Former Roma manager: Totti? He's a lonely boy
Walter Sabatini, sports director, left the management of Salernitana today. The highest moment of his career was with Roma between 2011 and 2016. Today in an interview with Corriere della Sera explains that “The all-encompassing image is that of Aureliano Buendia in A hundred years of solitude my favorite book: the condemned and the shot have my face.” He says that a person he admires is Fausto Bertinotti and that he no longer has “esteem for Israel: Netanyahu behaves like the worst Nazis” .
Football as a lie
He talks about the death of Renato Curi: “I can't go a day without thinking about Renato. The loss of the poem I had written that night added to the pain. I had to drink a bottle of whiskey to write it. He talked about how the world had to stop out of respect, but instead it continued as if nothing had happened. » Football, for him, “is above all a lie, a cheat: it gives a lot to a few and nothing to everyone, for every fifty lucky people there are five million desperate people. And there's nothing worse than growing up with the illusion of being able to become a footballer. » Then he talks about his health problems: “I suffer from a chronic disease of the lungs and bronchi and I have two stents in my heart. My days are lazy, I can't keep up a fast pace. When I go out, I do it with a wheelchair, because one of my vertebrae moved and after the cementing, I raised my head and slipped out of bed, fracturing my femur. I'm completely broken, but the real problem remains breathing: to speak without getting tired, I have to use oxygen.”
Death in the face
He says he faced death “in 2018. But what torments me is the pharmacological coma of around twenty days: I met anyone under the influence of drugs. It seemed so real that it still haunts me. I also met God in disguise, but it was a bit disappointing because he treated me with a lot of disdain.” In the afterlife, he said: “I want to believe in it. I was reading a theological treatise in the search for the soul: understanding if it exists, if it derives biologically from parents or if there is a universal soul of which each of us takes a small part. I must believe in it. And he explains: “I'm not someone who's going to retire: I have to die and that's not going to happen either, not yet. My brain wouldn't allow me to withdraw. I still expect something from football: I have to take and give. Even though football devastated me.”
Rome and Totti
He explains about the footballers that he “took someone to pick up some of them at 3 a.m. in the outskirts of Rome: the next morning, in Trigoria, he had to intercept them, take them to a locker room separated, have them take a shower and drink coffee. This always happened with Maicon and Nainggolan, perhaps the strongest midfielder I had, but a remarkable asshole: he had to call me at one in the morning, but he made fun of me a lot. But he never missed a training session or a match.” And then Totti: “There could only be selfishness in him, because life led him on this path and left him to us And he didn't have the intellectual strength to free himself from a certain condition. He never knew how to reason with the “we”, but always with the “I”. allowed to live: in Rome, he was a prisoner, already at 17 he could not leave the house All his life, he was the Captain, the Untouchable. The hysteria that I saw towards him is unthinkable. and he paid for it with loneliness even today, he is a lonely boy, so much so that he has not succeeded in doing the things he tried to do.