Gattuso, much more than 'Ringhio'

Get rid of the indomitable gamer picture with much substance and little form, is something that probably Gattuso will never get. During his journey as a footballer he has reached win it all because he was much more than a logger handing out kicks and screams. its ability to sacrifice joined a hulking tactical intelligence which now applies to the benches, but according to many it continues being 'Ringhio' (his nickname, 'grunt') and nothing else.

A little is their fault. During their press conferences, they often You hear him underestimate himself by saying he was “bad”, That he is wrong a lot, until it is “ugly”. The last phrases of this type were for Barça (“if they are in crisis, we are glued to the hospital and one step away from the cemetery “) and for Messi (” Stop him? I could only have been in dreams or on the Playstation “).

However, all that has achieved with Naples is for study it. He arrived in December with the team mutinous against the president, before the worst crisis of results of the last decade and inheriting the position of his teacher and soccer father, Ancelotti. Almost nothing. Despite the storm, in the Second round added 38 points (only Atalanta and Milan did better), won a cup Italian beating Lazio, Inter and Juventus (his first title as a coach and the only one for the team since 2014), and, on the way out, He proved to be at the height of this Barça.

At Camp Nou will play the most important match of his coaching career and to say that he has earned it is not enough. His record I would have opened one highway to the big clubs, but chose the more complicated path. Passed by Zion, for him Palermo “killer trainers” by Zamparini, by Crete and Pisa, where did it end paying out of pocket to the players.

Adventure in your Milan came suddenly: he was training the Primavera team, and the club asked him to replace Montella. In the first year he got a Cup final, in the second he reached a Champions League point. He she left because he was not convinced by the project and gave up the settlement so that they would pay until the last euro to his coaching staff and Gigi Riccio, his faithful and inseparable second.

In Naples, in addition to football difficulties, he had to deal with confinement and, when he raised the cup, heor did he with a broken heart for the death of her sister Francesca, who lost at age 37 the battle with a serious illness. To eliminate Barça and lead the partenopei between the best eight in Europe, something that not even Maradona himself got, he will need a huge dose of work and suffering. The same one he used to achieve every success in his incredible story.