Newsgroup: italia.cagliari.discussioni
Titolo: Zolissimo

Zolissimo
As a boy in Sardinia, Gianfranco Zola was destined for football, but it was
at Chelsea, at 30, that 'the little magician' came into his own. So why
return to play at home, Paula Cocozza asks him
Saturday August 16, 2003
The Guardian
In Cagliari, the first city of Sardinia, they have been talking about the
arrival of Gianfranco Zola for years. Every end of season has brought with
it another hopeful inquiry from the club, another disappointing reply from
the player's agent. Then, this year, the phone call came the other way
round, from Zola's lawyer. It might be time for the homecoming, he said.
The news arrived in England the day that David Beckham was officially
presented as a Real Madrid player in Spain, a golden 40ft image of his head
behind him, his wife before him, the British ambassador to her side, two
billion in front of their television sets around the world. And as they
waited for their three words of Spanish, a quieter leave-taking was
beginning. For Zola, at 37, it was the closing of the circle, a return to
the island he had left at 23 in search of a career; for English football, it
was a different kind of loss. Unlike Beckham, Zola has never featured on
anything but the back pages of the newspapers, never worn outlandish clothes
(though the affable jumpers raised a smile among his Chelsea team-mates),
never been the sort of icon you can call an icon. He became a personality
precisely because he never behaved like one.
The Zolas travel as a family. In England, they arrived as four and left,
seven years later, as five. In between, the man from the mountains, as he is
sometimes known back home, was taken to heart as if he were our own. He was
invited to join the British Library's Adopt A Book campaign ("Me! The
British Library! I mean..."), where his patronage paid for the restoration
of Mary Davey's Pleasant Reminiscences Of A Two-Year Residence In The Island
Of Sardinia; he was touted, along with Madonna, as an ambassador for
London's 2012 Olympic bid (it is hard to think of another sentence in which
they might sensibly be paired); he came to "appreciate" tea with milk, got
about by tube - especially the three stops on the Piccadilly line that took
him and the kids from their Knightsbridge home to the Trocadero amusement
centre. He says that queueing is mistaken by Italians as an indication of
English aloofness - living in London taught him to see it as a sign of
"great civic education". He says the London imprint is on his two elder
children - in the games they play, in the way they talk. In Sardinia, the
Zolas will speak English, lest they forget. And, in acknowledgment of all
the above, his homeland has given him an English nickname: Box Of Tricks.
The respect Zola achieved as a forward with Chelsea was one that he had
never quite found in either Sardinia or mainland Italy. In England, he was
voted player of the year in his first season and Chelsea's all-time best in
his last. More than that, he earned the love of fans of all clubs with his
industry and invention. He became for us the spirit of football. Not just
because of all the things he didn't do - drink, smoke, look sullen - nor
because he was so humble and seemed so glad to be among us. But because he
was capable of magic.
He was running towards goal on the left flank and the ball was flying
long-distance towards him. He quickened his step when he saw it coming,
slowed as he watched it come over his head and hit the grass before him. It
was last April, he was 10 yards from the byline, the angle was narrowing.
And as the ball rose up, he clipped it midair with the side of his foot to
send it on a new arc, over the goalkeeper's head. From one end of the field
to the other it had bounced just twice: on the first, Zola had administered
his only touch, on the second it had crossed the goal-line. Chelsea had
beaten Everton 4-1. Freeze the replay and you will see smiles on the faces
of his opponents.
On the main road out of Cagliari, the thumb-up on the sign points jauntily
up a whitening lane to the club's sports centre. The heat is thick with
pine, but everything else is turning brown - the bodies of the players
exercising, their shorts rolled up to lengthen the tans, the spiny shrubs,
the grass under their feet. Zola, who doesn't roll up his shorts, arrives in
his hotel having followed an afternoon training session with a late
cappuccino - a "disaster" for an Italian outside breakfast, a club-mate
points out. It is another habit he's imported from England.
"Leaving Chelsea hasn't been the easiest thing," he says. "I could only have
left for Cagliari. But with time it matured, matured always more, this
desire one day or another to see, to play here in Sardinia." The bond with
his homeland, he says, has always been strong. Each summer the Zolas
returned to their house on the north-east coast. He played in charity
matches and, while other players haggled over marketing rights, he lent his
image to Sardinian companies for free. His new team-mates can scarcely
believe they'll be playing alongside him. "Zola! You're ours!" one fan
yelled at his first training session in Cagliari. The club had seen him as a
teenager and turned him down. Now, by becoming a national treasure abroad,
he has also become one at home.
Ignazio, another fan, has left a message on the website of the Unione Sarda
newspaper that is echoed in countless others: "I would like to express all
my happiness and that of those who, like my father and thousands of other
Sardinians, emigrated for reasons of work. I believe I speak for all those
who, living abroad, have attached themselves to the figure of Gianfranco.
The Sardinian population abroad thanks you for the honour that you have
demonstrated and is ready to dream."
Zola was three when his dad came home with his first football (his mother
became interested later, "when her son was turning into a good player"). It
came from the Corrasi football club, where his father volunteered his spare
time, between jobs as a lorry driver and farm worker. Corrasi takes its name
from the mountain that looks down on the small town of Oliena (which takes
its name from the oil that is cultivated in its olive groves). Sardinians
call this area the island within the island. It's a remote part of a remote
place. "Life was simple," says Zola. "Work and family." Too young to take
part, he would go to watch the team train. They called him the mascotte ; he
had an honorary place in team photographs.
"I was one of those kids who always had a ball between their feet," he says.
He played around and about Oliena, with friends or on his own, against a
wall or between themselves, trying out the tricks he'd seen on TV. For all
his imagination, he wasn't a creative child. "I was rubbish at painting, at
music. I couldn't even sing. But I spent a lot of time dreaming, with my
eyes open. Dreaming about football... about football... about... football."
At 11, he joined his father's team. "Graccialino," says Vincenzo Palimodde,
then a Corrasi director. "Do you know what graccialino means? Very, very
skinny, very weak, but with the most super-fine technique we had ever seen.
We used to watch and ask each other, 'How on earth is it possible that this
tiny boy can strike the ball with such force?' The answer was his technique,
and that was something he was born with."
At 16, Zola had a choice to make. If you want to succeed, he was told, you
need to be out training five times a day. He couldn't do that and go to
school, so he gave up school, joined a gym and started to build himself up.
At 18 he was signed by Nuorese (in nearby Nuoro, the third city of Sardinia)
and within three years he had moved to Torres (in Sassari, the second city
of Sardinia), in the Italian third division. At 22, he was still plugging
away, still dreaming of making it to the big time. But there was no sign of
a breakthrough. Scouts from the mainland rarely visited. He must have
thought his moment would never arrive. "Hmmm, I certainly knew it was going
to be difficult," he says. "But never, never, never did I feel defeated or
discouraged. What happened occurred naturally because I loved what I was
doing."
What happened was that Luciano Moggi, then general manager of Napoli
football club, now of Juventus and ever a man who can spot a good piece of
business, saw Zola in action. "I have been down to Sardinia," he reported,
"and I can assure you that this is a little Maradona." In fact, both men
were 5ft 6in, but at Napoli Zola soon found himself operating as Maradona's
understudy. Zoladona, they called him, and he spent most of his first season
watching the great man from the substitutes' bench.
Gradually, stories of his apprenticeship drifted back to Oliena. In
training, Maradona had kicked the ball 20 yards with such spin that it
turned all the way back on itself to its master's feet. Zola had watched a
few times, then produced an exact replica. Zolito - little Zola - Maradona
had said, is truly great. When Maradona left, due to what Zola will describe
only as his having had "a few problems with other things", Zola became the
new occupant of his No 10 shirt. In Italy, it is the number given to the
fantasista , the fantasy man.
"Sardinians have a physical structure that's very well adapted to football,"
says Franco Masia, a youth-team coach at Cagliari. "Little fellows,
lightning moves, agile." These have always been Zola's trademarks. Masia
says it's to do with Sardinian DNA. Zola's feet move fast, and he can strike
the ball with every part of them. His passing, former Chelsea team-mate Mark
Hughes once said, is "so accurate you don't have to break stride". Zola
creates astonishing trajectories - curvy free-kicks, cock-legged flicks and
plopping lobs - because he understands that finding space on a football
pitch is nothing to do with where people are in that moment but where they
will be in the next one.
Zola agrees about the DNA. "Yes," he says, "and I'm proud of it." But there
have been times when it has also been his limitation. His biggest move in
Italy came in 1993, when Napoli, in financial difficulty, sold him to Parma,
in the first division, still a notch or two down from the really big sides.
His journey north coincided with a drift towards a more defensive style of
play and Zola was seen as a luxury player: capable of moments of individual
brilliance but unwilling to switch to other positions. The qualities that
were now unsuitable to the team seemed to echo mainland stereotypes of
Sardinians; "insular, hard-headed", Zola says. His international career
boils down to a comparatively slight 35 appearances - in Italy he never had
the clout of playing for a really big club, and once in England he was
largely overlooked - one rogue sending-off in the 1994 World Cup, and a
missed penalty that ended Italy's already slim chances of progressing in the
1996 European Championships.
Did he ever fear that, being Sardinian, he would not be accepted?
"Absolutely not," he replies quickly. "I have only feared not playing to my
potential." He says that it's not worth insisting on the point, that if he
had been playing at the top of his game the club would have accommodated
him; and, anyhow, if things hadn't gone badly there, he would never have
come to London and lived such a happy time. "I also believe I've got the
same strength of character that the people have got here. They're used to
fighting for everything they achieve in life. I come from a place in
Sardinia where everything is hard. If I hadn't had the strength and spirit
of character, I could never have achieved what I did achieve."
While many players joining the Premiership from overseas came with their
best times behind them, Zola was made in England. He had his golden era
here; it shone before him when, at the age of 30, he arrived at Chelsea. "In
London," he says brightly, "they appreciated a boy from Sardinia. In
London!" But the amazement with which he reports this news suggests that
instinct has always expected the opposite.
At Cagliari they have begun to make the most of their isolation. The sponsor
on the chests of the players' jerseys reads Terra Sarda (Sardinian earth), a
slogan devised and funded by the regional council for the purpose of
promoting all things Sardinian. Last year, the club inaugurated a new youth
policy. While others trawl farther and farther afield in search of talent,
Cagliari will sign up only Sardinians. So now they advertise open days in 10
towns and the number of children attending has doubled. All 150 boys on
their books were born on the island. Zola thinks this is a good idea. His
arrival, along with that of Gianluca Festa, also via England, takes the
number of Sardinian first-teamers to five.
"It's about valuing local talent," says the manager of Cagliari's team of
11-year-olds, before adding, more sheepishly, "though, of course, there is
also the problem of the sea."
The problem of the sea is that it separates Sardinia from mainland Italy by
120 miles. Until recently, says Festa, you practically had to sell real
estate to buy a family flight out. Transportation costs inhibit the local
economy, make it hard to export anything; not that the mainland cares. The
national newspapers barely have correspondents here. Parliament in Rome
seems a long way away.
"At times we tend to exaggerate this," says Zola. "But it is true that being
an island brings with it difficulty - in all sectors, not just football.
We're a bit... a bit... how can I put it? Sardinia at times is like a state
all on its own. It's harder for players to make themselves known outside
here. You remain detached, a thing apart. You have to go abroad to find your
space professionally. That's how it was for me and, I think, for others,
too."
His arrival from Parma coincided with a wider pattern of migration in
football. After the Bosman ruling allowed out-of-contract players to move
freely, the sports pages of every national newspaper described the drift of
players from abroad in the same terms that the Daily Mail today speaks of
asylum seekers. They were the foreign legion, an influx, and the result, it
was said, was chaos: dressing rooms that spoke in all tongues (they didn't
learn English because they didn't reckon on stopping), and the sight of
players wearing gloves in winter (didn't like to get stuck in). Zola, who
followed Gianluca Vialli and Roberto Di Matteo to Chelsea, was described by
the Mirror as part of "an Italian job lot". Because they affronted the
domestic football economy, they were called "imports", a noun that was often
preceded in newspaper reports by "glamorous" or "luxury".
But Zola doesn't really do glamour. For a start, he smiles far too often -
when it comes, which is readily, his jaw drops like a drawbridge to let it
out, a jowly, cartoonish spread of teeth that pushes his cheeks in
concertina creases up to his eyes. The same go-its-own-way haircut has hung
around his head since his first player's mugshot was taken at 18. Even
Leicester City players carry their toiletries in Louis Vuitton washbags;
Zola has turned up for charity matches with his boots in a plastic carrier.
He was getting on a bit, people said, when he joined Chelsea on reported
wages of Ł25,000 a week. Was he aware of what was being said? "I became
conscious of it afterwards. There was a lot of distrust of 'foreign' players
when I first arrived. There was a lot of nationalism, a lot of talk of
foreigners stealing places from local kids. But slowly, I think, people
realised that young players were still coming through at a certain level. If
you buy good foreign players, they can do a lot of good to the domestic
game. They bring new things, new ideas, different ways of playing."
He smiles at the word "imports" - but only because he smiles at everything -
and says, "You know, it's a bit unpleasant to compare a footballer to an
object." Footballers are workers who do a particular kind of work, a work
that's very dear to the people.
It might be part of Zola's legacy that foreign players are rarely spoken of
now; they have become just players. But there is one adjective he has never
shaken off. In England he was variously "the little Sardinian", the "little
genius", the "little magician", but he was always little. In descriptions of
Zola's game, he nipped and darted, scampered and scurried. The day after he
came off the bench, in the European Cup Winners' Cup final in 1998, to
dispatch 22 seconds later the bullet goal that put his side on the winners'
podium, the International Herald Tribune began its match report with the
words: "Gianfranco Zola, one of the smallest professional soccer players in
Europe..."
Did he take all this as evidence of affection or abuse? "Well, I don't deny
that at times it got on my nerves," he says. "I don't know. I've never
really looked inside to find out why it annoyed me," he adds, probing his
heart with an inquisitive fist. "As time passed, I got used to it. I
accepted it. I... absorbed it."
He says there are different kinds of discrimination in football. "It is
discrimination when people think that a boy who is small of stature cannot
become a footballer of value. In the beginning, I was severely undervalued
because I wasn't very tall and I wasn't very big," he says, hauling himself
up in the big leather armchair in the lounge of his hotel. "Many people
certainly didn't foresee a rosy future for me. But as it turns out," he
smiles, "they were wrong." So he would never have wished he were taller.
"Oh, no!" he says, pulling a horrified face. "Only a couple of thousand
times."
Zola turned down a reported Ł1.3m for one final year with Chelsea (about
half his previous year's salary), more from elsewhere, in favour of
Cagliari's comparatively slight ?400,000 or so a year (around Ł280,000).
When the Russian entrepreneur Roman Abramovich took over Chelsea and raised
the offer to Ł3m, Zola declined again - not because he had signed a
contract, but because he had given Cagliari his word. It was the maturation
of the bond.
Abramovich's response was innovative. He phoned Cagliari. How much, he
asked, for the whole club? "I must say, I was really, really surprised at
that," says Zola. "I took it as a compliment. But I had made my choice."
So what brought Zola back?
Cagliari has many things to offer, some of which are, according to local
knowledge: not much traffic, it's cheaper and more beautiful than the north
of the island, and there's a swimming pool down the road frequented by
visiting astronauts because it gives the sensation of weightlessness. Now,
of course, it also has Zola, and as a result the mayor's office is mulling
over its strategy for the next international tourism fair. But what it
doesn't have is a football club with trophies: Cagliari have won only one
Scudetto (the Serie A title), but it isn't on display because someone broke
into the office and stole it. They play in the second division, where as the
American author Joe McGinniss once said, there's "never a dull moment,
except during the 90 minutes of the match".
It certainly wasn't the money that brought him back - during negotiations,
that was the last thing he mentioned. It wasn't the quality of the football.
It wasn't even the prospect of a quiet life - the people will make him
suffer, they say, because they expect so much of him, expect him to take
them back to the top division.
No, Zola's return, according to those who know him, was simply this: a grand
gesture of extraordinary love. For while his value grew abroad, he chose to
redeem it back home, cashed himself in, credited the island for what he had
become.
"I know very well that my name brings with it responsibility," he says. "But
after so many years abroad, I want to exhibit myself, if we can put it like
that, in front of my land and in front of my people. It's something I feel a
great deal. More than any other thing it draws me, fascinates me, stimulates
me. Certainly, this is a land where we've never been very rich. We've never
had particular favours. To be able to bring pleasure to people here, as I
did in London, would be the maximum, from a professional and, above all, a
humane point of view."
From the Cagliari club offices, you can see the giant ferries waiting in the
port for their next load. The club president, Massimo Cellino, has been
explaining in tones of sombre politeness why he is delighted to have been
able to turn down Abramovich's offer. Then he remembers something. Hold on,
he says. There's a letter I want to show you. He scoots out and returns with
a blank postcard, grubby and creased. He has been carrying it in his pocket.
It has come from England. "Dear Sir," it reads, "Gianfranco has left us and
joined you - our loss is your gain. You are very, very fortunate. Please,
please take care of him - he is one in a million, a great player, a great
human being."

 the offer to £3m, Zola declined again - not because he had signed a
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I know this because Tyler knows this.