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The last time AS Roma had been crowned champions of Italy, they had gone into the final match of the season against a dangerous Parma outfit knowing that nothing less than a win would do. He had opened the scoring that day. Of course, he had.
Six years previously, on a typically warm September afternoon in Rome, he had run on to a knockdown from Daniel Fonesca and without hesitation thumped in a sweet left-footed volley straight into the bottom left corner of the goal at the Curva Nord. That, at the age of 17, had been his first senior goal.
This time, running onto a cross from his great friend Vincent Candela, the shot had been right footed, and the ball had smacked into the top left corner of the goal at the Curva Sud. At the age of 24, and now Captain of his club, it had been his 70th senior goal.
Inspired by their captain, Roma would go on to win 3-1 and seal that long awaited Scudetto. Now, fifteen years on from that championship winning season, they haven’t won another.
Somehow, that’s what makes it so special.
As a 12-year-old, and a veritable boy-wonder-of-a-12-year-old at that, he had had the strength of conviction and the guts to say no to Lazio when they came knocking at his door with a contract. He had slept with posters of Bruno Conti and Giuseppe Giannini stuck on his bedroom walls and had supported Roma since he could remember – there was only one club he would play for.
So sure of this was he that he had then sent his mother, Fiorella, to go and persuade Roma to sign him. And persuade them she did. After spending time in the youth system, he made his first senior team appearance against Brescia on the 28th of March, 1993. He had been 16 and-a-half years old.
Now, more than twenty-two years on, Francesco Totti is still at Roma - playing at times with kids who hadn’t even been born at the time of his debut - with that fierce loyalty he had shown as a boy still very much intact, despite – and this is important – the relative lack of honours that have come his way.
He had stayed at his boyhood club to - in his own words - “give the fans the best chance to have a great team play for them. They deserve it”.
There are no Champions League crowns in his cabinet, no Ballon d’Ors. He has won just the single league title and two domestic cup titles. If he had left for Milan, or Juventus, or even Real Madrid (the Madridistas had chased him for a long time in the early 2000s) he could have had so much more in the way of silverware and personal honours. Many people would call this naivety, the heart ruling the head and leading to an unwise life-choice as it were.
Those people don’t know a damn thing.
Rome’s favourite son
A genius yet a rompicoglioni (typically vulgar Italian slang that roughly translates to giant pain in the arse); arrogant yet self-deprecating; classy yet incredibly cocky; over the years the temperamental Italian has been about as predictable as a Roman-era Vesuvius. He can be short-tempered and nasty (as Mario Balotelli found out – the hard way) but more often than not, he can leave you with moments of beauty that take your breath away.
He is, in a word, Rome personified.
In the past, this Roman-ness has seen him being ridiculed– with not a little North Italian bias against the upstart southerner. His accent - so thickly Roman, his lack of any notable formal education and his tendency to use violence to sort out issues have all been used as a verbal battering pole.
Jokes about Totti are common across Italy and play on a variety of these faults, from his supposed ‘dimwitedness’ -
‘At the Vatican, they found a magic mirror. If you say a lie in front of it, you will disappear. Vieri starts - “I think I am the most powerful footballer in the world!” Puff! He disappears. Then Gattuso - “I think I am the most handsome footballer in the world!” Puff! He disappears. Now it’s Francesco’s turn. Having seen what happened to Vieri and Gattuso, he keeps on thinking about what to say and slowly says “I think… I think…”Puff! He disappears’
- to his, erm… ‘popularity’ with women.
‘One day, I (Alex del piero) asked Totti how he makes showgirls fall in love with him and he told me – “Easy! You sit in front of the TV, you choose who you like, you call her and ask – “do you wanna marry me?”. After a while, he calls me and asks “So, Alessandro, have you done it? How was it?” and I replied “yes, I sat in front of the TV, chose the girl I liked, and I called her. And then, she told me - Ah! Francé! I love it when you imitate Del Piero!”’
Most people would have gotten offended or changed in an attempt to please the masses and blend in. Not Totti though - he took them in his stride, collected a bunch of them and published his very own joke book (which made a truckload of cash that he then donated to charity!). He even had his teammates read them out on a popular TV show – the one with Del Piero above was actually read out by the great Juventus trequartista himself.
Mixed with this self-deprecation is a fierce streak of pride that has more than once seen him overcome seemingly impossible lows.
In early 2006, he broke his leg, a career-threatening ankle break that cast a huge shadow over his participation in that year’s World Cup, but he recovered in time and playing with a metal plate in his ankle, did his bit in the Azzurri's fairytale victory.
In 2011, he seemed to have lost all confidence and form, looking out-of-sync and generally unfit on the pitch. Critics, experts and even his beloved fans turned against him – so he refocused, lost a bunch of the weight and came back into the team with a brace against that beat the most hated of foes, Lazio. The next week, he scored again and celebrated by showing a T-shirt that said “The King of Rome is not dead” – referencing a comment made by a Northern Irish commentator after his second goal in the Lazio game.
It’s this streak of combativeness, this disposition to fight it out come what may, this self-deprecating humour (he once celebrated the breaking of a goal drought with a t-shirt that read “Scusate il ritardo”, Sorry for the delay) and that unwillingness to let go of his roots that have made him so beloved of all Roma fans.
He is Roman – and all that the term implies – and proudly so.
The Genius of Totti - Trequartista, False-nine and second-striker, all rolled into one
These days, Totti is a lot more appreciated around the world than he has been in the past. His loyalty to the club is celebrated, and rightly so, as a rare quality in these days of mercenary footballers and he reminds us all that there is nothing more special than actually living out your dream – going out there and giving it your all for the team you support. But, in the midst of this celebration of his loyalty, we run the risk of forgetting just how incredibly talented a footballer the Roman truly is.
He has scored a whopping 300 goals in 746 games (and that could have been a lot more if he had started playing in an advanced position as he does these days, a while earlier). The goals have come in all shapes and sizes – volleys from impossible angles, headers, long-range free kicks, mazy dribbles, calm finishes into the bottom corner and most famously of all the cucchiaio. Literally translating to Spoon, it’s the Italian term for a chipped shot and no-one in the world does quite it like Francesco Totti.
He has 187 assists to his credit, but often times you wonder what would have been if he had more teammates of the ilk of Vincenzo Montella and Gabriel “Batigol’ Batistuta. A virtuoso of the one-touch pass, his ability to create goals, to find that one little ball that can unlock defences, is almost unmatched. He can split defenses with nonchalant ease, and his backheel is the stuff of legend: there are cute little backheels, where the touch is almost imperceptible, angle-defying backheels like the one against France in Euro ’00 which set up the assist for the opener, and the one that is a mind–bending piece of magic, the spinning backheel.
Epilogue
“What is a club in any case?Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes.
It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love”
Sir Bobby Robson said that when he was asked to explain what Newcastle United meant to him.
It could just as well have been written about the love affair that Francesco Totti and AS Roma have been entangled in ever since the day he caught sight of the hallowed turf at il Stadio Olimpico (Of course he will say he never left Roma because “my mom said she will cut off my b***s if I ever left Rome”, but we know better)
As they have been saying in Rome, day in and day out for the past 18 years, Grazie Capitano
Thank you Captain, for everything.
