At the beginning of 1999 he left for Vicenza, in Italy. Did you want to leave Sporting? Were you already tired?
Wanting to leave, I didn’t want to. But the coach at the time, Croatian Jozic, had spoken to me. It came with the conversation: “You are already 32 years old, next year we can think about you being the kids’ coach…”. That didn’t sit well with me because I felt strong and good enough to continue playing. So, I already knew that his idea was to end my career. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t talk to anyone, I absorbed the situation and continued playing without any problems. Meanwhile, José Veiga and Baidek came to me and said they had an offer from Vicenza for me and that Sporting had accepted. Even with my heart hurting, realizing that Sporting accepted without talking to me, I ended up realizing that it would be a good way out, for an important championship, and that it would also be good financially for me.
Did you go to Italy with your wife and children?
As I went in January, they stayed in Portugal until the children finished school. For six months I was alone, they came and went from time to time. But it was good to have that period alone because of the language and the adaptation, I had to learn to speak Italian faster.
Were there Portuguese and/or Brazilians on the team?
Anything. He had Gustavo Mendes and Marcelo Otero, both Uruguayans and Dabo, French.
Was the championship tougher than the Portuguese one?
Yes. He wasn’t as fast as the Portuguese, but he was much more closed, much tougher, much more determined in details, the teams were very similar. At Sporting I was one of the big ones, we always went away to win, Vicenza was small, we went away to draw and it was difficult to win games.
Was the reception in the locker room as good as at Sporting?
Much more difficult. I returned to a small team. A team with conditions, with money, with fields, but, for example, we didn’t have a training center, nor a field to train like Sporting, we had to go out to train, one day in one place, the next day in another. The Italian at that time didn’t worry about that. He paid his players a fortune in salary, but trained on secondary fields. This was difficult for me. After five years, he returned, in quotation marks, to União da Madeira again. But if adapting to football wasn’t easy, life was already very positive, people love football, they live football like crazy, even excessively. I spent eight years in Italy and they were good.
What happened at Vicenza was a little like what happened at União da Madeira, they went down in division only to go back up the following year.
Exactly. There was this seesaw in the Italian championship, because it was a championship for Batistuta, Weah, Bierhoff, Rui Costa, Leonardo, Maldini, it was a very tough championship, it was necessary to have a very high level championship to stay in the I Division.
2024-02-18 08:31:30
#difficult #striker #stop #annoying #Domingos #patient #break #guy #kicked #time
