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By Root 337 0

in northern Italy—I had an espresso made from coffee beans grown on a compost heap, grown in the farmer’s own manure, for all I know. In other words: I’ve gobbled down everything imaginable in my life, but never had my hunger stirred up by a football player. All the same, just then, that’s what was on my mind: I had developed a strange new appetite. It may have had something to do with the fork that was flying straight at his face, following a trajectory that, I must say, had a certain elegance. Thrown by an unknown hand, with a clear objective. Ballistically speaking it was perfect, hurtling silently through the air, a clearly identified flying object. There was no plate, and the knife and spoon were missing, but the restaurant was there, and so were the diners: us, Chelsea Football Club. There was me, a manager with a slight trend toward waistline expansion. There were the players, hungry for victory. And there was him, a Russian midfielder with a host of talents and just one shortcoming: he can’t sing. He just makes a lot of noise.

But now he was going to have to sing. It was his moment. If you want to join the team, it’s not enough just to sign a contract. There’s another hurdle, and it’s the toughest, where pity isn’t a word, where mercy isn’t known. A player has to make it through karaoke night, a sacred ritual, and in this case it was being staged in a hotel in Los Angeles during our 2009 summer tour in the United States. This was my first time on the road since leaving A. C. Milan. Hollywood was just a stone’s throw away and Yuri was on stage—I was trying to figure out if I was watching a slapstick comedy or a horror flick. More scary movie than comedy, judging by the shivers running up my spine. For players coming up from the youth team, the requirement is to dance in front of their new teammates, in front of the whole squad, a full audience. Players or new staff members that have come from another club are simply expected to choose a song and belt it out. Without musical accompaniment, without help of any kind: a solitary torture. I, for example, immediately seized on a northern Italian folk song, in dialect, one that I’ve always liked: La Società dei Magnaccioni, by Lando Fiorini. The kind of stuff you’d hear at a small town party, where everyone’s drunk. For those of my readers who don’t know the song, I would suggest listening to Elton John and then trying to imagine the exact opposite. I did pretty well, none of the players booed or hissed. Maybe that was because they knew I was capable of benching them for the entire season … No, really, they all cheered when I was done, and in fact somebody pulled off the tablecloth and began waving it back and forth, like a banner. They all surrendered to my bravura.

That’s not how it went for Zhirkov, who had been introduced to the crowd by one of our team masseurs: “Ladies and gentlemen, silence please. It is my privilege to introduce to you tonight an artist who comes to us from the East, he’s here tonight just for us, please lend an ear, and then you be the judges.” The snickering in the background didn’t bode well. From Russia, with fury … The sacrificial victim was led toward the gallows, and by now I could see in John Terry’s and Frank Lampard’s eyes the terrible drama that loomed on the horizon. They were already laughing, even before he could open his mouth. Ivanovic was rooting for him—“Go on, Yuri!”—but it was the kind of encouragement you get when someone’s setting you up for a pratfall. His teammates had been ribbing him for days, telling him he needed to train for this moment as if it was the Champions League final, that his future at Chelsea would depend on his performance that night. This was no joke, practically a sacred rite of passage. He looked as worked-up as I get when I’m about to walk through the door of a trattoria, and the fact that he’s fundamentally shy anyway certainly didn’t help. He stood on a stool and began. My. God. I’ve never heard anything that bad. It was a disaster, he didn’t hit one note, not one. Pieces of bread were flying within