Ciao d:^)
Nonostante tutto sono vivo. Giustamente visto il mio “flight risk” ogni assenza superiore alla settimana fa immediatamente pensare a un abbandono, ma sto facendo del mio meglio. Nelle ultime settimane ho pure scritto un po’ di cose pronte da pubblicare, che spero sinceramente di mettere online prossimamente, ma non sono riuscito a impormi l’obbligo di sistemare tutto, ripulire i deliri e poi postare.
Quel senso d’obbligo che un po’ mi è mancato è arrivato invece ieri per cause esterne, come al solito. A metà mattina la mia amica Naomi mi ha scritto perché Mundial Mag cercava qualcuno che potesse spendere dieci minuti della propria giornata per parlare di Adriano Leite Ribeiro e sperava fossi io a poter dare una mano per la causa.
Ovviamente non ho saputo sottrarmi e quei dieci minuti sono diventati una mezz’oretta di telefonata internazionale guidando sotto la pioggia, la giusta cornice malinconica per un argomento del genere.
Ho sempre cercato di parlare poco di calcio e ho sempre cercato di non parlare mai di Inter. Non perché siano argomenti tabù, ma perché ho sempre ritenuto il calcio una cosa seria e io non sono un “nativo”, non ho mai giocato se non (male) in cortile quando mancava l’ultimo per essere pari e da bambino ero spesso quello un po’ strano a cui la cosa non interessava. Il calcio ha cominciato a incuriosirmi perché era un modo facile per avere qualcosa da condividere con mio papà e ancor di più con mio fratello – quindi ho sempre un po’ sentito non fosse una cosa mia e che toccasse a qualcuno più adatto dire la propria in contesti più formali. Nel corso degli anni la cosa si è evoluta in modo abbastanza tragico, avendo applicato il mio metodo un po’ ossessivo anche a quest’argomento. L’interismo, invece, è un altro discorso. Ho il terrore il tifo sia il mio vero punto debole dal punto di vista sociale, sono uno di quei poverini che si lascia condizionare le giornate dal modo in cui vanno le cose e l’abitudine dello Stadio ha soltanto amplificato il tutto. Per dire, io l’abbonamento da anni lo faccio da solo perché mi vergogno a far vedere alla gente come mi riduce la partita.
La combinazione tra le due cose, l’imbarazzo e il coinvolgimento emotivo, avrebbe dovuto farmi dire di no alla proposta di parlare di Adriano. E invece, eccoci qui. Oggi (o ieri, non ho capito bene) è uscita l’ultima edizione di “Hat Trick”, la newsletter a pagamento di Mundial Mag in cui prendono un argomento e ne parlano in tre modi diversi. Insieme a un bell’articolo su PES 6 e ad una gallery di foto con il Brasile, ci sono anche io che parlo di come Adriano sia stato uno specchio dell’essenza interista e del modo in cui io sia cresciuto tifando. È una storia che doveva andare male e ha trovato il modo di farlo, ma anche un modo di parlare di come il dolore di un rapporto incompiuto sia cambiato nel corso degli anni - perché a quattordici anni puoi incazzarti se scopri che il tuo attaccante dorme ubriaco al posto di allenarsi, ma a trenta hai la maturità per capire quanto possa far male vedersi davanti una vita distrutta. A James Bird di Mundial ho detto che io, come tanti, ad Adriano ho perdonato tutto e continuerò a farlo, perché capire come sono andate realmente le cose aiuta a capire quanto contino fortuna e tempismo in mezzo a tutto il resto. Prima di iniziare la telefonata ho avvisato due amici e cuori neroblu di ciò che stavo per fare e penso mi abbiano dato le due risposte migliori che potessi ricevere: il primo ha sintetizzato alla perfezione anni di tribolamenti, il secondo mi ha insultato.
Forse ho accettato proprio perché parlare di Adriano è un po’ come andare in terapia e probabilmente in questo momento mi tornava anche utile.
In ogni caso, io il testo in inglese ve lo lascio qui sotto sperando non si arrabbi nessuno. Se invece volete il resto vi consiglio di investire le due sterline al mese per la newsletter, ne vale la pena.
The kid from Rio is still beating in the hearts of The Nerazzurri
Interview: James Bird
“On 14 August 2001, I was at the Bernabéu, wearing an Inter shirt, and we were up against Real,” Adriano wrote to Inter fans a couple of years ago about his very first match for the club—a Santiago Bernabéu Trophy final. “That in itself would have been enough for me. But then I got out onto the pitch. I didn't think about it—it was just like I was playing on that dusty pitch in Vila Cruzeiro. I began dribbling around, trying to nutmeg people. Everything came off for me. I won a free kick, and on the sidelines they were calling for me to have a shot. Remember that left-footed shot I’d always practised at home and in the streets that drove my mum crazy? That day, I introduced it to the world with that free kick. They say that shot reached 170 kilometres an hour!”
Adriano had put on a clinic.
The ins and outs of his transfer from Flamengo to Inter in the summer of 2001, the loan to Fiorentina, the half-sale to Parma, and then the buy-back in January 2003, is confusing. What isn’t confusing is the effect he had on Inter fans. Marco Rizzi, an Inter fan and part of the Scarpe footwear podcast, told us all about it while driving through the Milanese rain this afternoon…
“I’ve just messaged two of my friends—they both have supported Inter in the exact same way as me. We’re pretty much the same age, so we’ve been brought up on the same teams—to say, ‘Guess who is going to cry on the phone today?’ I don’t know if there is another Inter player who brings through these types of feelings, these ties, like Adriano.
“For that first game, I was young and at the seaside near Rimini with my family. We didn’t watch the game—even my father, who is an Inter fan—but we had heard about this young player who’d been scoring goals for Flamengo. Around 11pm, the rumours started going around, people saying, ‘Have you seen what he’s done?’ By lunchtime the next day, we saw it in a flash.
“We had some great players in that team. He comes on for Christian Vieri, and then it’s Seedorf who gives him the chance to take the free kick. It was a stacked team, but we were still the little brother. Milan won the Championship in 1999, and then the final day of that season is famous as Cinque Maggio—5th May—where we start the morning top of the table, and Juve are Champions by the time the sun sets. So this was a particular time.
“Everyone was pissed when we sold him to Parma and then had to rebuy him for double. We knew he was a great player and should have had room in the team. We lost the Champions League semifinals that season, and everyone was thinking, ‘If we had Adriano, this would have been different’. “But then he comes back. I saw it with my eyes, but you look back now at the highlights and you’ll see how crazy it was. He had everything. He had left, he had right, he had his head, he had power, finesse. I was thinking of the goals he scored and how they represented perfectly the player he was.
“You think about PES, and he was overpowered in real life. Looking at the game, you could expect anything. You could have a corner against you, and you’d be thinking, ‘Yes, but ok, if the ball goes out of the box in the proper place, and Adriano uses himself correctly here, he could go and score. As a kid, everything is fantastical; you can’t always grasp the reality of things, and watching him was like this.
“Adriano is the perfect representation of Interismo. It’s a tragedy in itself. We had a lot of great times and a lot of great memories, but it had to go wrong, and it did go wrong. From the beginning, the loan and the buying back, and then him having his best season just after his dad died.
“We were all scarred by how the Ronaldo relationship ended because we felt like we’d always been there for him during both injuries and put him in the best situation to have a great World Cup in 2002. He decided to leave and win the Ballon d’Or, and you understand it, but then he came back to Milan and celebrated the goal in the derby, so we had to cancel that from the memory. We felt bad, so bad.
“With Adriano, it was also something about Milan having Kaka. An upscale Brazilian with this super-clean look, where we had this warrior from the favelas, so we felt like we wanted to protect him.
When I think about him now, I think about the goal against Perugia in the yellow shirt from 03/04, two fakes inside the area, left shoulder to the goalpost. I think about the goal against Udinese in 04/05, from our own box to theirs ripping everyone. I think about the goal against Basel in the Champions League just after coming back from Brazil. “He scored a lot of amazing goals. He was soft-spoken, and we never knew what was happening behind the scenes until we found out about his father. When I read his letter to The Players’ Tribune in 2021, I cried, man. It was understanding the situation: that he lost his love for football at the time he was best in his career. If you grasp that, if you can understand that he was 26, just 26, when he was on loan to São Paulo from Inter to be closer to home, you realise how he had so much more potential to give.
“A lot of older fans had told us they were delusional about their dreams of Vieri and Ronaldo playing together. They did, but only in something like eight games in three years, and when we signed Ibrahimović, it was the same type of thing—wanting to see him and Adriano together.
“Adriano showed us his potential; he showed us what it could have been like. When Marcus Thuram started celebrating his goals at the start of this season like Adriano, I felt it each and every time. It’s funny because the first friend I told I was going to speak about Adriano said, ‘The only thing you can say is Adriano is the perfect example of Interismo, that not anyone could have written a better story, a better screenplay to show Inter’.
“The second one said, ‘Fuck it, this is bullshit, you’re telling me this now and I’m going to have to spend the next two hours watching highlights and games’. It’s been like this for 15 years.”