I Think Therefore I Play by Andrea Pirlo, Alessandro Alciato Page B

midfielders and which the strikers. Total chaos: only the goalkeeper wasn’t in doubt.
    He’d point to a circle and say: “Okay, Costacurta, you need to go here.”
    And I’d be forced to pipe up: “But boss, that’s me.” It was even worse when he mistook the defenders for strikers – I began to suspect he was doing it on purpose. Four forwards on the pitch and only two defenders: Berlusconi’s forbidden dream.
    But even Terim was aware that without the president, that type of president, Milan would have been nothing, both in terms of money and power. Without his cash and commitment, they’d have ended up like lots of other clubs.
    Berlusconi would go mad, quite literally, when we won in Europe or on the global stage. He’d burst into song, strum along with his mucker Mariano Apicella, 30 tell jokes. Under his command, Milan became the most decorated club in the world, just as it now says beneath the crest on the players’ shirts. Berlusconi, by extension, is the most decorated president.
    And he signed Huntelaar.
     
    28. The Peruvian striker who has scored prolifically for Bayern Munich and Werder Bremen either side of an unsuccessful spell with Chelsea
    29. Bruno Vespa is the host of a long-running news and politics programme Porta a Porta (Door to Door) shown on the Italian state-owned channel Rai Uno
    30. An Italian singer famous for performing songs written by Berlusconi

Chapter 12
    There was a time when I thought about quitting football, but Huntelaar wasn’t to blame. I just didn’t want to have anything more to do with it – the mere thought turned my stomach. I’d eaten too much already; I was on the verge of throwing up.
    It wasn’t even the fault of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Oguchi Onyewu, two of my former team-mates at Milan. One of them is the only mean Swede, the other the solitary American who prefers football to baseball, basketball, gridiron, ice hockey and even hamburgers from McDonald’s.
    During a training session at Milanello, I saw them laying into one another like two bully boys from the roughest estate. They looked like they were trying to kill each other: there were definitely some broken ribs, despite silence and denials from the king’s buglers who said it was just a “lively confrontation”.
    Those of us who’d witnessed it were put in mind of a Mafia-style settling of the scores. It was like something out of Highlander – there can be only one. That pair certainly caused me alarm, but it wasn’t them who killed my desire for a footballing future. If anything, they were too busy trying to bump off one another.
    I thought about quitting because, after Istanbul, nothing made sense any more. The 2005 Champions League final simply suffocated me. 31 To most people’s minds, the reason we lost on penalties was Jerzy Dudek – that jackass of a dancer who took the mickey out of us by swaying about on his line and then rubbed salt into the wound by saving our spot kicks. But in time the truly painful sentence was realising that we were entirely to blame.
    How it happened I don’t know, but the fact remains that when the impossible becomes reality, somebody’s fucked up – in this case, the entire team. A mass suicide where we all joined hands and jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge. The famous strait proved narrow in the extreme. So narrow, in fact, that if the whole Istanbul experience was a suppository, it could find no escape once inside us. Every now and then, I feel it move, letting me know it’s still there, asserting its presence. It calls me by name and it’s a pain in the arse in the truest sense of the term.
    When that torture of a game was finished, we sat like a bunch of half-wits in the dressing room there at the Atatürk Stadium. We were bloodthirsty zombies faced with an unforeseen problem – the blood was ours and they’d drunk every last drop. We couldn’t speak. We couldn’t move. They’d mentally destroyed us. The damage was already evident even in those