Proud man walking

The butcher's son from Rome who forsook the family business for
football speaks exclusively to Observer Sport about the good times at
Chelsea, the bitterness he still feels towards the club's chief
executive and his current mission to put Juventus back among the
greats

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer

Yes, I would love to play Chelsea in the Champions League next year,'
says the man who still commands nostalgia among bluebloods of Stamford
Bridge and, indeed, beyond. 'To bring Juventus to the Bridge, not out
of revenge or spite, but just to show the fans and players, and the
club, that this is what I do now. That this is Juventus, these are the
players I'm proud to work with now, and this is the team I've built -
on a budget.'

Claudio Ranieri is speaking at Juventus's training ground nestled
against the Alps; the man who, in British football, proceeded from
being Chelsea's Tinkerman to the Dead Man Walking - and then Proud Man
Walking, which is the title of his memoir. At Valencia in Spain he
became El General, and now, back home in Italy, his four English years
have left such a mark that his new nickname is Il Mister, the term
Italians use for an English gentleman, blending respect with pastiche.
No one in English football could forget how the Tinkerman - so called
because of his eccentrically kaleidoscopic team selections and
substitutions - was stabbed frontally in the gut, rather than the
back, despite having taken the club Roman Abramovich acquired three
years into Ranieri's stewardship to second place in the Premier League
and the semi-finals of the Champions League. His reward for leading
the club to their best placing in half a century was to be sacked.

No one could forget Ranieri as the only Chelsea manager ever to be
applauded, as the blade twisted, by Arsenal's North Bank after winning
a Champions League quarter-final at Highbury and, at his last away
game, by Old Trafford's Stretford End. After Manchester United came
the long goodbye to Stamford Bridge, a home game against Leeds on 15
May 2004, Abramovich's dismissal notice in Ranieri's pocket, but a lap
and guard of honour with the players. For a while afterwards, at
Valencia and Parma, Ranieri would tell English papers that his 'real
club' was still Chelsea. But no longer.

Ranieri now occupies a post that is, in its way, even more prestigious
than Chelsea manager and certainly more highly charged with history
and tradition. Juventus are an institution without parallel in sport,
an Italian national side and the most widely supported football team
in Europe, counting 11 million inscribed fans in Italy (20 per cent of
the population) and another nine million in the diaspora across the
continent. Juve have won Serie A 29 times and, while billionaire
foreign titans with no idea what a football is squabble for ownership
of top British clubs, have remained under the ownership and patronage
of Fiat, and the Agnelli family that runs Fiat, since 1923. As the
fans' banners claim - 'TRADIZIONE', 'ONORE' - Juventus are football's
aristocracy. And this is what made the corruption scandal in 2006 all
the more painful.

Juventus' total redemption seems assured. They suffered a dip in form
after beating Roma, one of two teams ahead of them, before returning
to their best with a 2-1 win last weekend away to Inter, the Serie A
leaders. Mauro Camoranesi and David Trezeguet scored the goals, and
Alessandro Del Piero equalled Gaetano Scirea's record of 552
appearances for Juventus.

The unspoken but implicit aim of Ranieri's employment, a place in the
Champions League, is all but guaranteed. 'That tradition is a great
pressure as well as the particular situation we're in,' says Ranieri.
'It's a special place, this, and a special task.'

The club have two nicknames: La Vecchia Signora (The Grand Old Lady)
or La Fidanzata D'Italia (Italy's girlfriend). As the writer on Juve,
Roberto Beccantini, puts it: 'Grand Lady, Grand Tart - the two souls
of Juventus.'

Ranieri was in a particularly hot seat during derby week recently. The
identity of a Juventus supporter is unique and complex: although Juve
play in Turin, in Italy's Alpine northwestern corner, they are, above
all, a team of the south, where every town and village boasts a
Juventus Club. In Turin itself, Juve became the team adopted by rural
southerners (now their descendants) who came north to work on the
production lines at Fiat. Fans of Torino, conversely, insist that they
are the local side, a claim echoing that of Everton or Manchester
City, invoking indigenous civic roots against international prowess.

When the derby ended goalless, Ranieri, with his typical caustic
humour, said: 'What went wrong? Oh, just the little things with which
you win a game. We messed up too many passes, too many assists and too
many chances.' Next morning, he goes back to the Vinovo training
ground to start again.

He was born in 1951, son of a butcher in the fiercely self-certain
working-class quarter of Testaccio, on the Tiber's banks in Rome.
Claudio, well known as a ragazzaccio - a lad - in the neighbourhood,
did not follow his brothers into the family trade, but graduated from
Roma's academy. His career as a defender was spent mostly in the
second division, and aged 35 he elected to train as a coach. His first
major task in management was clearly defined: to take the Sardinian
club Cagliari from the third division back to Serie A, which he did in
consecutive seasons up to 1991. Then came Napoli in 1991-92, at a
moment of sadness after the degeneration from genius of Diego
Maradona. Ranieri managed a decent fourth place, but was still sacked
by the later-arrested Napoli owner, Corrado Ferlaino - albeit having
established what would become an important relationship by replacing
Maradona with Gianfranco Zola.

Next, from 1993-97, Ranieri was asked to bring back Fiorentina from
Serie B and did so, winning the Italian Cup and Italian Super Cup in
1996. The following season, he took Valencia off the bottom of the
table and won the Spanish Cup, and then qualified for the Champions
League in 1999. After Chelsea, he returned briefly to Valencia and in
February 2007 took over Parma (like Juve, disgraced by scandal at the
time), briefed to rescue them from presumed relegation. He did.

When Ranieri came to Juventus last summer, his task both burdensome
and challenging, Juventus had gone through the Calvary of public
humiliation, the schadenfreude of every other fan in Italy and
disciplinarian relegation to Serie B for the first time in their
history, with a ball and chain of points deducted. Then, after a
management purge and a struggle across the little stadiums of Italy,
resurrection back to the top level. Ranieri's aim was, in his own
words, 'to bring Juventus and its name back among the greats, where
they belong, after all the chaos. To be here is more than just a new
adventure. It's a summit of sorts. To be part of Juventus is to be
part of history'. He says: 'I like this concoction which life seems to
have in store for me. They seek me out, special tasks in special
situations. Wherever I go, the club is never to stay on the same
square on the board, they have to move up. I don't know if it's
coincidence, some calling or destiny - but whatever it is, it's the
story of my life. And now I'm here at Juventus, with a specific task
again, in a particular situation.'

Ranieri's story at Chelsea has been told often, but the circumstances
of the initial task in hand when he was appointed in September 2000 by
Ken Bates are all the more resonant now that Ranieri has Juventus to
handle. 'With Chelsea, the job was this: move up to the top, get into
Europe. And I did that - fourth place in the Premier League and then
into the Champions League, the season before Abramovich and all the
money arrived. I got Chelsea into Europe with almost no money to spend
in the first year - it was coincidence that Abramovich happened to
find a club up for sale, and it was Chelsea. Abramovich was made of
gold, but for me it was work to do, a task to perform.'

Not that Chelsea's fans were initially welcoming. They taunted Ranieri
by chanting the name of his predecessor, compatriot Gianluca Vialli,
and called him Clownio because his English was lacking. But by the
time the daggers were out, websites and T-shirts emerged urging 'Save
Claudio' and 'Don't tinker with the Tinkerman'. All in vain.

Chelsea's shafting of Ranieri is the most brazen parable of everything
that is vile in modern football. After Abramovich's acquisition of the
club and Peter Kenyon's defection from Manchester United, the overt
courting of Sven-Göran Eriksson began. Ranieri knew he was doomed. One
of the explanations for his self-destructing tinker with the Chelsea
team knocked out of the Champions League semi-final by Monaco in 2004
is that he knew Abramovich and chief executive Kenyon had met José
Mourinho's agent the day before that crucial game.

Presumably there was a confidentiality clause, and the word
'Abramovich' rolls off Ranieri's tongue with relative objectivity, but
the mention of the word 'Kenyon', which he does not volunteer, turns
his genially confident, chatty manner into a flinch.

'When Kenyon came, I was frozen. Kenyon was the new boss, and new
bosses tend to want to bring in their own people and I was not one of
his people. Am I bitter? Yes. Bitterness, rancour, hurt - call it what
you like. Before Abramovich came, I was doing my job, I carried on
doing it for him and I wanted to continue doing it. At the end, after
the game against Leeds, I knew the players and the supporters were
with me, even if the club was not. They knew I had left my legacy with
them.'

One cites the theory of many Chelsea fans, that without Ranieri's
foundations, none of what Mourinho then did would have happened. 'I
didn't say that. You did. But thanks,' he says. 'Without the first
years, I don't think Abramovich would have bought Chelsea.' He laughs.
'Some people were jeering: "You'll be out by summer", and I answered:
"No, it'll be sooner than that. It'll be May."' Within eight months of
the sack at Chelsea, Ranieri would be fired again, by Valencia. He
jokes that although he never set up the family home in Spain, 'I still
have my house in Fulham'.

'There was no specific condition as such at Juventus, not even to get
into the Champions League,' he says. 'The condition was to give the
club back its history and get it back among the greats within five
years - for me that means creating from this group a squad that can do
that. Get a better squad, from which to select a better team. There is
great strength here, but I have to make it stronger - it can shine,
but it has to shine brighter.'

But how will the years at Chelsea impact on all this? 'I'm trying to
balance the English and the Italian way of doing things. I love the
English style and the way players unleash themselves without
restraint. But then I love the Italian game, and this is a bit of what
we are bringing to English and Irish football - Vialli, me, Fabio
Capello and Giovanni Trapattoni: the mental game, in it for the long
haul. There is a nervousness and intensity in the Italian game, which
produces results after all - they won the World Cup and Italian clubs
are a continuous presence in Europe, on lower budgets than the English
and Spanish. I want to combine the English and Italian styles at
Juventus, but I have to admit that calcisticamente [which roughly
translates as football-wise] I still feel myself to be English.'

Even if he is Il Mister, this is an extraordinary thing for a manager
of Juventus to say, maybe even a nod to the possibility of returning
to the Premier League one day. But, Ranieri having declared his
Englishness, the conversation suddenly and temporarily abandons
football and turns to food - a discourse aimed not so much at me as to
convince the Juventus official, Luca Casassa, sitting in on the
interview, of the apparently unthinkable.

'You really can eat well in England - if you have the money,' Ranieri
says. 'In London, you can eat your way around the world - Lebanese one
night, Indian the next. Even if you don't have the money, there are
places I find when I'm going round the north of England with my wife,
because she is looking for antiques - little places with good solid
food.' What about his rumoured preference for Lincolnshire sausages?
'Absolutely! Newark, in the marketplace, they're delicious, but no one
here believes me.' Then he returns to 'Englishness' in football, and
the downside - as typified by the task Capello now faces.

'Capello, like Trapattoni, is a great champion. Wherever they go, they
win trophies, and I'm sure that under them, England and the Republic
of Ireland can do great things. This is the influence of the Italian
game I talked about. But it's curious, England's weakness over such a
long time; inexplicable, with such good players.

'There is this different culture in England, a different tradition of
the players' deportment from that here in Italy. In England, you fight
hard on the pitch, then the match is over and you can think about the
next thing. In England, it might be normal for a player to drink more
than is wise and to party. All that behaviour you read about is
strange to Italian football culture. Here, players are expected to be
disciplined in their own lives.'

Three days after our long conversation, Juventus faced Fiorentina in a
game of far greater importance to Ranieri personally and Juventus
generally than the derby against Torino. Fiorentina, on a roll, had
overtaken Milan to claim the coveted fourth place, Champions League in
view, but still four points behind Juventus. Juve needed a win to all
but ensure the place in Europe Ranieri was hired to achieve.

The auspices were good: a day soaked in sunshine after a week of
chilly mists, and an expectant, noisy crowd. But Ranieri had already
passed a strange day, the team having agreed to be summoned from their
customary pre-match retreat to the hotel headquarters of right-wing
election candidate Silvio Berlusconi, also owner of Milan (who badly
needed Fiorentina to lose). Ranieri is told by the controversial
former prime minister: 'I warn you - win it for us, too.'

Berlusconi's Juventino political opponents would joke the following
day that the curse was thus cast. Fiorentina took a surprise lead, but
Juventus composed themselves and got back to 2-1 after the interval.
Then things went awry, not only on the pitch, but on the Juve bench.
'I am still a tinkerman,' Ranieri had said during our conversation. 'I
still think one should make the selections for the moment.' Only he
seemed now to tinker away the lead, removing first his best player on
the pitch, Camoranesi, then Del Piero. Fiorentina's substitutes, Papa
Waigo and Osvaldo, tore into Juventus and both scored - Osvaldo's
winner coming in the third minute of time added on - so that the
morning's headline 'Ranieri - Back to Victory' morphed next day into
'Ranieri: No'.

After the game, not a single player appeared to chat to the press in
the usual way. Ranieri did, alone and without the usual furrowed
smile. His views on the tinkering? 'Camoranesi had given his all and
Del Piero was tired - he's played every game this season and I needed
another reference point up front.'

For Ranieri the ironies of the defeat could not have been more cruel,
for behind it turned wheels within wheels of history - with potential
pointers to his future. On 4 December 1994, Ranieri brought his
Fiorentina team to Turin, and they went two goals ahead. Juve replied
with a brace of their own, both by the man who would become Ranieri's
predecessor at Chelsea, Vialli, then an unforgettable late winner from
a teenaged wunderkind called Del Piero.

Opposite Ranieri that night was the emergent Juventus manager Marcello
Lippi, for whom the match was a turning of the wheel in the season, en
route to the first of five Scudetti he would win for Juventus,
followed by a European Super Cup, a Uefa Cup, an Italian Cup, four
Italian Super Cups, a European Super Cup, an Intercontinental Cup -
then the World Cup for Italy in 2006.

Lippi: the maestro, magician and Mephistopheles of Italian
football-as-chess, arguably the greatest coach in the world. Lippi's
ghost hangs over any manager at Juventus. Ranieri must know that he
was not Juventus's first choice, and that Juve were not the only club
hoping to entice Lippi out of retirement. Chelsea may have been
ungrateful towards Ranieri, and Juventus welcoming, but La Vecchia
Signora is not a humanitarian charity. And if Juve are wanting to
replace Ranieri with Lippi, they will have to wait until Ranieri takes
Juventus to the point at which Lippi is prepared to return - and hope
this is before Milan or Inter tempt Lippi.

Lippi's spectre came into sharper focus after the Fiorentina defeat,
with whispers across the pages of the football press and furious
blogging to and fro on Juve's website - echoing Ranieri's Chelsea
days, actually, with most fans urging support for Il Mister and
concentration on the matter in hand, whatever the long term. After's
Sunday's win over Inter, the 'bring back Lippi' blogging abated
entirely and Friday's glowing headlines in La Stampa summed up his
current popularity.

It would be a cruel injustice if someone other than the passionate
Ranieri were to take Juventus - next season's draw permitting - to
Stamford Bridge. Ranieri at Juventus is by no means a Dead Man
Walking, nor even a Proud Man Walking: to the gratification of English
fans who remember him fondly, Ranieri is a proud man running at quite
a pace.