Van Basten Malattia – “We don’t deserve this, do you understand? We have seen van Basten, we cannot bear this.’ It was the last home game of the 2001/2002 season. One of those wrong years, straddling two cycles. Javi Moreno, known as El ratón, the topastro, a meteor, played as a starter.
He got a comfortable sloping pitch down the right line. As he ran, the Spanish center forward awkwardly thrust his right foot forward, once, once again, completely out of sync, to control the ball that was about to hit the ground. He then he tripped, and fell. A spectator grabbed the railing and began to howl how pitiful it was to watch these spectacles, for those who had experienced the short season of the Dutch swan.
Kissed by the football gods, betrayed by an ankle
At the end of a slow afternoon spent talking to himself in the private room of a restaurant in his native Utrecht, Marco van Basten squeezes his cup of tea with both hands and lowers his head for the first time, to hide his eyes. The Italian title of his autobiography, to be released by Mondadori, is Fragile.
It doesn’t just refer to the ankle that gave him away. But the existential path of a former champion kissed by the gods of football and bad luck, who went through difficult times and had to wait for “the autumn of his life” to get naked and recognize his own vulnerability as a man, he who looked like a to be superior, for grace and talent.
Was he afraid of the future?
«That evening I was only thinking that my life had been football. Now it had become a sewer. I was only 31, I hadn’t played for two. I was gutted from the painkillers. I had crazy pain in that cursed ankle. I was desperate.”
Was he also depressed?
Quando finalmente mi sono ripreso, ho riconosciuto in me stesso i sintomi della depressione. I didn’t understand at the time. I was too focused on my being sick. I wondered why this suffering should have to happen to me. I’ve never found an answer.”
Do you still feel the victim of an injustice?
«I stopped when I passed forty, which is the age when everyone stops playing. Up to that moment there hasn’t been a morning that I haven’t thought about what might have been.’
By the way…
Ronaldo is a great player. Coloro che sostengono, tuttavia, che sia un calciatore più formidabile di Lionel Messi si sbagliano o sono disonesti.Messi is unique. Inimitable and unrepeatable. Like him, one every fifty years.Era un prodigio del calcio fin dalla giovane età.
Marco Van Basten, a very Italian name grafted onto an orange tulip surname. One of the greatest champions ever, one of the greatest regrets on the field due to a talent as impressive as it is undermined by physical fragility, which interrupted his career far too soon.
An immense blaze, Marco Van Basten “the Swan of Utrecht”, and never a nickname would have been able to describe more clearly the powerful elegance of a sportsman. A spectacular center forward with very fragile crystal ankles.
Marco Van Basten made Milan history thanks to memorable goals, winning everything with the Rossoneri team but also lifting the European Champion trophy with the Dutch national team in 1988. All very fast: the story of a career that ended too soon.
Marco Van Basten was born on October 31, 1964 in the city of Utrecht, Holland. From an early age he was passionate about football: at the age of 7 he played for a local team in Utrecht called UVV, which was his breeding ground for growth and development.
A quick move to another club in the city, USV Elinkwijk in which he only played one season, and the Ajax stars realized how good the long-legged boy was, able to control the ball like few others. At the age of seventeen he entered the club’s lower leagues but on 3 April 1982, aged 18, Marco Van Basten made his first-team debut against NEC Nijmegen, replacing legend Johan Cruyff.
Marco Van Basten was the top scorer in the Dutch league for three years. His continuous scores led him to earn a place in the Netherlands national football team, Orange .In the 10 years he wore the national team, between 1983 and 1993, Marco Van Basten scored 24 goals.
The most important, and also considered one of the most beautiful goals in history (volley to cross at the far post, from an almost impossible position), was scored against the then Soviet Union at the 1988 European Championships. And it was the goal that gave the team Dutch the victory of the European.
A player of exceptional class and gifted with a sense of goal like few others, Marco Van Basten was the dream of many European club presidents. On July 5, 1988, it was an Italian team, AC Milan, led by the new president Silvio Berlusconi.
Thus an unforgettable trio was formed for anyone who followed the football of those years, not just for the Rossoneri fans: Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard. Three phenomenal players, all three of them Dutch. Van Basten’s palmares in Milan was masterful: three Italian championships , two European Cups , two European Super Cups and two Intercontinental Cups , for a total of 147 games and 90 goals overall.
The amazing career of the incredibly talented Marco Van Basten has unfortunately been hampered by physical problems. Already in 1986, after a dispute, he was forced to have surgery on his right ankle in Switzerland.
The following year, as a player for Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan, he injured himself again but in his left ankle: he was out for 6 months and returned to play directly in the decisive match against Maradona’s Napoli, at the San Paolo, when Milan became champions of Italy.
