Caioli Messi vs. Ronaldo Messi vs. Ronaldo

The Greatest Rivalry
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78578-056-1
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Reihe: Luca Caioli

In 2009 Real Madrid paid £80m, a then record fee, to sign a ready-made superstar in an effort to keep pace with a Barcelona side that had won it all. In doing so, they sparked a rivalry like no other; Messi vs Ronaldo. The seasons that have followed have been truly spectacular, the battle for supremacy increasing in profile and intensity all the while. Their styles, personalities and footballing allegiances continue to divide opinion, but their dominance of the record books has now put one claim beyond debate - this is football's greatest ever head-to-head. Acclaimed football writer Luca Caioli draws on invaluable testimonies from those closest to the two stars, with exclusive insights from friends, families, teammates and managers, to tell the inside story of this fascinating rivalry.

Luca Caioli is the bestselling author of biographies of Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar. A renowned Italian sports journalist, he lives in Spain corresponding for SKY Italia and Corriere della Sera.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Caioli, Luca

Leseproben

Chapter 2

The Rosarino versus the Madeiran

Cristiano and Leo are two of the highest-paid sportsmen in the world, but they were not always accustomed to such a life of luxury. They are both from modest, working-class families, for whom making ends meet was often a challenge.

The Real Madrid star is born on 5 February 1985 at 10.20am at the Cruz de Carvalho Hospital in Funchal, the capital of Madeira, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, some 860 kilometres from Lisbon. He weighs 4 kilos. He is the fourth child of María Dolores dos Santos and José Dinis Aveiro, joining Hugo, Elma and Katia. The family’s three-bedroom concrete council house in Quinta do Falcão would later be demolished in 2007 to avoid problems with squatters.

They had not planned to have another child. Katia is already nine years old, and this latest pregnancy took them by surprise. Nonetheless CR7 quickly becomes the spoiled baby of the family. The first thing they need to do is come up with a name. ‘My sister, who was working in an orphanage at the time, said that if it was a boy we could name him Cristiano,’ recalls Dolores. ‘I thought it was a good choice. And my husband and I both liked the name Ronaldo, after Ronald Reagan. My sister chose Cristiano and we chose Ronaldo.’

Just over two years later, thousands of miles away, Celia Cuccittini is admitted to the maternity ward of the Garibaldi Hospital in the Argentine town of Rosario, the largest town in Santa Fe province. Seven-year-old Rodrigo and five-year-old Matías are waiting at home with their grandmother, while their father Jorge Messi accompanies their mother to the hospital. The pregnancy has been uneventful, but during the final few hours complications arise. Gynaecologist Norberto Odetto diagnoses severe foetal distress and decides to induce labour in order to avoid any lasting effects on the baby. To this day, Jorge can recall the fear of those moments, the panic he felt when the doctor told him that he was going to use forceps, his plea that he do everything possible to avoid using those pincers, which, as is the case with many parents, concerned him greatly due to the horror stories he had heard regarding deformity and damage to one’s baby. In the end the forceps are not needed, and Lionel Andrés Messi is born a few minutes after 6.00am on 24 June 1987. Now that the initial fears have passed, they can celebrate. The new arrival is a healthy 3 kilos.

Leo grows up in the home that Jorge has built at weekends with the help of his father Eusebio. It’s a brick house on a 300 square-metre plot, with a backyard where the children can play, and it’s in the Las Heras neighbourhood in southern Rosario, home to humble, hardworking people. Jorge is the head of department at a steelmaking company, while Celia works at a magnet manufacturing workshop.

Over in Madeira, Cristiano’s father Dinis is the town hall gardener, while Dolores works hard as a cook so that she can put food on the table for her own children as well. Like thousands of Portuguese citizens, Dolores had emigrated to France at the age of twenty, where she spent three months cleaning houses. Her husband was going to join her, but when he wasn’t able to she returned to Madeira. They already had two children. Life isn’t easy for the Aveiro family. It’s tough for anyone who lives far away from the luxury hotel industry which has colonised the coast. It’s a small home for a family of six – and whenever there’s a storm the house leaks in dozens of places. Dolores fetches bricks and mortar from the town hall to try to keep the problem under control. But today, Cristiano remembers that time as a happy childhood. At two or three years old, playing in the yard or on Lombinho Street, he began to discover his best friend – the football.

‘One Christmas I gave him a remote-control car, thinking that would keep him busy,’ recalls his godfather Fernão Sousa, ‘but he preferred to play with a football. He slept with his ball, it never left his side. It was always under his arm – wherever he went, it went with him.’

Ronaldo’s love of football has been handed down through the family. In his spare time, Dinis was a kit man for local team Andorinha. And it’s no surprise when he chooses the team’s captain to be little Cristiano’s godfather. In fact, Dinis and Fernão Sousa are more than half an hour late to the baptism because they don’t want to miss Andorinha’s match against Ribeira Brava.

‘From the day he walked through the door, football was Cristiano’s favourite sport,’ recalls María dos Santos, one of his former teachers. ‘He took part in other activities, learnt songs and did his work, but he liked to have time for himself, time for football. If there wasn’t a real ball around – and often there wasn’t – he would make one out of socks. He would always find a way of playing football in the playground. I don’t know how he managed it.’

Cristiano has to play in the street because there is no pitch near his house. One particular street, Quinta do Falcão, proves to be a challenge when buses, cars and motorbikes want to get through. He and his friends have to remove the stones marking out the goalposts each time and wait for the traffic to pass before resuming the game. Their games are intense battles between households, between gangs of friends. They are games that never end. There’s a well where Cristiano spends hours on end kicking the ball against the wall alone. The well and the street are his first training grounds. It’s here, between the pavement, the asphalt and the cars, playing against kids young and old, that Ronaldo learns the tricks and techniques which will make him great and become the hallmarks of his signature style. ‘He used to spend all day in the street, doing authentic tricks with the ball. It was as if it was attached to his foot,’ recalls Adelino Andrade, who lived near the Aveiro family. ‘When it came to football he was truly gifted,’ maintains Cristiano’s sister, Elma. ‘But we never dreamed he would be where he is today.’

It takes Leo a bit longer to discover his love of football. At three years old, the Flea, as he is known, prefers picture cards and much smaller balls – marbles. He wins multitudes of them from his playmates and his bag is always full. At nursery or at school there is always time to play with round objects. For his fourth birthday, his parents give him a white ball with red diamonds. It is then, perhaps, that the fatal attraction begins. Until one day he surprises everyone. His father and brothers are playing in the street and Leo decides to join the game for the first time. On many other occasions he had preferred to keep winning marbles – but not this time. ‘We were stunned when we saw what he could do,’ says Jorge. ‘He had never played before.’

From that moment on there is no turning back. Football is to become his whole life, just as it has become Cristiano’s, although both players stumble into their first ‘official’ match purely by chance. In fact, there are a lot of similarities in the circumstances. They both go along as spectators, and end up on the pitch. Cristiano’s cousin and best mate Nuno plays for Andorinha. One day he invites him to come and watch a match, and asks if he wants to put on the sky-blue shirt. Cristiano joins the practice and decides to stick around. He is just six years old, and three years later he will be awarded his first sporting licence, number 17,182 in the Funchal football association. Meanwhile he earns the nickname Abelhinha, ‘Little Bee’, as he buzzes non-stop around the pitch. ‘He was fast, he was technically brilliant and he played equally well with his left and right foot,’ says Francisco Afonso, Ronaldo’s former primary school teacher and first coach. ‘He was skinny but he was a head taller than other kids his age. He was undoubtedly extremely gifted – he had a natural talent that was in the genes. He was always chasing the ball, he wanted to be the one to finish the game. He was very focused, he worked equally hard regardless of where he was on the pitch. And whenever he couldn’t play or he missed a game he was devastated.’

That same year, over in Rosario, Leo’s grandmother has been going every Tuesday and Thursday to watch grandsons Rodrigo and Matías train at the Grandoli ground. One summer afternoon, Leo decides to go with them. ‘I needed one more to complete the ’86 team,’ recalls team coach Salvador Ricardo Aparicio, aka Don Apa. ‘I was waiting for the final player with the shirt in my hands while the others were warming up. But he didn’t show up and there was this little kid kicking the ball against the stands. The cogs were turning and I said to myself, damn … I don’t know if he knows how to play but … So I went to speak to the grandmother, who was really into football, and I said to her: “Lend him to me.” She wanted to see him on the pitch. She had asked me many times to let him try out. On many occasions she would tell me about all the little guy’s talents. The mother, or the aunt, I can’t remember which, didn’t want him to play: “He’s so small, the others are all huge.” To reassure her I told her: “I’ll stand him over here, and if they attack him I’ll stop the game and take him...