I Think Therefore I Play by Andrea Pirlo, Alessandro Alciato Read Free Book Online Page B

underpants, absolutely dripping with foam and shouting total gibberish. Listening to him, though, I knew he was beginning to wake up and regain his senses. I tried to escape, but I was already done for. When the guy on your shoulder is Gattuso and he’s out to do you harm, you can run as hard as you like, but he’ll always catch you. You could be a gazelle or a lion – it makes absolutely no difference.
    With the door safely locked, De Rossi came over all bold. “What’s all this noise? I’m pretty sure I’ve heard something similar in the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill films.” For the record, the noise was Rino running me through his full repertoire of slaps.
    He said goodnight and returned to his room. That’s how he is: he’s either playing or he’s back at camp. He doesn’t do crazy joy, isn’t interested in letting his concentration slide. He just can’t bear the thought of having left a stone unturned in the quest to win a game.
    He’s also superstitious to a pretty disgusting degree. At the 2006 World Cup, because things were going well, he kept the same tracksuit on for more than a month. It was something like 40 degrees in Germany and he was going about dressed like a deep-sea diver. From round about the quarter-finals, he began to stink. Never mind a fire extinguisher – what he really needed was an industrial supply of lavender.
    Rino’s always been my favourite target, top of the table by some distance. This despite the fact that on several occasions he’s tried to kill me with a fork. During meal times at Milanello, we’d invent all sorts to torment him and put him on the spot. When he got his verbs wrong (pretty much the whole time), we’d jump on him immediately. And then when he actually got them right, we’d make out that it was still wrong just to wind him up even more. Me, Ambrosini, Nesta, Inzaghi, Abbiati, Oddo: that was the group of bastards right there.
    “Rino, how are you?”
    “Bad. We got beat yesterday. I was better if we won.”
    “Rino, try again. It’s ‘I’d be better if we’d won’.”
    “But it’s the same thing.”
    “Not exactly, Rino.”
    “Fine then. I’d be better if we’d won.”
    “Rino, just how ignorant are you? ‘I was better if we won.’ That’s how you say it.”
    “But that’s what I said before.”
    “What, Rino?”
    “That thing about winning.”
    “What thing, Rino? Can you repeat it?”
    You could see the red mist coming down and he just wasn’t able to hide it. We could tell what was coming and so we’d commandeer all the knives. Gattuso would grab a fork and try to stick it in us. On more than one occasion, he struck his intended target and the fork sank into our skin. We were as soft as tuna; the kind you can cut with a breadstick. Some of us ended up missing games because of one of Rino’s fork attacks, even if the official explanation from the club was one of muscle fatigue.
    We’d get out of his way when he got mad but once he’d calmed down and gone to his room, we’d come back out, pile up the sofas in front of the door and block his exit.
    “Let me out – training starts in a while.”
    “Deal with it, terrone .”
    He’d then go crazy again, smashing up everything in sight. But even when he was angry, he was one of the good guys. I’ve always thought of him as being like a character from a film by Woody Allen, my favourite director of all time. I picture him with that No.8 shirt, foaming at the mouth as he tries to deliver lines like: “I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.” Or: “There’s nothing wrong with you that can’t be cured with a little Prozac and a polo mallet.”
    Amongst other things, I’ve seen Rino catch and eat live snails for a bet. He really does belong in a film. I like to think of myself as a director, on the pitch and in life, and I’d never let an actor of his class pass me by.
    You need pillars like him in the dressing room. Bodies get older but