Italy Develops Taste for Goals
FLORENCE, Italy — When he scores a goal — and they have come in shiny handfuls, like coins — Luca Toni cups his hand and wiggles it playfully near his ear with the glee of a child who hears something rattling in his piggy bank.
The gesture is actually a playful take on a confused dinner conversation he once had with a friend. "Listen, it's Luca," Toni has signaled to the crowd for each of his club-record 31 goals in 38 games this season for Fiorentina. The stunning number led the Italian League and positioned him to win the Golden Boot award as the player judged to be Europe's top scorer.
"Do you know me?" he pantomimes for spectators. "Do you understand?"
Toni's audience will grow exponentially next month when he makes his anticipated World Cup debut for Italy in Germany. A first-round match against the United States is set for June 17, with the Azzurri, or the Blues, seeking their first global soccer championship since 1982 and hoping to end a string of agonizing early elimination.
Each time Toni scores a goal, launched from a 6-foot-4 frame, he also seems to gesticulate against the obscurity in which much of his career has languished, as if to say: Finally, do you appreciate my skills?
His ascendancy comes at the relatively late age of 28. Not so long ago, Toni nearly quit soccer while playing in Italy's third division, the transient, backwater equivalent of Class AA baseball. More to the point, Toni is remindful of Kurt Warner, the onetime grocery-store clerk and indoor-league unknown who developed Super Bowl acumen at quarterback in St. Louis, stacking touchdown passes the way he once stacked cans of corn.
"Nobody gives me something," Toni said through an interpreter in a recent interview. "Every year I improve. Football is like a magic game."
Quietly confident and darkly handsome, with a movie star's jaw and a model for a girlfriend, Toni drives a Ferrari and appears in the gossip pages as well as the sports pages. Still, he is appreciated for a beer-and-pizza lack of pretension, born of the humility of a village childhood and delayed professional gratification.
"Many Italian players consider themselves more important than they are," said Riccardo Cacioli, a hotel manager and Fiorentina fan. "Toni is a simple guy."
On a soccer field, though, Toni's instincts are voracious, predatory. And his presence among a group of other rapacious forwards has given hope that Italy may abandon its typical caution in the World Cup, a deliberate, counterattacking style and highly organized defensive posture historically known as catenaccio, or door bolt.
In 27 World Cup matches played since Italy won its third and last title in 1982, the Azzurri have scored as many as three goals only twice and two goals only nine times. Even during the 1990 World Cup, facing a mostly amateur American team in Rome, Italy managed but a 1-0 victory, narrowly avoiding an embarrassing tie.
A wrenching, sudden-death loss to France in the final of the 2000 European championships, a disputed second-round exit from the 2002 World Cup and a disastrous inability to advance beyond group play in the 2004 European championships led to outrage, despair and something entirely bizarre. After the 2006 World Cup draw last December, the television network Sky Italia suggested the pairings were rigged by placing the United States with Italy, Ghana and the Czech Republic to create a formidable Group of Death.
Italy worried about the United States soccer team? Times had surely changed. What was next?
A great pasta nation threatened by Cup O'Noodles?
The mood lightened considerably after Italy routed Germany, 4-1, in an exhibition here on March 1, inflating expectations that the Azzurri would feature a World Cup lineup with three forwards and the ambition for phosphorescent attack.
Marcello Lippi, Italy's manager, has admonished reporters not to develop a kind of catenaccio of the mind, a locked way of negative thinking about Italian soccer.
Toni said: "We forgot catenaccio. A lot has changed."
Italy is expected to start Toni and Alberto Gilardino up front, with Francesco Totti, recovered from a broken fibula and ligament damage in his left ankle, in recessed support. There is a history of former nobodies finding grace and validation for Italy in the World Cup. Salvatore Schillaci, nicknamed Toto and possessing wild, fearless eyes, led all scorers with six goals during the 1990 tournament, after having made only one previous appearance for the Azzurri.
Schillaci carried his anonymity into the World Cup, while Toni arrives with klieg-light expectation, given his 81 goals over the past three seasons for Palermo and Fiorentina in the Italian League. But, like Schillaci, Toni did not arrive early to the spotlight. His career flickered and was nearly extinguished before it gained its postponed radiance.
The son of a house painter and a school worker, Toni grew up about two hours north of Florence in the village of Serramazzoni, with a population of about 6,800, and began playing soccer at age 5 or 6, coaxed by an older brother, Andrea. At 17, Toni turned professional, but by 21 he was still flailing in the Italian third division. During the 1997-98 season at Fiorenzuola, he played little, scored two goals in 26 matches and nearly gave up soccer to get another job. A game once so joyful now brought only inactivity, frustration, torment.
"I thought, maybe I'm not right to play football," he said.
Give it one more shot, Toni told himself. He began to find the net, and bigger clubs began to find him.
By 2000-1, Toni reached the first division, Serie A, then was paired for two seasons at Brescia with Roberto Baggio, the Divine Ponytail, the best Italian player of his generation. In those two seasons, Toni scored 44 goals and said he learned a valuable lesson from Baggio: "If you want to be a good soccer player, you must become a good person."
Lippi became manager of the Italian national team in 2004 and embraced Toni, who is big and powerful without being lumbering. He is improved at heading the ball and is not a great dribbler but deft enough to hold the ball. Toni has scored seven goals in 19 appearances with the national team, including four during World Cup qualifying — three in a game against Belarus.
"He is very strong in the head," Lippi said of Toni's soccer acuity, "and has a smell for the goal that is very particular."
Bruce Arena, the manager of the United States team, said of Toni and his attacking partner, Gilardino: "They are about being in front of the goal and putting away chances. They run pretty well, but they are not going to create on the dribble and beat you and score goals. They are going to get on the end of things."
Perhaps Toni's only real flaw this season, his first at Fiorentina, was failing to convert a penalty kick in a 0-0 draw against Cagliari in March. A repeat at the World Cup would send shudders down the length of Italy's mountainous spine.
Three times in the past four World Cups, Italy has experienced excruciating departures on the losing end of penalty-kick shootouts: in the 1990 semifinals against Argentina in Naples; in the 1994 final against Brazil at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.; and in the 1998 quarterfinals against France outside Paris.
"It seems like some kind of curse," Cesare Maldini, then the Italian coach, said in 1998.
So expectant for victory was Italy in 1990, the national flag hung everywhere, even on clotheslines with the laundry. Nothing hurt worse than losing at home, unless it was the awful sight of Baggio ballooning his penalty kick in 1994 to give Brazil the title, his head dropping like the blade of a guillotine.
"There were no words," said Toni, who watched on television as a 16-year-old. Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women's basketball coach who moved to suburban Philadelphia from Italy as a young boy, looked on in disbelief at a summer basketball camp.
"It was like you wanted to kill yourself," Auriemma said, adding of Baggio, "That leaves you scarred for life, the fate of a whole country on your feet."
Before the latest scandals erupted, Marco Mazzocchi, the television host of a popular Italian soccer program, said he had two concerns about the 2006 World Cup — Brazil, a five-time winner, and penalty kicks. Italians are endearing because they are passionate, emotional, excitable, Mazzocchi said, but taking a penalty kick requires aloofness, cold detachment.
"It is not a question of fatalism, it is a question of heart, involvement," Mazzocchi said. "Certainly to go to penalty kicks is a difficulty, and to have lost this many competitions recently weighs on us. Let's hope we never get there."
How would Toni perform in that situation, on a world stage? It is the one unknown about him. He has never played in the Champions League, Europe's most prestigious club tournament, or in a World Cup. Would his natural calm prevail? Would his hand end up wiggling at his ear in celebration or covering his face in inconsolable hurt?
"I haven't played the World Cup, but I have a big emotion about it," Toni said. "I'm happy to live the moment. I want this moment to come as soon as possible. I like to live with intensity."
By JERE LONGMAN
New York Times
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