What is the waiver for Stefano Pioli? Responds the coach of Milan, a guest in the studios of Sky Sportsalso citing an anecdote dating back to Palermo, with Zamparini inside: “How it gets to you, it’s a blow. They prevent you from carrying on or concluding any work and at the beginning I always thought everyone was unfair, except the one in Palermo. After the pain, you try to explain the reasons and decide which things to carry on with and which not”.
How was it in Palermo?
“We were eliminated by Thun in the Europa League preliminaries, with two draws as favourites. So there were already difficulties, we had to play Novara on artificial turf and I basically didn’t fit into the environment. Maybe the team came from a Coppa Italia final they lost a month earlier, maybe there was a nucleus that needed changing, but I felt I didn’t get into the players’ heads. So Zamparini tells me there was a strike and the first championship match wasn’t being played. I tell him to make a friendly, he tells me that he had already thought about it, with Napoli. Lavezzi, Cavani, Hamsik… We lose 3-1. Then I go back to the sports centre, I see television cameras and journalists… The warehouse workers, once I go inside, hug me. He calls me the president and joins me from Mondello, during an aperitif together he told me that he had feelings and that he would have exonerated me anyway, at the first defeat. Better to do it immediately and I would have found a team, I told him he was right. A month later he called me from Bologna and I left. He was so correct and direct that we kept talking for a long time”.
