|
這應該就是訪問的內容：
The Last Gladiator: Kevin Buckley talks No10s and petrol pumps with a star who is almost as powerful a symbol of Roma as the Colosseum.
“YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE. I’M A ROMA BOY,” SAYS FRANCESCO TOTTI.
TWO YOUNG WOMEN CLAP A GOAL, their faces lit up in astonishment. Their blue and white scarves honour Sampdoria. But the scorer wears the yellow and red of Roma. All around the compact Luigi Ferraris stadium in the backstreets of Genoa, thousands of awe-struck home fans are applauding. But it is the opposition who have scored. Home supporters saluting an opponent’s goal is a rare sight anywhere. In Italy – the land that fair play forgot – it is almost unheard of. That was in November. Now, with Serie A’s winter break over, Roma’s thoughts are turning to the UEFA Champions League visit of Lyon in February. But the architect of that inspiring sporting moment has something more immediate on his mind as he plonks himself on to a maroon plastic chair by the empty swimming pool at Trigoria, Roma’s training complex, south of the Italian capital.
Club captain Francesco Totti self-consciously nurses the bandaged middle finger on his left hand, a souvenir from a Coppa Italia match that week. It was painful enough to make him forfeit training for one day. “Oh, it’s not broken, but it was really badly twisted, sprained,” he says in his trademark heavy Roman accent, sliding the digit out of the blue sling to inspect it. “It’s annoying more than anything.”
But sitting in the bright morning sunshine of an unseasonably warm Roman winter, Totti’s finger is the least of his physical concerns. The 30-year-old’s left tibia and ankle bones still carry more metal screws and bolts than a 1970s schoolboy’s Meccano set. They are the residue of the operations necessitated by the injury, which in February 2006, wrecked what most Serie A observers recognise was his best season since the club lifted the scudetto in 2001. The metal intruders will remain until a further operation in June this year.
The timing, and extent, of that career-threatening injury could have devastated a less-confident footballer. After years of underperforming on the biggest international stages: European Championships, World Cups, Champions league, Totti, it seemed to everyone in Italy, was peaking at the perfect time for the 2006 World Cup. Before the injury, he was a leading a rampant young Roma side to a-then-record eleven straight wins in Serie A. Then crack.
Totti somehow defied sports science to make it into Marcello Lippi’s Italy squad. Modestly, he takes little credit for such a remarkably quick return. “It was mainly down to the dedicated work of the doctors, the physios here at Roma, they all did great work.” He doesn’t mention the days and weeks of lonely physical effort he endured. “Well, yeah, I had to do a lot of work myself,” he concedes. “I had to put in 8 hours a day in the gym, and so on.”
Although the Azzurri won, Totti’s recovery, paradoxically, did little to change ambiguous perceptions of him beyond his native Italy. Another big tournament, the world shrugged, another underpar Totti. “Honestly, for me I’m sorry not to have been at one hundred per cent,” he says. “But after all, if someone had said at the beginning of the tournament ‘You can be there and only be 30 per cent fit and win the World Cup,’ I would have accepted it willingly even if not playing my best. I contributed what I could in that condition.”
His most dramatic contribution was arguably the blasted penalty that sank Australia in the last 16. When a RAI TV reporter asked him if he had ever worried that he might miss, he replied instantly, “No, never,” utterly bemused by the question.
Significantly, that World Cup medal is only the second major success in Totti’s 14-year professional career that began with his Roma debut in March 1993 when he was just 16. The other is the Serie A title he won with his beloved Giallorossi in 2001. He scored 13 goals that season and made many more. In doing so, he gave the most conspicuous example of a captain inspiring and dragging, when necessary, his side to the title since Maradona won Serie A with Napoli. However, despite his relative lack of trophies, Totti’s place in the pantheon of creative No10s who have graced the game is secure. It is some achievement for a player, who has given his lifelong allegiance to a club without the financial firepower of Europe’s elite. Even club officials readily admit he is “Roma’s greatest ever player – by a long way.”
Born in 1976, five days after Ronaldo and two days before Shevchenko, Totti’s early days are almost as mythological as the early lives of those who ruled the Roman empire. The legends tell of a ten-month-old boy who wouldn’t give the ball back, a five-year-old who won his first football trophy, and a nine-year-old in the stands who, to a round of applause, headed a wayward pass back to the very spot on the pitch where the pass had come from. Even as a child, it seems, he played with a sense of theatre, as if football isn’t just a game, but can be a performance too, providing you have the talent.
Like many Roma, fans Totti was mesmerized by the artistry of Giuseppe Giannini, the No10 who was worshipped as Il Principe (the Prince). Today, Totti has replaced Giannini in the fans’ affections and even the old master has paid tribute to his successor, saying, “Every time he touches the ball a light comes on.”
As a gifted 23-year-old at Euro 2000, Totti sulked pitchside after being excluded by then coach Dino Zoff. But he played a key role in Italy’s rollercoaster tournament, introducing his imprudent chipped penalty kick – the cucchiaio or spoon – against the Netherlands, only for Italy to lose the final to France.
At World Cup 2002 he, like most of Giovanni Trapattoni’s squad, disappointed before he was red carded in the infamous defeat by South Korea. At Euro 2004 he let himself and his country down by getting himself suspended for reacting to the constant niggling of Christian Poulsen by spitting at the Danish defender. This petulant moment cost him millions in sponsorship deals as his image plummeted.
Nowadays there is a new maturity about Totti. Marriage, fatherhood, a multi-million-per-year contract, all mean, he says, “I will spend my entire career at Roma, it’s impossible that I’ll ever leave.” Together they have given him a serenity that has allowed his awesome talent to flourish.
His lob from outside the area against Inter in November 2005 is one of the most talked about examples of Totti magic since the chipped penalty in Amsterdam 2000. Italian television pundit Giampere Mughini marveled that Totti had “gone to Milan and taught them football in their own backyard.”
That was surpassed by his goal at Sampdoria, a breathtaking amalgam of audacity, power and technique. Totti glided down the left into the penalty area as team-mate Marco Cassetti flighted a high diagonal lob over the defensive line from the right side of midfield. With a defender closing in to block, Roma’s No10 met the dropping ball half way into the area, not even a yard inside its left border. A first time left-foot volley at knee height sent the ball soaring at 45 degrees across the face of the goalmouth to bulge the net at the far-right post.
It was football as ballet, theatre, performance art, a beautiful creation worthy of the quixotic characters that have made the No10 jersey something special. “When I was a little kid, sure I had my inspirations. Maradona, Baggio. Then there was Zola. Players who have made history,” he says, before adding thoughtfully, “But let’s say that every No10 has his own style, his technique, and way of playing. That changes depending upon when you play. The era you play in. The epoch.”
And football has changed. “In those days, the game was more beautiful, then there was more technique. Yes, the game has become more physical, it is less beautiful,” he admits, nodding. “It’s more about business and all that. But it’s still a beautiful game.”
The door out on to Roma’s patio opens and a messenger says the mister, the coach, is calling Totti for training. Totti stays put.
As a creative lynchpin, Totti is accustomed to being fouled, niggled, kicked, taunted and pushed. “Lately it’s a bit less actually,” he says, matter of factly. “I don’t know why. There seems to be more respect from opponents and officials.” Does it annoy him that spectators underestimate just how much physical battering he takes? “It’s not only me; it’s like that for all the technical players.”
Luca Valdiserri, the Rome-based sports writer with Il Corriere della Sera newspaper has a different explanation. “It’s because in Luciano Spalletti’s formation he is playing closer to goal, where defenders are more careful about clattering someone.”
But it’s not only the technical abilities that have endeared Totti to the Roma fans. Born and bred in the capital, he has spent his entire career in the red-and-yellow jersey, beginning in the junior sides. “He is a symbol not only for Roma the club, but of Rome the city,” says Valdiserri. “The fact that he stayed loyal means so much to Romans, who feel disliked by people from other parts of Italy.” It is the equivalent of Maradona remaining with Boca Juniors, or Zidane staying forever at Bordeaux. Only Gigi Riva at Cagliari in the 1960s and 1970s can compare to Totti’s home-town loyalty.
Huge transfers, to Madrid, Milan or Torino, have been repeatedly offered. And spurned. “If I had to choose another league, then Spain is where I’d feel best,” he admits. “English football is based on physicality, that’s what strikes me. To be honest, I don’t like it much. Certainly it’s different,” he laughs, “it’s interesting, like a rollercoaster.” His loyalty has cost him. Players at bigger clubs can count on half-a-dozen Champions League appearances each season. “That experience massively improves a player,” says Valdiserri. “Totti has missed out on that, which in many ways explains his performances with Italy. He has never been poor, but people have never seen the same Totti with the Azzurri that they see with Roma.”
In return for his loyalty, the fair-haired local lad from the ordinary family – parents Fiorella and Enzo had clerical jobs in the public sector – in the working-class neighborhood of San Giovanni, has become more than just a popular footballer. “He’s part of Roma, like the mayor, but more popular than the real mayor, Walter Veltroni,” declares Stefano, the loquacious taxi driver working the Trigoria run. “Totti is Totti. We call him Il Re, the King of Rome.”
Totti’s accent, the almost abrasive directness, the sheer physicality of a typical in-your-face Roman, has given him a unique image of a rough diamond defiantly lacking the finesse of some of Italy’s northern idols. It is no coincidence that his best mate in the Azzurri squad is southern boy Rhino Gattuso. When asked what he would have been if not a footballer, Totti shoots back unhesitatingly: “Petrol-pump attendant.” There’s not a flicker of humour in his chiseled face and, after an awkward silence, it’s clear he’s not joking.
He is now at an age when many of his contemporaries are contemplating retirement or loss of form. There is no hint that Totti is thinking of anything but games, goals and trophies – though not, despite persistent demands, for Italy at present. His splendid form this season suggests that his best is yet to come. But then his game has always been about speed of thought, not speed of foot, and a sense that football, as a spectacle, requires melodrama and magic. Watching Totti run a Roma performance like that afternoon in Genoa remains one of the game’s greatest pleasures. It’s easy to see why Trapattoni once dubbed him the “Van Gogh” of Italian football, even suggesting he could do things that his old team-mate Gianni Rivera couldn’t.
The door on to the patio bursts open for a second time and this time Spalletti himself steps out, tapping his wrist to indicate the time. “He has to be the footballer now,” says Spalletti. It’s said with a charming smile, but is a sideswipe at how his star’s celebrity status can obstruct the simple work of football. The king of Rome hesitates momentarily, then jumps up, shakes hands and walks quickly back to work.
|
发表于 2007-4-5 14:22:14