• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

We never had time to go back, but one day I’ll return to Parma with my Chelsea players. And there’s only one problem to overcome as far as they’re concerned: the sun shines in Parma, so they’ll be disoriented, especially Lampard and Terry, the English ones … They’ll look up at that strange orange ball in the middle of the sky, scratch their heads, and ask in unison: “Uh, what’s that?” They’ll be frightened, even more frightened than they were when they heard Zhirkov singing karaoke. They’ve never seen the sun in their lives. I have, but in my first ten days in London, I came close to forgetting what it looks like. It rained. The whole time. Day and night, around the clock. I left the house in the morning like a small child strolling down Ocean Drive on his way to the beach in Miami, without a bucket and spade but wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and I’d come home in the evening like an Alaskan sleigh dog, without a tail but chilled to the bone. All the same, I got used to the cold weather, and I got used to my new life: the English were a crucial part of that. I can go wherever I want without being stopped on the street, that’s the exciting new change for me. I can go to the supermarket and the only people who come up to me are security guards, looking at my overflowing shopping cart and wondering, with a hint of suspicion, “Is this a robbery?” Other people recognize me but they treat me like one of them. They leave me alone, they respect my privacy, and nearly all the autographs I signed this year were for Italian fans, who nonetheless have a place in my heart and always will. It’s an attitude that makes up a part of a larger picture, the culture of football fans in England: people go to the stadium to cheer on their team; you know that if you make a mistake you’ll pay for it; there are kids in the stands, not guys with baseball bats. And a manager can live without as much pressure, there’s more leisure time—time to think, time to live your life, and time to work better.

And, in my case, time to win. In the Premier League, we began in grand style, encouraged by Abramovich’s request (“I want Chelsea’s style of play to be recognized around the world”) and by the formation that I brought with me from Italy: 4-3-2-1, the Christmas tree. The first few times, no one got it—not the sports journalists, not even the coaches of the opposing teams. For a while, it was a walk in the park, I was enjoying myself enormously, and the 3-1 that we stuck to Sunderland in the second game of the season felt almost like a physical pleasure. It was like running downhill: our confidence grew, and the players were happy, too, because they were trying something new—they weren’t bored. I would change the way we played depending on Anelka’s position. Things went great until December, when our opponents started to figure out how to beat us, and our winning streak started to flag, which was inevitable anyway. We lost to Manchester City, and we drew with Everton, West Ham, and Birmingham. It’s normal not to win every match in a season; when people said we should never lose a game I wanted to laugh, but it made me laugh just as hard when they said we’d never bring the trophies home … We recovered and we started running again at our own pace, and without giving away too many secrets. For one simple reason: there aren’t any secrets—or maybe just one.

A times table. Like the ones they give you in elementary school, when you learn to count and do multiplication. You slide beads on an abacus, you count sheep before falling asleep (to tell the truth, I always counted lambs, they’re tender and easier to digest), and over time the arithmetic filters into your mind. We did our calculations right after we were catapulted out of the running for the Champions League by Inter, then Champions of Europe, at a moment in the season that was so precarious it could easily have slid into disaster. In the past, Chelsea had always had a hard time recovering from roundhouse punches like that, so the day after our defeat we