Carlo Ancelotti_ The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius - Alessandro Alciato [22]
All kidding aside, it’s an excellent psychological exercise. Challenges and difficulties aren’t obstacles: you can and you must go beyond them. Aside from my second injury, there was Sven-Göran Eriksson, who had, in the meantime—June 1985—replaced Liedholm in the dugout. He was young, Swedish, and he had already won the UEFA Cup with I. F. K. Gothenburg; he had just come to Italy from Portugal, and you couldn’t understand a word he said in Italian, practically the same as now. “Tre muuuu tre.” At first, some people thought he was saying “three times three” and they’d answer: “Nine?” Then it dawned on us that he was trying to say “three against three.” We played a lot of practice matches, tre muuuu tre, and later quattro muuuu quattro.
Eriksson brought a whole new way of working to the team; he prepared meticulously, he was respectful, and he was good-hearted and open to helping the players. Every morning, when he came to work, he would go around and shake hands with all the players, until finally there were some who couldn’t take it anymore, like Pruzzo. Eriksson would extend his hand, Pruzzo would reach out and shake it, saying: “A pleasure to meet you, I’m Roberto.”
I was pretty comfortable, even if, during that period, I began to understand just what it meant to be benched. I had recovered from my injury, but he wouldn’t let me play; he believed in Stefano Desideri and Giuseppe Giannini, both of whom had come out of the youth league. I felt that I had been sidelined, I thought he was overlooking me or that he had it in for me. That wasn’t the case at all; he put me back on the first team, and the following year he even offered to make me captain, because Agostino Di Bartolomei had moved over to A. C. Milan and Conti didn’t want to take on that level of responsibility. Me—captain of Roma. I represented a team and three-quarters of the city, because, let’s admit it, there really aren’t that many Lazio fans in Rome.
Right before one game, we walked into the locker room in I can’t remember which stadium, and we were suddenly hit with a serious wave of nausea. It was a stink the likes of which none of us had ever encountered before. Ciccio Graziani hurried over to the toilets and, with his usual savoir faire attempted delicately to determine who was behind that stench: “Ahò, ma che te sei magnato? I ratti der Tevere?” Roughly translated: “What have you been eating, rats from the Tiber?” A door swung open, and Eriksson emerged, red-faced. “Relax, boys. It’s just the coach who’s crapped his pants.” Like Liedholm, he never lost his temper. He was Liedholm’s natural successor. He really was a great coach. One of the reasons that my relationship with Roma cooled considerably was the team’s decision to get rid of Eriksson in April of 1987. The previous year, we had lost a spectacular championship match for the Scudetto, the famous game against Lecce, even though we had played beautifully. Undici muuuu undici—eleven against eleven.
CHAPTER 9
“Hello, This Is Silvio. I Want to Win Everything There Is to Win.”
They made me sick of being part of that team. I lost my enthusiasm for the club, my passion for playing there withered and died. All kinds of odd things were going on, but most importantly, A. S. Roma had just bought two players—Lionello Manfredonia and Rudi Völler. They’d overspent, and it was time to sell a player to make up the difference. The only player anyone wanted to buy was me. A martyr to a fallen market.
In 1987, A. C. Milan hired a young coach named Arrigo Sacchi,