the disease discovered playing padel- Corriere.it

Sinisa Mihajlovic
died today due to the severe form of leukemia that struck him years ago. The Serbian football manager and former player was 53 years old. He leaves behind his wife Arianna and six children, one of whom had recently given him a granddaughter.

July, 2019, we are in the Casteldebole headquarters, the training center of Bologna. Sinisa Mihajlovic a few days earlier, when he was still on vacation in Sardinia, he felt pain in his adductor, he had blamed the padel, the tough workouts he underwent even at the age of 50, he thought it was inflammation.

The Bologna doctors have insisted that he carry out further investigations and have just presented him, with a thousand precautions, the result: leukemia. Break time. But do you live or die with this leukemia?, his reaction, without going around it, straight to the point.

With this leukemia, today, Sinisa Mihajlovic died. And a heartbreaking endingafter three years of struggle and hope, like in a badly written book, the end came for Christmas, adapting Francesco Guccini and his story also set in Bologna.

But for three years Sinisa lived, fought, coached her own therapy, wanted to know everything from doctors and nurses: three hospitalizations and three cycles of chemo, a transplant, returning to the bench in record time for the first match against Verona, sunken eyes, the weight lost, another smile from his beloved wife Arianna (love at first sight many years ago in Rome, who knows what beautiful children would come with her, there were five: one more beautiful than the other in fact), the training followed on the iPad, the team under the hospital window to celebrate the victories (and his biting irony , they won't let me out because it's good luck, lose if they keep me here), the Sanremo festival with my friend Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a controversial exemption, the birth of his granddaughter Violante, Virginia's daughter, a relapse, other treatments, another transplant .

Life. Complicated, different from the one before, but life.

Ten days ago Sinisa had appeared by surprise in Rome at the presentation of the book by Zdenek Zeman, two illegal immigrants who have always liked each other. No one could imagine it would be her last public outing.

In the autobiography written with Andrea Di Caro, deputy director of Gazzetta dello SportSinisa said that he was born twice, the first on February 20, 1969, in Vukovar, ex Yugoslavia, it was a Thursday and I didn't cry. They told me I already had a tough air, they had to spank me three times to make me scream.

The second was on October 29, 2019, at the Sant'Orsola Hospital in Bologna, thanks to an unknown American boy who had donated his bone marrow. That time, Sinisa cried all right: it was supposed to be the beginning of a longer journey. She wasn't the same person. It wasn't what she shared anymore, what the f… look? whoever gazed at him, who was called a gypsy in the stadiums, was the Sinisa who had infected everyone with his struggle and his weakness, his challenge to the disease played by attacking and pressing high, a Sinisa who was not used to finding all this consent, he who had never sought it.

In football there is room for one cliché at a time, so to talk about Mihajlovic one cannot fail to draw on the vocabulary of the warrior, the fighter, because this is how one grows up in Borovo, with dad Bogdan, a truck driver, and mom Viktorija, a factory worker Bata, the shoe factory that left him at the age of 5 to look after his younger brother Drazen, then kicking all day from one side to the other of a huge field with two goalless goals, a divided banana as the best gift ( so much so that the greatest dream, for the future, was a truckload of bananas that I would have eaten all by myself), and then of course the fratricidal war at home, the broken families, the Croatian uncle, the mother's brother, who wanted to slaughter like a pig his father, friendship with the Tiger Arkan.

For someone who has seen this, what do you think the anxieties of the ball were? Whether it's winning as a footballer with Red Star (a Champions League as a kid), Lazio and Inter (two Scudettos, 4 Italian Cups, a UEFA Cup, a Super Cup, 28 goals from free kicks, three in the same game), becoming a coach first as second to Mancini and then on his own, Bologna, Catania, Fiorentina, Sampdoria, the leap to Milan, and then Turin, Bologna again.

Of himself on the bench he has always claimed the ability to enhance players, launch young players, grow the value of the team. Look who arrived after me: he has always done worse, and it was true. But Sinisa was also a witty man, a cheerful clan chief, Serbian music in his ears, who showed films to his players, who loved Kennedy and read books on Ghandi, who also mended the broken relationships after the exemptions because I don't want to leave rubble.

He had seen enough in his life. Of Italy, which he considered home, he said it was a vicious country, no longer showing solidarity, like my former Yugoslavia, fortunately you are all Catholics.

He he had chosen three frames to summarize his life: The first time I saw Ariadne; the birth of my children; the run-up, the left foot and the ball at the crossroads.

This last ball out. So Sinisa, with this leukemia you die. But, a little bit, she lives forever.