Sandro Mazzola was a precursor

All my life spent proving to be up to a father, a shadow from the past that is always present, a fixed thought that returns every time you kick a ball and the resulting trajectory follows a destiny which is never yours alone, but belongs to both of you. In celebrating today the eighty years of Sandro Mazzola – Sandrino, son of the great Valentino – we are here to agree with Sigmund Freud. He argued that the relationship between father and son is based on rivalry. If for the son – at the beginning of the story – the father is a model, then he becomes an obstacle to overcome and finally a rival to fight. From Sandro Mazzola – who was only seven years old when he lost his father Valentino, who died in the Superga tragedy – an evil fate has stolen the possibility of the last two existential passages – the obstacle father, the rival father – freezing the two in the territory where the father it is forever a myth to emulate and the son has to take on a responsibility too great to be dribbled.

In some archive photos, as well as in some grainy archive images, the two Mazzolas – with their father taking his son by the hand – enter the field, in that football church that was Filadelfia: one with boldness of the strong and healthy athlete, the other trotting happily, with the fragility of one who tries to stay within the steps of those who precede him, taking refuge under his wing. We are all children of a common history, children of our fathers, but also – above all – of our talent and our sacrifices. And in this sense the bright career of Sandro Mazzola is there to tell us exactly that.

Discovered by Giuseppe Meazza, protected by Benito “Veleno” Lorenzi, launched in the first team by Helenio Herrera: Mazzola has been the flag of Inter all his life, 417 appearances, 116 goals distilled in seventeen years (1960-1977) crossed by race, with shorts and squeezed on the thighs, darting into the penalty area, in those afternoons of neon light that infused San Siro in that black and white era. And then executive, in two different phases, from 1977 to 1984 – with the Fraizzoli presidency – and from 1995 to 1999, alongside Moratti, for a total of another eleven years.

With the Inter shirt Mazzola has won everything that could be won – four league titles, two European Cups and two Intercontinental Cups – marking with his own pace a season, the Sixties, in which Italy was changing its skin and football became pop.

In trying to define Mazzola’s technical outline, one would say that it was – in spite of himself, he with his gaze so turned back, to his father Valentino – a forerunner, a forerunner of the times, able to summarize in his game a certain idea of ​​modernity that would come in the years to followin the thread that unites Paolo Rossi and Baggio, up to Del Piero and Totti, our only true planetary champions of the recent era.

Mazzola was thin, wiry, he might have looked fragile – so skinny – but he was tied with wire. He had phenomenal speed of thought and execution, he was almost hasty in his ability to accelerate every decision. He knew how to evade the surveillance of his opponents by hinging on a repertoire of feints, moves, shots and changes of direction that-today, in modern football-would constitute an added value. More than Gianni Rivera – his alter ego, more rounded and more harmonious in thinking / playing football – the Mazzola of sixty years ago would be able to immerse himself in our Sunday contexts with an unparalleled ease, almost without effort. So much so that it is easy to imagine – why not? – with the City or Real Madrid jersey: elegant in posing, lightning in the shot, deadly in execution. Mazzola starts as a striker – at the beginning of his career, in the Mago’s Grande Inter he was a virtuoso counter-attacker – and then – as was the custom in his day – to retreat his range of action and dispense football from a different perspective, demonstrating an enviable aptitude to adapt to the new tactical needs of a football that was changing skin. He was imaginative and solid, his class was based on style, but he knew how to become a craftsman if necessary. Nor is it fair to try – once again – to compare him to his father. Valentino Mazzola was not just a team man, but a team summed up in a single man and the only certainty is the impossibility of replication, even if backed by the DNA.

Mazzola’s real victory lies in the fact that he kept faith with the promise of his son who looks for himself in his father, but managed not so much to escape from the comparison – an arduous mission – as to support him, goal after goal, dribbling after dribbling shot after shot. He was in fact – Sandro Mazzola – a man of his time – played at an age in which every future seemed plausible – an infinite child like all the champions kissed by grace are, a son who – even today, at eighty years old – if he closes his eyes he sees himself there, with a ball under his arm and a hand stretched out to seek that of his father, before entering the field to play – alone and yet never alone – destiny.