Vialli, that last public outing with the old Samp mates: “Sorry if I left early” – Football
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“Gianluca has been a perfect guide for all of us: there is no more suitable word to define him”. Thus Marco Lanna, current president of Sampdoria and his teammate in the Scudetto season, explains the role that Vialli assumed naturally in each group, without any effort or forcing. He was a spontaneous guide in that Sampdoria, but he never put himself on a pedestal: he felt like everyone else, in the company of football players who were truly friends coordinated by an atypical cosmopolitan like Vujadin Boskov and a forward-looking deputy like Ciso Pezzotti, who managed sporting miracle of a championship won outside a metropolis: the roll of honor of Serie A says that, after the triptych Bologna 1964-Fiorentina 1969-Cagliari 1970, only Verona in 1985 and Sampdoria in 1991 achieved the goal , subsequently barred to teams from medium-sized cities by the growing economic gap, irreparably widened by the money from television rights.
Vialli, the embrace of Wembley with Mancini is the core of happiness
by Gabriele Romagnoli
A president’s dream
Gianluca Vialli, with his football twin Roberto Mancini, was the symbol of that miracle, as Lanna recounts: “He was the most balanced: always the first to train, to run, to fight. He set an example, seriously. In difficult moments he you looked to take from him the strength he transmitted: the same that he never stopped showing during his illness, because he always continued to look at things with a smile, he never felt sorry for himself”. In recent times, the relationship between the two former team-mates had become even closer: “All of us in the Scudetto shared the idea of the book, which later also became a documentary film, which would make that experience indelible. In the year in which I became president I shared many things with Luca. He was the first one I called, before accepting, because he knew everything from Sampdoria, in detail, given the negotiations with the Americans to take over the club. He inquired, asked me about market movements: the common hope was that, with the change of ownership, he could return. I always told him that I was warming up his seat. He was a man who was attentive to everything and everyone and never stopped thinking about Sampdoria.”
Vialli, Cathryn White-Cooper his anti-diva wife and the daughters with whom he joked about the disease
by our correspondent Antonello Guerrera
The tribute to Marassi with Sinisa
Next Sunday the team, before the match against Napoli, will remember him together with Sinisa Mihajlovic, the other great former Doriano who has just passed away: the players should wear the number 9 shirt during the warm-up. Then, probably in the following home match at Marassi against Udinese, on January 22nd, a Vialli-day is probable, in memory of the great Sampdoria, just immortalized in the book “The beautiful season”, signed by Vialli and Mancini, and by the homonymous documentary film by Marco Ponti, presented at the end of last November. It tells the now legendary Sampdoria story in a Genoa that suddenly became the capital of Italian football – Sampdoria winner of the championship and finalist in the Champions Cup, Genoa fourth and semi-finalist in the UEFA Cup – while the 1992 Colombian Expo, with the recovery of the Porto Antico in project by Renzo Piano, packaged one of the most successful operations and urban planning of the 20th century in Italy and sanctioned, just two years after the inauguration of the Ferraris stadium renovated by Vittorio Gregotti for Italia ’90, the full osmosis between the successes in football and the architecture of a city that is steeped in football.
Vialli, a champion who was able to inspire others by example
by Paolo Condò
The last message
Precisely on the occasion of those November evenings, between Turin and Genoa which he reached by car alone, Vialli confirmed his attachment to that story in his last public appearance. Anyone who was present at the revival of that epic with the Sampdoria heroes side by side again – from Mancini to Pari, from Lombardo to Mannini, from Vierchowod to Pagliuca – noticed the enormous effort that Vialli, already suffering greatly from the recrudescence of the disease, had made to be present, happy and excited. It was as if he was aware that it would be the last time all together. The next morning, his message popped up on the chat mobiles, altruistic as always, because the generosity also illustrated by the Foundation set up with Massimo Mauro was his distinctive feature: “Sorry if I left early”, he wrote. It had been a beautiful evening, a flow of memories, with Mancini always at my side. The two of them had become friends when they were little more than teenagers, in the Under Azzurre, but the couple had consolidated at Sampdoria. Complementary on the pitch and in life, thanks also to their different character and different technical and athletic characteristics, they had gradually strengthened a role usually reserved for older players: the president Paolo Mantovani, with a lucky intuition, consulted the young Vialli and Mancini , through the ds Paolo Borea, to choose the players with which to improve the team to reach the Scudetto.
The pain of Cremona for the death of Vialli, the mayor: “Citizen mourning on the day of the funeral. His name at the stadium? Nice idea”
by Lucia Landoni
That phone call from Lippi
Involved and made responsible, with an irrepressible enthusiasm, Gianluca & Roberto were not only the natural leaders of the group completed by Mannini, Pari, Fusi, Branca, Lombardo, Vierchowod, Cerezo, Pagliuca and all the others, but they never thought of abandoning Genoa. Where Vialli lived on the Quinto seafront, on the first floor of the historic Villa Rosa, and Mancini next door, a ten-minute drive from the Bogliasco training ground. There was no shortage of temptations, as Gianluca would have confessed, coveted by Berlusconi’s Milan. More than the well-known aphorism phrase on the Ligurian Sea to be preferred to the artificial lake of Milan 3, friends keep in memory a phrase of impeccable dryness, delivered to them by a mature ex champion, now far from his career as a footballer: “Why should I have gone to Milan , if I earned the same money in Genoa, I was fine and could I still win?”. He won the Champions Cup in 1992 at Wembley against Barcelona in truth in 1996 in Rome, as captain, with another shirt, that of Juventus. But before that there had been two such-and-such seasons with Trapattoni and he was already planning his return to Sampdoria. He was even choosing the home when he received the phone call from Marcello Lippi: “Don’t even think about it: you will be the pillar of my team”. The rest, from the move to Chelsea to his English life with London as his new domicile and the closing of the football circle with Mancini’s European title as manager of the national team, is a very fresh story. The story of Gianluca Vialli, the perfect guide of any group.
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