Carlo Ancelotti_ The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius - Alessandro Alciato [38]
Mazzola and Colucci suddenly became reliable; they were suddenly the right age, too. They started to play again, and they took the team all the way up to Serie A.
I have positive memories of that time. It was a happy time. It was the beginning of my career, but I expected that in my first year of coaching I would run into a lot more problems than I did. The players were fantastic. They helped me whenever they could, from the first day to the last. So did the team owners. It was a Reggiana with no famous names but with some exceptional people. Gregucci, Di Mauro, Ballotta, Mazzola, Simutenkov, Paci, La Spada, Di Costanzo, Pietranera, Gandini, Tangorra, Colucci, Schenardi, Tonetto, Cevoli, Caini, De Napoli, and Strada. Thanks, boys. In twelve months, I had already experienced everything: fear, whistles, catcalls, joy, the bottom and the top of the rankings, a near-firing, followed by a resurrection, a bad market, and even a poor man’s Maradona. An incredibly rich experience. And a useful one, because, for the first time, I felt as if I should thank Capello, the gruff old guy who never let me play. In the meantime, he had also refused to accept the position of coach for Parma. He had come to an agreement with the team, but, at the last minute, he pulled out. With him gone, Parma called me. A team in Serie A. The Via Emilia—the Roman road that runs across northern Italy —is a sweet place for me: a return to my origins, to the city where I grew up as a player, where I’d played in the youth league. I was born in Reggiolo, but I lived in Felegara. So Parma was my second home.
I found myself in the middle of a transfer campaign that had been planned and executed by others (it’s something that happens …). I was coaching players I didn’t know, footballers that I’d never even heard of: Thuram, Crespo, Chiesa, Verón, Rivaldo, and Cafu. Then there was Bravo, coming from Paris Saint-Germain, Amaral, and Zé Maria (José Marcelo Ferreira). Well, I knew who Rivaldo was, but I didn’t know the others. To make it worse, they wanted me to send a kid out to play goalie in Serie A, a child, a goalkeeper who was still green behind the ears. I thought they were joking, but they were dead serious. “Carletto, look; he’s a good goalie. He can block anything.”
“Fine, fine. What’s his name?”
“Gianluigi Buffon.”
“And who is he?”
The new team drafts were decided by Sogliano and Cavaliere Pedraneschi, the son of the Cavaliere Pedraneschi who, when I was just fifteen, came out to my small town to recruit me as a player for Parma after I had been rejected by Reggiana and Modena. I owed a debt of gratitude, through family connections, to the cavaliere, and he was just the first in a long series of mentors and benefactors. That is why I never objected to their recruits, which had in any case lost Verón at the last minute (who had been requested by Sampdoria in exchange for Chiesa), Rivaldo (who was asking for too much money and was replaced by Strada, whom I had coached when I was in Reggio), and Cafu (who decided at the last minute that he couldn’t leave Palmeiras, a Brazilian club owned by Parmalat, the dairy company that also part-owned Parma).
“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