Carlo Ancelotti (2 page)

I stared at it, suspended in midair. It was graceful in a way. It revolved as it flew, defying the law of gravity, like a precision missile. A very smart bomb, a bomb with an impeccable ear for music. As it reached the end of its trajectory, it slowed down and changed direction, like a football someone had kicked with a little downward-curving English on it. The fork was embarrassed, too. At that exact moment, I had my vision. When it comes to food and eating utensils, my brain is a one-way street, leading to my stomach. The association was instantaneous and organic: fork = steak. I smiled, and for an instant I was the happiest man in the
room. Certainly happier than Yuri, who was by now tethered, a hostage, to his subhuman yodel. Čech wanted to put on his helmet to protect his ears. Malouda was the wildest, whistling and howling and stamping his feet as if he were possessed by the devil. It was a three-ring circus. I looked around for a red nose I could strap to my face, but I couldn’t find one—no clowns, boys, not tonight. Zhirkov still hasn’t fully recovered from the trauma. But thanks to people like him, and like me, like all the others, and like Bruno Demichelis (who is a genuine psychologist and a refined tenor, and who sang
Nessun Dorma
on that unforgettable evening), we became the team that went down in English soccer history by winning the Double, the Premier League and the FA Cup—not forgetting the Community Shield at the beginning of the season against Manchester United. For a long time, I thought that was my favorite trophy, if only because it’s shaped like a plate. And on that plate you can put what you like: I piled it high with passion, with the discovery of a world I knew nothing about. London, England, Chelsea, Abramovich, Stamford Bridge, the Blues, the Queen. Another step in my life, another tile in this incredible mosaic, this splendid adventure. It began with that monstrosity sung by Yuri and it ended with
Volare
, that extraordinary poem set to music that I sang together with my team in front of the thousands of people who invaded Fulham Road, standing atop a double-decker bus, the day after we won the FA Cup final at Wembley against Portsmouth. A corner of the city had become our own immense universe. Untouchable, invulnerable.

It was all very nice, even if it was tough at the beginning. I didn’t speak English well, and so the club sent me to take an
intensive course in the Netherlands (in secret; and, at the same time, it sent all its top managers to study Italian—I don’t know if that was a gesture of respect or because they knew I’d be a useless student). One of the reasons I fit into the locker room was thanks to the fundamental role played by Ray Wilkins, my number two and my friend, because it’s one thing to translate words—plenty of people can do that—but translating feelings is the gift of only a select few. Ray is one of those select few, always present, noble in spirit, a real blue-blood, Chelsea flows in his veins. His heart beats in two languages, and that helped me. Without him, we couldn’t have won a thing, and in particular we wouldn’t have started the year at supersonic speed. The first game and the first trophy: the Community Shield against Manchester United, and we beat them in a penalty shoot-out: Ancelotti 1, Sir Alex 0. I had never been to Wembley before and it was a moving experience—maybe I was more curious than moved, but I still knew how it was going to end. We had trained too hard and too well to lose, I had absolutely no intention of embarrassing myself in front of my new players, and they had no intention of putting on a bad show in front of the new coach from Italy. I said to the team in the locker room: “We are a first-class group of players, but we don’t understand that yet. We need to attack, impose our style of play, be recognized for what we do. I am going to learn a lot today.” One thing, in any case, had already become clear to me in the preceding weeks: John Terry is the captain of all team captains, he was born with the captain’s armband on his arm. Even without the band, it’s as if he wears it anyway, and that’s how it ought to be. He’s different from all the others, Chelsea is his home, it always has been, ever since the
youth squad. One word from him, and the locker room holds its breath. He’s the first one to sit down at meals, the first one to stand up. Outside, he is the first, in the absolute sense of the term. Being part of this club is his mission, that’s how he was made. He pays close attention to the performances of the youngest players in the youth team, he keeps up, he knows all the scores, he misses nothing (although he often loses at ping-pong in the dining room—and when that happens, watch out). He works twice as hard as everyone else, he has the sense of responsibility of someone who runs a company, a people, a philosophy that above all has to win. There is no room for second place; there can only be room for us.

For us—and in the end we went to take our prize. Climbing the stairs that lead from the pitch up to the stands was something I had only ever seen on television, I had always been curious to know what people think in that moment. I found out soon enough: “I have to lose weight.” Jesus, yes, I have to lose some weight. I felt like I was climbing Everest, I was huffing and puffing, out of shape, I couldn’t get enough air. But when I finally got to the top, I understood: it was like starting an ascent to heaven. To the sky. Which is the same color as our team shirts, and that can’t be a coincidence. Once they put the trophy—or perhaps I should say, the plate—in my hand, I hoisted it with enormous pride. Priceless, unique, and incredibly light. Magic seconds. And then an imperceptible sense of discomfort seized hold of me for an instant; but that always happens when I see an empty plate.

S
occer is like having lunch with your friends: the more you eat, the hungrier you get. It’s the chef and the company that make all the difference; and I love the company of David Beckham. One evening, while he was playing for A. C. Milan, I invited Beckham to dinner in a restaurant in Parma. By the end of the evening, he refused to leave the restaurant. I kept insisting, and he kept pleading with me, “Please, one more course.” At one point I considered calling the police—handcuffs would certainly have stopped him from cramming any more tortellini into his mouth. In the end, I managed to convince him with these words: “Look, David, if we don’t leave this restaurant right now, I’m going to arrange another Spice Girls reunion tour.” Fourteen seconds later we were back in the car, hurtling back toward Milan, with the radio off. Open
parenthesis: Let me say something about David. He was a big surprise to me, and a positive one. When he arrived in Italy, I expected to be dealing with a movie star homesick for Los Angeles, one of those players who thinks too much about gossip and fame and not enough about football. But I was wrong. He’s an impeccable professional, a workaholic, and an almost excessively well-mannered gentleman, with all the class of a very honest person. And then there’s the fact that he likes Emilian delicacies, which is obviously what matters most. Close parenthesis.

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 all gathered in the locker room of our training grounds in Cobham. The venerable old men all spoke—Terry, Drogba, Cech, and Lampard (another magnificent example of English leadership; when I see him on the field, it makes me happy). I was proud of us in that twenty minutes, we understood that we had lost a great deal but that we could win much, much more. I was very clear in what I had to say: “The Premiership and the FA Cup are still ours for the taking. Only six teams have managed to pull off a double in 140 years, but boys, it’s our turn now.” The plan—and it wasn’t exactly a secret plan—was to deflect attention from the Champions League and focus our energies on a new target. “We’re eleven games from the end of the season, and if we play
them well we can go down in history.” At that point, we pulled out our times table. Numbers and statistics, written so clearly that no one could possibly misunderstand. There were only a few numbers, simple, fundamental sums that we needed to keep in mind. The number of training sessions remaining: 50. The number of days we could still devote to achieving our objectives: 60, more or less. The number of games left to play: 11.

The first game was against Blackburn, and to tell the truth, the final score of 1-1 did sort of scare me. Then we exploded like an atomic bomb: 5-0 against Portsmouth, 7-1 against Aston Villa, 2-1 away to Manchester United. All magic numbers that made our times table look pretty special. Our success at Old Trafford was the one that got us the League title, even though in the end Ray Wilkins and I were forced to drink to our victory alone. As is the tradition, a few minutes after the final whistle we went to Sir Alex’s room to drink the usual glass of wine. We walked in, and silence reigned. He sat there staring at a television screen; the set was tuned to a horse race, his greatest love. We were strictly relegated to the background, to some place beyond and behind the background. We stood awkwardly for a while without saying a word, uncertain what to do, and finally did what we had come to do: we drank a glass of wine, to our own health. Bye-bye. Even though I won each of the three games I played against him that season, I still consider Ferguson to be a master of soccer, a teacher in my life, an example I have always looked up to, a colleague to emulate, and in fact, in some ways, unattainable. (Unattainable in the sense that I don’t have a passion for racehorses.) Before heading back to Stamford Bridge, we took on Aston Villa in the FA Cup: 3-0.
Then in the League again: 1-0 at Bolton, we took a beating from Tottenham, we gave 7 to Stoke, then 2-0 against Liverpool, and 8-0 against Wigan. We became Champions of England, I was a foreign king in a friendly country. A slightly tipsy king, if you want to know the truth, because I’ve only seen as much beer in one place as there was in our locker room a few times. The boys were dancing to rap music; I gave it a try too, but without much luck—I have a hard time rhyming credibly in English. I wasn’t thinking all that clearly, and that was when I decided to make a little speech to my team:
“Carissimi signori
, the time has come for you to start learning Italian. We’re colonizing you now. I train Chelsea Champions, Capello is the manager of the National Team …” Obi Mikel, Joe Cole, and Drogba (who is a machine on the field), Malouda (the player who most impressed me with the way he improved) all gave me their approval, in their way: “Oh, you’re right, Carlo,
e che cazzo
 …” I must have missed something, apparently.
Eccheccazzo sì
—Italian for “what the fuck”—they knew Italian better than I did. Couldn’t they have told me before?