Fans turn against Divine Ponytail’ as Baggio faces end to turbulent career

Now, just two months away from his 33rd birthday, an age where most players begin considering retirement, Baggio may be forced to leave the club and exile to Japan or the United States, where the game is still in its infancy.

“No, I didn’t expect it,” Baggio told reporters who pressed him for a comment. Neither did the tens of millions of fans, who idolise him from the most dispersed corners of the globe.

The handful of furious fans who displayed the banner were reacting to an interview Baggio gave to the press in which he vented his anger at coachMarcello Lippi for going back on his word by leaving him on the bench for most of this season after being promised a key role at Inter.

This season, Baggio has played just four games, none from the start. Three times, he came on as a substitute during the final minutes of a losing match.“It isn’t easy to come on during the last quarter of an hour and prove one’s worth, perhaps by succeeding in turning the game around. There was only one guy who could do miracles and they nailed him to a cross,” Baggio remarked.

Unless he is allowed to play more, Baggio fears he stands no chance of carving out a spot for himself with the National team. Taking part in this summer’s European Championships would mark an apt finale to his 16-year career.

Lippi and club officials, however, displayed little sympathy and were swift to air the possibility that Baggio may be sold when the transfer market re-opens in January. “If a player is not happy with the fact that the trainer has to make certain choices, regardless ofwhether he likes or dislikes someone, then he can go somewhere else,” said Lippi.

So far, however, both English side Chelsea and Baggio’s former club Bologna have denied an interest in the boy with the golden touch. To his numerous admirers, it is tantamount to blasphemy that Baggio should be treated as “any other player”.

Baggio has scored 27 goals with the National team, at the extraordinary rate of one every two appearances. He is the only Italian to have scored in three editions of the World Cup and for nearly a decade, he made the Azzurri’s number 10 shirt his exclusive right.

In 1993, he became the first Italian to win the Golden Ball, awarded to the best player of the globe, since Paolo Rossi, the 1982 World Cup match winner. This is a man about whom film director Franco Zeffirelli once said: “He has the splendour of a diamond.”

“Lippi has committed what, in my mind, is a mortal sin,” said Joe McGinniss, an American football writer and Baggio enthusiast. “He has tried to bring to apremature end Baggio’s career, as surely as if he had broken Baggio’s kneecaps with a hammer.”

Baggio was born in 1967 in Caldogno, a deeply-Catholic town near Vicenza, well inside Italy’s industrial heartland. As a child, he used to exasperate papa Florindo and mama Matilde by blasting the ball down the home’s seven-metre long corridor and into the toilet, which acted as a makeshift goal.

Legend has it that his mates used to drag him out in the evening to watch him smash the town’s lampposts with pinpoint precision before fleeing at the arrival of Tito Rizzi, the town’s police officer. After three years of purgatory in Italy’s third division, Baggio joined the Serie A with Fiorentina, where he rapidly established himself as the local hero.

His departure to Juventus five years later ignited rioting in the streets, with at least 350 police officers unable to sedate the violence that ensued.A keen rock music lover, Baggio spends his summer holidays in Argentina, where he retreats to engage in hisfavourite hobby: hunting. Despite his Catholic background, he has converted to Buddhism.

After brief stints with AC Milan and Bologna, Baggio in 1998 joined Inter, the team supported by his entire family. He has since had more disappointments than joy.

The current quarrel involving Baggio and Lippi is only the latest installment in a long-standing dispute that opposes Italy’s most creative players and coaches. Increasingly obsessed with tactics, modern-day coaches fear that creative geniuses of the Baggio variety may upset the team’s delicate balance.

At his first World Cup, in 1990, Azeglio Vicini only allowed Baggio a few scant appearances, preferring to him the solidity of Roma’s Giuseppe Giannini. “In any other National team, someone like Baggio would play and the coach would concentrate on building a team around him. In Italy, we do the opposite. We first build a team and then realise that a champion may only bring disturbance,” remarked the great Inter player Sandro Mazzola at thetime.

History would repeat itself eight years later, when Cesare Maldini refused to field Baggio alongside Alessandro Del Piero during the 1998 World Cup in France. The only time Baggio was given a chance to express his full potential, in 1994, he almost single-handedly led Italy to the Pasadena showdown against Brazil. Fans blamed that defeat on coach Arrigo Sacchi rather than on Baggio blasting the crucial penalty over the crossbar.

“I have followed the career of the greatest player of all time very closely, and I have come to the conclusion that Baggio has been, for lack of a better term, screwed by many coaches over the years…And I have had enough. I am fed up with stupid coaching decisions and politics,” says one fan named Dwayne, who has launched a Baggio must play in Euro 2000′ campaign over the Internet.