When talking about a new beginning in Cagliari in 2023 Claudio Ranieri remembered Leicester, the little team with which he won the Premier League, the sporting paradigm of David defeating Goliath, he said: “It’s a gone story, we have to write another one.” Thus he wrote the story of his second Cagliari, led, after promotion on the final day, to salvation. Confirming what everyone thinks, namely that the role of Davide’s slingshot fits him perfectly.
And in fact even now in Rome’s crisis, the beginning of a new story that was not foreseen in advance is being written in these hours – from London: a story that mixes football and life. Ranieri’s Roma faith has never been a mystery, as he explained it to Famiglia Cristiana just over a year ago: «I am a serious professional, while I coach a team, that is my faith. But the child in me cannot betray what has always been.”
And the child has a Giallorossi heart, a heart passed on to his nephew who not too long ago accompanied him by the hand to the Roma pitch in Trigoria to watch the team train. Now, once again, heart and work will come together, in another of the seemingly impossible undertakings collected in a long career made up of many moves. Ranieri is like this: a sort of Mary Poppins of football who is called where needed, in situations that are prohibitive for everyone else. Ranieri, who had been Sir Claudio for the English, returns sor Claudio as they call him to Rome where he was born in Testaccio, where he lives, even if, fresh from the English championship with Leicester, he explained to FC: “I feel at home wherever I can recreate my family unit”, cemented by his forty-year marriage to Rosanna, a discreet presence always alongside the coach, but very far from the spotlight by choice.
Ranieri had already been in Rome as a player and then again as a coach in 2009-10 and in that capacity he came close to the greatest of his unlikely dreams: if it hadn’t been for a goal by Milito against Siena in the second half of the last match, he The 2010 Scudetto would not have belonged to Mourinho’s Inter but to Ranieri’s Roma who had gone to rest as Italian champions, keeping open until the end a championship that Inter in March seemed to have already closed.
Now he will take on a Roma team in full crisis, the fourth manager in a calendar year, four points from the relegation zone: bread for the coach famous for his comebacks and his salvations, called to chase away the shadows from the bottom, to bring out, brilliantly, the colors among which he feels at home.
He had announced that Cagliari, barring national teams, would be his last club bench, but as we know, you can’t rule the heart. And never mind if what calls the kind coach, who not by chance has earned the nickname of gentleman in all languages, is not the forest but the fresh grass of the Olimpico. And who knows, perhaps the resemblance to English lawns evokes new dreams of forbidden heights.
