Post by Salem6 on Sept 18, 2006 9:23:09 GMT
Ian Hawkey
The Italian reflects on four months in which he has lifted the World Cup, lost two league titles and had a nightmare Real Madrid debut
Fabio Cannavaro had an important birthday last Wednesday, his 33rd. He spent the day in France, where the sporting population are always likely to begrudge him a little because recently he led a group of players to an important triumph at the expense of 11 — and then 10 — Frenchmen. He had time in the morning to reflect on his eventful 12 months, at its centre the World Cup, where Cannavaro led Italy so stylishly that he finished a close second in the election for player of the tournament, the kind of honour that comes rarely to defenders. Before Germany, he shared in the defence of a league title with Juventus. Afterwards, he joined the most decorated club in European football, Real Madrid, a new city in a new country for him and his young family to discover.
“The year of his life”, he calls it. All that is barely half the tale. There was also the summons to Rome six days before the World Cup for an interview with magistrates investigating corruption. There was the apparent suicide attempt by a good friend and colleague. There was Juventus’s punitive relegation to the second division and the confiscation of his scudetti, the only league titles of his career.
As for his birthday, he’s had better. Wednesday night in Lyon, he acknowledged, may rank as one of the three least impressive of a professional career that stretches back to 1993. He was poor, his Champions League debut for a wretched Madrid finishing in a hammering that somehow disguised itself as a mere 2-0. Four would have seemed merciful, six fair.
Cannavaro watched the first goal arrowed in by a striker who escaped his marking; later he sliced a clearance backwards at his own perplexed goalkeeper and . . . well, let’s spare the birthday boy more details and simply report that he was scarcely recognisable as the commander of Italy’s back line.
In the Madrid dressing room, everybody had a dressing down. I gather that the coach, Fabio Capello, erupted. “He certainly raised his voice,” Cannavaro confirmed. “He wasn’t happy. There were some strong words. When that happens, you can say things that might come out the wrong way.”
Cannavaro and Capello go back a way, so he had witnessed this particular volcano before. Others among the Madrid players had not. “I should think even the players who don’t know him well now understand the message.”
The message is urgent. Cannavaro, a month into his career in Spain, senses impatience everywhere. He has joined an institution where the gap between aspiration and achievement yawns: three years, no prizes. “It’s pretty clear from the atmosphere that the people here want something fast. You walk around downtown and they come up to you and say, ‘Win something important’.”
We met the next evening in Madrid. He had just completed one of those assignments that tend to come the way of captains of world champions, and for which his handsome face, blue eyes and sculpted torso make him a natural invitee. It was a photoshoot modelling a new Nike Pro compression-fit first layer top. In between frames we got to see other layers and his tattoos, the names of his three children, Christian, Martina, Andrea, inked on his arms, and an elaborate design across his right shoulder and a little way down a powerful bicep.
Cannavaro has the build of a sprinter, although not obviously of a modern centre-half. He stands just over 5ft 7in, short for his position, and is nimble for his musculature. He doesn’t often lose duels contested with the ball at an opponent’s feet, can usually trust his speed in the chase and compensates for what he might concede to a rival in height with a powerful spring. He also has that bearing on the field that seems to give him a few extra inches, head up, chest pushed out.
He said his mea culpas about the Lyon game and as he discussed it wondered if a long, rigorous summer may be having an effect. “The World Cup has drained a bit of energy,” he said, “and I can see that in a lot of my teammates. It was quite an exhausting experience, both physically and mentally.” Still, he was happy enough to relive it, the bad bits as well as the good. And the ugly. Close to the end of the story we reached the moment. Cannavaro was not too far away from where it happened. “I didn’t see it,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “but I heard it, a sort of ‘Poum!’” He jerks his head forward in imitation of Zinedine Zidane plunging his forehead into the chest of Marco Materazzi, evidently with sufficient force that the thud of the impact carried.
Being so sharp-eared, had he heard anything of the lead-up, Materazzi’s words to Zidane, taunts about his sister’s virtue, among other things? “I didn’t really hear what Materazzi said,” insisted Cannavaro.
Really?
“Really.”
Did he disapprove of Materazzi’s provocative aside, an offence deemed serious enough to earn a two-match Fifa ban? “I’ve known Marco for a long time,” Cannavaro said. “Even if you do have a reputation, that doesn’t justify two games of disqualification for talking on the pitch. We have to remember what was done wrong in this situation. [Zidane’s] reaction was over the top compared to what had been said.”
Could he sympathise with Zidane, the pressure, the breaking point? “I can understand it happening, but there is no justification. You have to try as much as possible to set a good example. Ever since football has existed, backchat has been part of the game, but that doesn’t mean you can affect someone with it.”
Does Cannavaro chatter on the pitch to opponents? “I try not to. I personally think talking too much prevents you being at maximum concentration. I can’t see the point.”
When was the last time he lost his temper in a match? “When I played at Napoli and someone was elbowing me, handling me. Since then, any red cards have been for challenges.”
He needed to reflect a bit about the last question, and go back a distance to recall his last attack of temper. He left Napoli 11 years ago, so that’s a long time staying cool, in control, grown-up.
FABIO CANNAVARO was always that, by most accounts: a good kid from treacherous streets in a southern city that carried a reputation and an incontestably bad record for crime, petty and organised. Cannavaro comes from Naples and feels proud of that. He likes to think he’s a true Neapolitan. How so?
“Allegro,” he said with a smile. “I feel like a typical Neapolitan because I like to enjoy life. We are a city with a lot of problems, but the approach to life is still happy, we try to live each day to its best, have a smile on our face. In that I like to think I’m typical, though I recognise I’m a very fortunate Napolitano to have become a professional footballer.”
And how does he imagine a typical northern Italian might describe a typical Naples citizen? “That the Neapolitan will try to trick them into something, that the city is chaotic, nothing works there and it’s dirty,” he said, smiling again. “There is a big prejudice from the north to the south in Italy — and, yes, Napoli is a city where there’s risk and danger.”
The young Cannavaro grew up with a full sight of the danger, in what he portrays as a “crowded neighbourhood with all the temptations that come with street life”. He knows plenty of lads of his age who succumbed. “Friends who are no longer with us, others involved with drugs or crime. That could have been an option for me, but I had the support of a good family with strong values.”
And athletic genes. His father played semi-professional football. His younger brother, Paolo, had several seasons in Serie A with Parma and now represents Napoli.
While Fabio was developing as a footballer in the late 1980s, Napoli were doing their raucous, numerous, fervent supporters justice, winning league titles and celebrating the populist brilliance of Diego Maradona. Cannavaro got close to Maradona, touching distance. He was a ball-boy at the Naples stadium when Argentina beat Italy in the World Cup semi-final of 1990.
Rising rapidly through the Napoli youth teams, an early first-team assignment would be to mark Maradona in a practice game.
The outing has become legend. Kid Cannavaro played so hard that one of the coaches apparently instructed him to ease off. Maradona told him, “No, you carry on, you’re doing well.” Soon enough, Claudio Ranieri ushered him into the first team.
He marked David Platt on his debut against Juventus, still a teenager. Later he joined the exciting Parma side of the late 1990s, forming an admired defence with Lilian Thuram and goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, all to be reunited at Juve. He left for Internazionale once Parma began feeling an economic pinch, and moved to Juventus two summers ago, a priority recruit when Capello took over.
For Italy he has been a fixture for most of the past 10 years, the World Cup final his 100th cap. He leads with some allegro — he is in charge of the dressing room music for the Azzurri, “everything from 50 Cent to Bob Marley to Neapolitan songs” — and a great deal of dignity and natural authority.
In Germany that would become clearer each day, because Italy’s was no ordinary campaign, the demands on their captain far beyond strapping on an armband and calling heads or tails.
Against an extraordinary backdrop of domestic scandal, tragedy and individual insecurities around the careers of half the squad, Cannavaro was required to become a politician, a diplomat, a firefighter. Almost every time he faced the media in Germany, questions would skip over Alessandro Nesta’s fitness or Francesco Totti’s form and branch into ethics, match-fixing and whether or not he, Alessandro del Piero and Co fancied spending the next two years playing in the Italian second division, where Juve might end up as punishment for the part their management staff had played in manipulating the appointment and the conduct of Italian referees.
The scandal broke about five weeks before the World Cup. Cannavaro woke up one Friday morning to read about it, at first like any other Italian, surprised and increasingly alarmed. Transcripts of phone conversations featuring the managing director of Juventus, Luciano Moggi, had been leaked by investigators to the press. They were damning, revealing the club’s apparently habitual practice of dictating by whom and even how matches were officiated. This, in what until not so long ago was the most admired league in the game.
Then, deep into the text, Cannavaro saw his name, his words quoted in a conversation with Moggi two years earlier, when the player was with Internazionale and the Juve executive was colourfully engaged in what is quaintly known as “tapping up”.
On the page it read like a line out of Goodfellas. “Let’s make it happen today,” Moggi urged Cannavaro down the phone, “Tell him [the Inter president], ‘The coach doesn’t rate me’. That’ll be enough. Go on, give him a bitch of a call!”
In the transcript Cannavaro’s responses were brief and non-incriminating, but since the publication of the details, he has come to dread encounters with fans of Inter, whom he did leave for Juventus. “It got to the stage in the last couple of months where anybody who talked to Moggi on the phone and the media get hold of it, you became something like a criminal or something. There are Inter fans who have followed this conversation and think I didn’t play well for them because I wanted a move to Juventus.”
Prosecutors also became interested in Cannavaro as a witness, not because he was suspected of any wrongdoing but because of Moggi’s connection with the influential Italian player agency GEA. So, on the way to Germany, Italy’s captain spent two hours interviewed in connection with an investigation.
The scandal spread a contagion. In the weeks ahead of the World Cup, Italy’s head coach, Marcello Lippi, found his name linked to the same probe.
Moggiopoli, as the case became known, was intruding into Camp Italia. The captain decided on a strategy: “With the media, everybody was free to say to what went through their minds,” Cannavaro recalled. “We thought there was no real need to define a common line.”
As Italy progressed and Cannavaro excelled — Italy’s defence conceded one goal from open play in seven games — the gathering assumption was that Juventus would be relegated, stripped of their past two championships, 2005 and 2006, Inter inheriting one of those titles retrospectively.
Five of Juve’s players were meanwhile playing lead roles in Italy’s impressive momentum in Germany.
Then, shortly before the quarter-final, news reached the captain of a tragedy. His former teammate for Italy and Juve, Gianluca Pessotto, had fallen from the roof of the club’s headquarters to the ground and was in a grave condition in hospital in Turin. Pessotto had recently taken a management position at Juventus and was understood to be suffering from depression. He might easily have died in the fall.
“It was natural for everyone to gather together in that sort of situation,” Cannavaro recalled.
“As a group you tighten up. We prepared that banner for after the victory against Ukraine. That was something that needed to be done.”
Ukraine were beaten 3-0 and Pessotto, still unconscious, would later see written in big bold letters the win dedicated to him.
Cannavaro won’t go as far as to say the crisis at home had a decisive effect on what would be glory in Berlin, but a point had certainly been made. “For the Juventus players, everybody felt they needed to show that what they earned was earned on the pitch. We were disappointed that things we deserved, the scudetti, had been taken away.”
It still rankles. “It’s quite strange to see that star (the mark of reigning champions) on the Inter jersey. Everybody knows there was a difference in strength between the two teams in terms of performance. The Inter players are aware of the fact that it was given to them by the federation, not earned or deserved on the pitch. They were not the ones who won it on the field.”
Did he feel angry with Moggi? “Yes, actually. I’m disappointed that having won two leagues, I’ve nothing in my hands for it.”
There was also the “bad image” that Italian football had acquired. “We’ve had several problems in the last decade, and there’s also the way we are as people. Italians make a big thing out of everything. After the World Cup victory, I hope there will be a better image abroad, though I don’t think it necessarily will be at home.”
Did he think it appropriate that Juve should be punished with relegation and a starting total for the new Serie B season of minus 17 points? “I don’t know if it’s fair or not. I didn’t witness what had been going on among the management of Juventus. What I know is that the team, the players, earned what we worked hard for, and if you need confirmation of that strength, it was that eight players, Italian and French, from Juve were in the World Cup final. This was a pretty strong team and didn’t need any extra help to win titles.
“It’s important to understand what happened. It’s not a scandal of bribing or handing out money to buy games. It’s somebody exercising a powerful position. Sports justice says that’s not legal, and it’s not, but it’s different from the idea that people were buying games. This whole thing has no money involved.”
Except that it carried huge financial implications. Cannavaro was the first of the high-earners sold by Juve. For the World Cup’s outstanding individual, there was an immediate market. Real Madrid acted quickly. Within a fortnight of the tournament finishing, he was inheriting the club’s No 5 shirt, vacated by the retiring Zidane.
It is unlike the places he has been before, with aspects of each of them. Real Madrid, on their fourth president in eight months, can seem as neurotic as Napoli, as desperate as Inter, as snooty as Juve. And they play looser football than he is used to. Cannavaro the impeccable Italian stopper has joined the Hades of central defenders. Lately players of the class of Walter Samuel and Jonathan Woodgate have gone there and turned vulnerable or luckless, hostages to a style that prioritises the extravagant attacking gesture and leaves holes. Cannavaro already sees a football culture distinct from the Serie A he has known.
“Here,” he said, “they like to get the ball to do the sweating rather than the players. In Italy there’s more emphasis on tactical and physical aspects of preparation.”
For all that, he has few doubts about the potential of a Madrid squad expensively reinforced over the summer — a new head coach and more than £50m spent to acquire Ruud van Nistelrooy, Cannavaro, Emerson, Mahamadou Diarra, Jose Antonio Reyes — and has enjoyed getting to know footballers who had been brief acquaintances. David Beckham, for instance. “Great guy, great footballer and very professional,” said Cannavaro. “I do find it surprising that he’s not part of the England team any more. It’s the manager’s call, but he’s a champion.”
Madrid are not champions, not of Spain since 2003, not of Europe since 2002. “We need to be in better shape, faster,” he admitted. “We’ll do the work and get that right. What was striking to see in Lyon was that we were always later to the ball compared to the other team. Capello teams are not known for that attitude. But we’re not performing well, not playing as a team and players are still approaching it more as individuals.”
He would not be the first man to diagnose modern Madrid in those terms. He probably won’t be the last. But if they need a new totem, Cannavaro makes a convincing candidate.
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2093-2361434,00.html