The ‘Super’ in the League: All eyes on Alessandro Del Piero

Elbow room, he must have realised then, was going to be a helluva problem.

On Monday, a day before his and Delhi Dynamos’ first game of the Indian Super League against Pune City FC at home, Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was the stage for the pre-match press briefing and final training session. Even to the conference hall, he understandably arrived in a troop — Delhi’s Dutch coach Harm van Veldhoven, Danish striker Mads Junker and Indian midfielder Francis Fernandes up ahead, the little Italian tiptoeing slowly in the middle and his security blanket swooshing up the back.

When he took his place behind a microphone, Del Piero nearly looked relieved to not be sharing his seat with another man. So he rocked the chair back and forth as the coach addressed the media and spread his arms left and right when the mike was passed about the floor for questions. But when the queries began pouring in, the chair stopped rocking and the arms folded right back across his ribs — for they were all addressed to him.

“Alessandro, will you be match fit?” “Del Piero, what’s your take on the artificial pitch?” “Alessandro, what will it be like to play against your former Juventus teammate (David) Trezeguet?” “Alessandro, what tips have you passed on to your team?” “Alessandro, what’s your stay in India been like?” Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro…

Van Veldhoven, perhaps feeling for his other players on the dais at this point, felt the urge to cut in. “Do we have any questions for Francis?” he asked, half pleading. “Yes,” said one journalist. “Francis, what does it feel like to play with Del Piero?” Everyone, including Del Piero, burst out laughing. Even van Veldhoven afforded himself a smile.

That he is the most decorated player present here in India is a given. But whether he alone, twenty odd days shy of his fortieth birthday, can give this hastily slapped together league (that seems to depend as much on personalities from Bollywood in the dug-outs as players of his vintage on the field) any sort of credence remains to be seen. But going purely by the earnestness of his answers on Monday evening, the signs look promising, if not wholly positive.

“This is the most important thing for me,” he said, stopping just short of clutching his heart to prove that the ISL does hold value to his career, whatever little is left of it. “Yes, there hasn’t been much time. But we’ll be okay. No problem. No problem.” But that’s Del Piero for you, a person who his Italian teammate Andrea Pirlo describes in his book, I Think Therefore I Play, as the gold standard — the ‘train hard, complain little, always care for team’ type.

New objectives

“There are no more records to beat,” Del Piero had said, almost four years back to the day, after destroying Giampiero Boniperti’s half-a-century old scoring record at Juventus. Against AC Milan, he came off the bench, weaved some magic, scored the winner and less importantly (for him, at least) bagged goal number 179 in the jailbird stripes of his beloved Turin club. He was days short of 36 then, the proverbial autumn of his footballing life. “But I will go on, because one needs to set new objectives.”

Those objectives forced him to leave The Old Lady, his home for 20 seasons and arrive first in Sydney (for two seasons) and now in New Delhi.

“I spent two great years in Sydney. Sure it was no Turin but it was a little more easy, more normal life than in Italy,” he said on Monday. “It was great, I spent great times. Not much walking around the streets though.”

Here, Del Piero paused, weighed his words, broke into a grin and said: “But Sydney is a multicultural city and I find many Italian people there. This is also a multicultural city. But here I do not find that many. You guys alone are too many.”

Then, he stopped speaking again, waiting for the laughter to subside. And when it did, he said: “But that’s good, no? Because I am happy to share my time and space with you. And with Indian football, because that’s why I am here.”