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By Root 402 0

the French player Di Costanzo, jocularly known as the poor man’s Maradona. He recalled El Pibe de Oro in the way he took penalties; otherwise, he was definitely a poor man’s player. I was in lovely company. I had even been jeered by my fellow townsfolk; it was more or less like being repudiated by your own family. I blame it all on the Reggiana–Cosenza game. We were winning 1–0; there were only nine men left on the Cosenza team after two sendings off. We kept jogging up to their goalposts in a vaguely festive, Christmasy fashion. We were so generous and good-hearted that we argued over whose turn it was to score; nothing like it had ever happened.

“Please, be my guest.”

“No, my dear fellow, go ahead.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. After all, today is your birthday; you should score.”

Di Costanzo pipes up: “Can I score?”

His teammates, in chorus: “No, you only know how to take penalty kicks.”

Just a few seconds before the end of the game, on the last play, their goalkeeper gave the ball a tremendous kick, and it flew all the way up the pitch into our area. Three players all leapt into the air at the same time: from our team, Gregucci and the goalkeeper Ballotta, who was already an old man, even back then, and, from their team, Cristiano Lucarelli, who was already a Communist, even back then. Two out of the three collided in midair: Ballotta and Gregucci. Lucarelli scored, kicking into an empty goal. The score was 1–1, and objections flew in every direction.

We went out for the eighth day of the championship after a week in training. I had two choices: either win or be sent home with a boot in the ass. This was the dancing bench (if it wasn’t dancing, it was wobbling seriously), first edition. The decisive match was Reggiana–Venezia, and it was decisive for our opponents as well. There were lots of people who assumed: “Today is Ancelotti’s last day.” Wrong. Just fifteen minutes into the game, we were already winning, 3–0. They were not just wrong, they were dead wrong. By December, we were in first place, and by the end of the season, we’d been moved upstairs to Serie A. From jeering and catcalls to triumph: while waiting for the specialists, I had pulled off the first Italian miracle.

And we triumphed in spite of the terrifying January market. We were fielding the 4-4-2; the central midfielders, Mazzola and Colucci, seemed unreliable at first because they were still young. So we decided to intervene. We still needed to improve our strikers, and the general manager, Dal Cin, had reassured me: “We’ll do great things together. It’s a promise.”

One day, right after the Anglo-Italian Cup, I walked into my little office. There, waiting for me, was Nando De Napoli, a former teammate on the Italian national team at the World Cup of 1986: “Nando, what a surprise! How are you?”

“Fine, Carletto. How are you?”

“Doing great, Nando. You should have called me. I didn’t know you were in the neighborhood. If I’d known you were coming, we could have had lunch.”

“Oh, yeah, well …”

“By the way, Nando, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“I’m your new midfielder.”

I pretended to smile, but inside I was sobbing. I turned around, and standing behind me was Di Mauro, who was young, I guess, once, but that was years ago, when I was playing for Roma. I didn’t ask him what he was doing there. I had a feeling I already knew. Another new player. Oh, thank you, Signore Dal Cin, you’ve really done wonders here. Both of them trained for a while, but I could see that it was hard on them, they couldn’t keep up with the pace of Serie B. Both were at the end of their careers; both were recovering from injuries. One day, I decided to put them on the field, in an away match against Delio Rossi’s Foggia, a team that didn’t just run; it flew. They moved down the field a thousand miles an hour; we couldn’t keep up with them even in our imaginations. De Napoli and Di Mauro were the pair of thinkers on the Reggiana team. Everyone knows that thinking takes time. Too much time, in some cases. While our reinforcements were clearing the rust out of their