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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/sports/soccer/15soccer.html?_r=1&oref=slog
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Italy Develops Taste for Goals
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By JERE LONGMAN
Published: May 15, 2006
FLORENCE, Italy — When he scores a goal — and they have come in shiny 
handfuls, like coins — Luca Toni cups his hand and wiggles it playfully 
near his ear with the glee of a child who hears something rattling in 
his piggy bank.
Fiorentina striker Luca Toni is the first player in 47 years to surpass 
30 goals in Italy's top league, Serie A. He scored 31 this season.
The gesture is actually a playful take on a confused dinner 
conversation he once had with a friend. "Listen, it's Luca," Toni has 
signaled to the crowd for each of his club-record 31 goals in 38 games 
this season for Fiorentina. The stunning number led the Italian League 
and positioned him to win the Golden Boot award as the player judged to 
be Europe's top scorer.
"Do you know me?" he pantomimes for spectators. "Do you understand?"
Toni's audience will grow exponentially next month when he makes his 
anticipated World Cup debut for Italy in Germany. A first-round match 
against the United States is set for June 17, with the Azzurri, or the 
Blues, seeking their first global soccer championship since 1982 and 
hoping to end a string of agonizing early elimination.
[In the past week, though, Toni's achievement and Italy's anticipation 
of the World Cup have been overshadowed by burgeoning scandals in the 
Italian League, whose season has ended.
Four clubs, including Fiorentina and the champion Juventus, are under 
investigation for possible match-fixing. In a related fraud probe, 
Italy revoked the credential of its designated World Cup referee. And 
Gianluigi Buffon, Italy's top goalkeeper, has been questioned by the 
authorities about possible illegal betting activities. All involved 
have denied wrongdoing.
Toni has not been implicated in the scandals. The match-fixing 
investigation apparently centers on the 2004-5 season, before he joined 
Fiorentina. Italy's World Cup roster is due May 15, and it is premature 
to gauge whether the scandals will affect the team's chances. If Toni 
remains unblemished, many believe, he could become a breakout star.
"Players must think only of playing," Toni said of the scandals, his 
remarks relayed by a Fiorentina spokeswoman. "We must believe in clean 
football. We have to wait for justice and clean up the situation."]
Each time Toni scores a goal, launched from a 6-foot-4 frame, he also 
seems to gesticulate against the obscurity in which much of his career 
has languished, as if to say: Finally, do you appreciate my skills?
His ascendancy comes at the relatively late age of 28. Not so long ago, 
Toni nearly quit soccer while playing in Italy's third division, the 
transient, backwater equivalent of Class AA baseball. More to the 
point, Toni is remindful of Kurt Warner, the onetime grocery-store 
clerk and indoor-league unknown who developed Super Bowl acumen at 
quarterback in St. Louis, stacking touchdown passes the way he once 
stacked cans of corn.
"Nobody gives me something," Toni said through an interpreter in a 
recent interview. "Every year I improve. Football is like a magic 
game."
Quietly confident and darkly handsome, with a movie star's jaw and a 
model for a girlfriend, Toni drives a Ferrari and appears in the gossip 
pages as well as the sports pages. Still, he is appreciated for a 
beer-and-pizza lack of pretension, born of the humility of a village 
childhood and delayed professional gratification.
"Many Italian players consider themselves more important than they 
are," said Riccardo Cacioli, a hotel manager and Fiorentina fan. "Toni 
is a simple guy."
On a soccer field, though, Toni's instincts are voracious, predatory. 
And his presence among a group of other rapacious forwards has given 
hope that Italy may abandon its typical caution in the World Cup, a 
deliberate, counterattacking style and highly organized defensive 
posture historically known as catenaccio, or door bolt.
In 27 World Cup matches played since Italy won its third and last title 
in 1982, the Azzurri have scored as many as three goals only twice and 
two goals only nine times. Even during the 1990 World Cup, facing a 
mostly amateur American team in Rome, Italy managed but a 1-0 victory, 
narrowly avoiding an embarrassing tie.
A wrenching, sudden-death loss to France in the final of the 2000 
European championships, a disputed second-round exit from the 2002 
World Cup and a disastrous inability to advance beyond group play in 
the 2004 European championships led to outrage, despair and something 
entirely bizarre. After the 2006 World Cup draw last December, the 
television network Sky Italia suggested the pairings were rigged by 
placing the United States with Italy, Ghana and the Czech Republic to 
create a formidable Group of Death.
Italy worried about the United States soccer team? Times had surely 
changed. What was next? A great pasta nation threatened by Cup 
O'Noodles?
 The mood lightened considerably after Italy routed Germany, 4-1, in an 
exhibition here on March 1, inflating expectations that the Azzurri 
would feature a World Cup lineup with three forwards and the ambition 
for phosphorescent attack.
Marcello Lippi, Italy's manager, has admonished reporters not to 
develop a kind of catenaccio of the mind, a locked way of negative 
thinking about Italian soccer.
Toni said: "We forgot catenaccio. A lot has changed."
Italy is expected to start Toni and Alberto Gilardino up front, with 
Francesco Totti, recovered from a broken fibula and ligament damage in 
his left ankle, in recessed support. There is a history of former 
nobodies finding grace and validation for Italy in the World Cup. 
Salvatore Schillaci, nicknamed Toto and possessing wild, fearless eyes, 
led all scorers with six goals during the 1990 tournament, after having 
made only one previous appearance for the Azzurri.
Schillaci carried his anonymity into the World Cup, while Toni arrives 
with klieg-light expectation, given his 81 goals over the past three 
seasons for Palermo and Fiorentina in the Italian League. But, like 
Schillaci, Toni did not arrive early to the spotlight. His career 
flickered and was nearly extinguished before it gained its postponed 
radiance.
The son of a house painter and a school worker, Toni grew up about two 
hours north of Florence in the village of Serramazzoni, with a 
population of about 6,800, and began playing soccer at age 5 or 6, 
coaxed by an older brother, Andrea. At 17, Toni turned professional, 
but by 21 he was still flailing in the Italian third division. During 
the 1997-98 season at Fiorenzuola, he played little, scored two goals 
in 26 matches and nearly gave up soccer to get another job. A game once 
so joyful now brought only inactivity, frustration, torment.
"I thought, maybe I'm not right to play football," he said.
Give it one more shot, Toni told himself. He began to find the net, and 
bigger clubs began to find him.
By 2000-1, Toni reached the first division, Serie A, then was paired 
for two seasons at Brescia with Roberto Baggio, the Divine Ponytail, 
the best Italian player of his generation. In those two seasons, Toni 
scored 44 goals and said he learned a valuable lesson from Baggio: "If 
you want to be a good soccer player, you must become a good person."
Lippi became manager of the Italian national team in 2004 and embraced 
Toni, who is big and powerful without being lumbering. He is improved 
at heading the ball and is not a great dribbler but deft enough to hold 
the ball. Toni has scored seven goals in 19 appearances with the 
national team, including four during World Cup qualifying — three in a 
game against Belarus.
"He is very strong in the head," Lippi said of Toni's soccer acuity, 
"and has a smell for the goal that is very particular."
Bruce Arena, the manager of the United States team, said of Toni and 
his attacking partner, Gilardino: "They are about being in front of the 
goal and putting away chances. They run pretty well, but they are not 
going to create on the dribble and beat you and score goals. They are 
going to get on the end of things."
Perhaps Toni's only real flaw this season, his first at Fiorentina, was 
failing to convert a penalty kick in a 0-0 draw against Cagliari in 
March. A repeat at the World Cup would send shudders down the length of 
Italy's mountainous spine.
Three times in the past four World Cups, Italy has experienced 
excruciating departures on the losing end of penalty-kick shootouts: in 
the 1990 semifinals against Argentina in Naples; in the 1994 final 
against Brazil at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.; and in the 1998 
quarterfinals against France outside Paris.
"It seems like some kind of curse," Cesare Maldini, then the Italian 
coach, said in 1998.
So expectant for victory was Italy in 1990, the national flag hung 
everywhere, even on clotheslines with the laundry. Nothing hurt worse 
than losing at home, unless it was the awful sight of Baggio ballooning 
his penalty kick in 1994 to give Brazil the title, his head dropping 
like the blade of a guillotine.
"There were no words," said Toni, who watched on television as a 
16-year-old. Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women's basketball coach 
who moved to suburban Philadelphia from Italy as a young boy, looked on 
in disbelief at a summer basketball camp.
"It was like you wanted to kill yourself," Auriemma said, adding of 
Baggio, "That leaves you scarred for life, the fate of a whole country 
on your feet."
Before the latest scandals erupted, Marco Mazzocchi, the television 
host of a popular Italian soccer program, said he had two concerns 
about the 2006 World Cup — Brazil, a five-time winner, and penalty 
kicks. Italians are endearing because they are passionate, emotional, 
excitable, Mazzocchi said, but taking a penalty kick requires 
aloofness, cold detachment.
"It is not a question of fatalism, it is a question of heart, 
involvement," Mazzocchi said. "Certainly to go to penalty kicks is a 
difficulty, and to have lost this many competitions recently weighs on 
us. Let's hope we never get there."
How would Toni perform in that situation, on a world stage? It is the 
one unknown about him. He has never played in the Champions League, 
Europe's most prestigious club tournament, or in a World Cup. Would his 
natural calm prevail? Would his hand end up wiggling at his ear in 
celebration or covering his face in inconsolable hurt?
"I haven't played the World Cup, but I have a big emotion about it," 
Toni said. "I'm happy to live the moment. I want this moment to come as 
soon as possible. I like to live with intensity."
-- 
Andrea de Florence © - ISCF online: 
http://www.iscf.info
Proud Member of "I ragazzi del '99 di ISCF" & "Trio Merdella"
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