual lightning bolts, the usual burning sensation. In practical terms, I was the first man in history with stigmata on my ass.

M
aybe what Tanzi wanted was to take me to Parmalat. Print a nice
SELL
BY
date on me, and sell me by the kilo—come to think of it, he would have made a good profit if he had. Carletto: best if consumed as soon as possible. Eat all you can.

Christmas was coming. The ultimatum came after a draw with Atalanta. There was only one condition: don’t lose. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure not losing would be enough. Before the break, we had two away games, at Vicenza and at the San Siro, against Sacchi’s A. C. Milan. The first match went well; Benarrivo saved me with a slicing shot from outside the penalty area. It was a lot more than just the goal of that Sunday; it was the goal of the entire week. The match ended 1–1; it could have gone worse, but according to Tanzi it had to go better. He didn’t like us much
in those days, but he couldn’t cancel the Christmas dinner that he’d already planned at his house, just a few days before we left for Milan. We exchanged gifts; the players gave me a set of luggage. We were guests of someone who would gladly have skipped seeing us entirely.
“Buona sera
, Cavaliere.”

“Buona sera
to you. Do you know that our team is doing badly?”

Let’s say I’d guessed it.

“Carletto, you should know that if you don’t win against A. C. Milan, I’m going to fire you.”

“Well, Merry Christmas to you, too, Cavaliere.”

I lost my appetite, and it was the first and only time in my life, I think. Beat A. C. Milan in their own stadium. Impossible, or something like it. Word got around, and even Tanzi’s closest advisers did their best to make him change his mind. “Mr. Chairman, we’re playing at San Siro. Wouldn’t a nice little draw be enough?”

“We have to win. And win we will.”

Unless I’m much mistaken, I’d heard that phrase once before. By the end of the meal, he had begun to believe that a single point would save me. And he hadn’t even had much to drink. Just a little two-percent Parmalat milk.

I had a bad feeling. I wasn’t feeling optimistic. But I decided to take the initiative: the evening before the game, I asked the entire team to come to my room at the Hotel Doria. We opened champagne and we toasted: “To us.” We said goodbye; we all agreed that it had been good working together. Short but intense. A farewell celebration—a sad occasion. Despite my sense of doom, the adventure continued. We won, 1–0. At San Siro. Against A. C. Milan. On the eve of the season’s winter break. I always suspected
that it was a sort of Christmas gift from Sacchi; maybe he thought that if I’d been fired it would have been a defeat for him too.

After the holidays, we won 1–0 against Juventus too. In that season, we won eleven times with scores of 1–0. Eleven times. Because we had an unknown goalkeeper, Buffon. Two central defenders who weren’t anything special, Thuram and Cannavaro. An unimpressive striker, Crespo.

Another round, and the same gift. Just like in Reggio Emilia, in Parma we were turning the league on its head. From the bottom to the top, at the speed of sound. We let the Scudetto slip out of our hands in the return match against Milan, 1–1, but more importantly in Turin against Juventus. We were ahead once again by 1–0 when Collina called a scandalous penalty kick against us. It was shameful. There had been a disagreement between Cannavaro and Vieri, a scuffle between the two of them: no justification for a penalty kick. Invented. An optical illusion. While Collina was walking back toward midfield, I was yelling at him from the bench: “Nice work! Good job! Great decision!” I said it again: “Nice work! Good job! Great decision!” He turned and walked toward me; I stood up, he pulled out his red card. I couldn’t believe it. “What are you doing?”

“I’m ejecting you.”

That much I had already figured out; I was hoping for a more complete answer. Thrown out for my first offence; I doubt that many other coaches in history have enjoyed that particular honor.

After the game, I went to see him. I asked him why he’d ejected me. Chairmen of several teams hadn’t been able to do it. What made him so smart?

“Well, I tossed you out because I read your lips. You called me an asshole.”

“You’re wrong; I thought it, but I never said it.”

I guess he really was good; he’d read my mind. When things weren’t going well, on the other hand, I tried to read my players’ minds, asking for their help. When things were really on the line, just before we drew with Atalanta, I summoned the whole team to meet in the locker room. It was an emergency meeting; there were some things to straighten out. I was very direct: “Look, if things aren’t working out between us, I think we might as well say it openly. If we can’t get along, there’s no point waiting for the chairman to fire me; if this meeting tells me that we don’t see eye to eye, I’ll go to Tanzi myself and tell him to find himself another coach. So please, let’s talk in a spirit of sincerity.” I have to admit, they were sincere. The first to speak sincerely was Alessandro Melli, who was open and honest: “I hope they fire you, so I can finally play some football.” I appreciated it; we were there to tell one another what we thought. He did the right thing; he certainly helped me to understand the atmosphere in that group. In general, though, the team wanted to hold it together, to work together. They agreed with what I wanted to do. I had a strong feeling that things would improve quickly—and they did. We made it to second place, which meant we had qualified for the first round of the Champions League. Not bad for our first year.

The second year didn’t go so well. We tried to reinforce the team, but we achieved just the opposite effect. We got to the first round of the Champions Cup, in the Stadio Ennio Tardini, against Borussia Dortmund, coached by Nevio Scala. That’s where Crespo
changed a city’s opinion: he scored and then he clapped his hands over his ears; I think he was the first player to do it. “Oh, heavens. Has he gone deaf?”

I reassured everyone: “No, he’s just pissed.”

“Now jeer at me if you have the balls,” he was suggesting—an unmistakable gesture.

Crespo wasn’t well loved; he’d been jeered and whistled at frequently in his early times with the team. The fans didn’t like him. He was talented, a serious young man, but they just didn’t like him. Before that goal, it had been whistles, jeers, and cheers.

In the match against Borussia, everyone was asking me to replace him. Just after the match began, some guy right behind the bench started screaming: “Substitute. Substitute. Substitute.” “Substitute, substitute, substitute.”
Ma va’ a cagher
—Oh, go take a crap. I kept him in, he scored a goal, we won, and I went to the press room: “I would like to inform the Parma audience that I will never pull a player off the field who is being jeered.” Whistles and jeers, but I wouldn’t substitute myself either.

During my time in Parma I came in for a lot of criticism, especially in my second and last year. Everyone had an opinion, and they sort of tended to look down on me. Parma (like Reggio Emilia) was historically a farming town, then over time it became an industrial capital, losing the peasant culture that I love best. We lost a match against Fiorentina under Malesani; so Tanzi, in hopes of victory, hired none other than Malesani as next year’s coach. But without the Fiorentina team, which would have been a little too spendy.

I wasn’t popular with the old executives of Parma either, especially because I’d decided against signing Roberto Baggio; they
never forgave me. At the end of my first season with Parma, Roberto had already come to an agreement with the club, but he wanted a regular starting position, and he even wanted to play behind the strikers, in a role that didn’t exist in 4-4-2. I wasn’t willing to change my formation, and I told him so. I had just gotten the team into the Champions League, and I had no intention of changing my system of play just then. I called him up: “I’d be delighted to have you on the team, but you should know that I have no plans for fielding you regularly. You’d be competing against Crespo and Chiesa.” I’d been rigid; I wasn’t looking for conflicts or problems. He disagreed; I could already imagine his ponytail rising in protest. His answer was crystal clear: “I want continuity, I need to play all the time.” And, in fact, from A. C. Milan he went to Bologna.

Now, years later, I regret how it went. I was wrong to be intransigent. Over time, I learned that there is always a way of allowing a lot of great and talented players to work together and get along. At Parma, I still thought that 4-4-2 was the ideal formation in all cases, but that’s not true. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and of course I’d take Baggio. I could have handled the situation very differently. All of this, of course, caused problems for me. I was branded a coach who was opposed to attacking midfielders, and that wasn’t entirely unfair. For that matter, the year before, I’d turned down Zola as well. Ancelotti, the anti-imagination. Give me anything, but not another number 10. The truth is that I was afraid of moving into territory that I thought I knew too little about. It was a lack of courage, but I made up for it in the years that followed. I found a new source of courage, in part because I went to coach Juventus. And I really couldn’t bench Zidane.

I
t felt more like a court of law than the locker room of Juventus F. C. The place was teeming with lawyers, all eager to defend Zidane; this is my first memory of the
biancineri
. When I think back to Turin, Zidane comes to mind. The Dream Player was presumed innocent, no matter what, and that presumption was defended ferociously by his incredibly expensive team of lawyers: Gianni Agnelli and Paolo Montero. Agnelli was the Avvocato, full stop—Italy’s national “Lawyer”—while Montero was a lawyer without a law degree, but ready to take on all comers. An odd couple. United in the name of Zizou, a fiery comet that fell to earth from the starry sky, a poster that stepped down from the wall. Welcome to the world of mortals, Our Lord of the Soccer Ball.

They were his shadows, they were his guardian angels, they
never left his side. Agnelli was crazy about him; Montero was just plain crazy. When they looked at Zidane, they saw a pure and glowing light, a traffic light that was permanently green. A right of way to extraordinary transport, and he was certainly extraordinary; too bad for us if he often showed up late.

One day, during my first year on the Juventus bench (a year that began in February 1999), we were scheduled to leave for an away game, and Zidane hadn’t arrived yet. He’d vanished, and his cell phone was turned off. I waited for a while, then I made a decision: “Let’s go.”

“But, Carletto, how will he catch up with us?”

“That’s his problem.”

From the back of the team bus, Montero jumped to his feet, marching up the aisle toward me. “Coach, we need to talk.”

“Sure, Paolo. Let’s get this bus on the road, and then I’m all ears.” He marched up to the driver and crossed his arms. “No, that’s exactly what we need to talk about. No one is leaving here without Zidane.”

I took a few seconds to think it over. I evaluated the situation with a certain mental clarity: “Okay, here I am, facing a homicidal maniac who is staring furiously into my eyes as he clenches and unclenches his fists. Given the choice between the good and the not-so-good, he has always sacrificed the good: he aims at the ball, and he kicks your leg; he aims at your foot, and he kicks your leg; in fact, when he aims at your leg, he kicks your leg.”

“OK, Paolo, let’s just wait for him.” The important thing, after all, is your health, right?

Zizou showed up ten minutes later, apologized for being late, and the bus pulled out.

Zidane was the greatest soccer player I ever coached—the sole inhabitant of a very different planet. Before every match, the Avvocato came into the locker room, said hello to Alessandro Del Piero, and then went straight to Zizou. He was head over heels in love; he took Zizou aside and had a little chat. It was a scene that I witnessed dozens of times. Often, Agnelli was accompanied by his grandsons John and Lapo Elkann; they would appear, greet the team, and go talk to Zidane. They were just like their grandfather. Then it was Moggi’s turn: where’s Zidane? And Giraudo: where’s Zidane? And then Bettega: discreetly, in a private corner of the locker room, because he was shy.

That was when I started to get a little lonely. Everyone was ignoring me; they all came to see Zidane. Sometimes even the fans ignored me. For instance, one morning at Turin’s Caselle Airport. We were returning from Athens, we’d just played an embarrassing Champions League match against Panathinaikos, and there, waiting for us as we got off the airplane, was a small mob of young men who weren’t especially interested in paying tribute to our athletic prowess. As Zidane went past, they shoved him. That marked them for—well, maybe not for death, but sudden and certain punishment. Montero witnessed the scene from a distance, removed his glasses and, with an elegant gesture that struck me as incongruous, slipped them into a case. It was handsomely done, but it boded badly for the young men. A few seconds later, he was running at top speed toward the little cluster of hoodlums, fists flying.
Backing him up was Daniel Fonseca, another willing brawler. In my mind, I imagined a boxing announcer right behind them, hovering just outside the ring: “And that’s a right, a left hook, another left hook. Technical knockout, that’s a TKO. Zinédine is safe. I repeat, Zinédine is safe.”