Nereo Rocco

Dinar said:

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Australiano1980 said:

altafini, rivera, cesare, rocco.. ????

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Inter may have become the most noted practitioners, but it was the red half of Milan that first showed the rest of Europe how potent catenaccio could be, thanks to the genius of Rocco. Square-faced and plump, with short legs, he cut a vaguely comical figure, but he dominated his players almost absolutely, even having them watched after they’d left the training ground so he could be sure their private lives would not interfere with their football. So controlling was he that at Torino in the mid-sixties, the forward Gigi Meroni went through a spell of pretending his girlfriend was his sister to deflect Rocco’s attentions. He was ebullient and charismatic, quick-tempered and charming, an enthusiastic drinker who would use a local restaurant as his office. Once, in a fury, he kicked out at what he thought was a bag full of spare shirts lying on the dressing-room floor, discovering too late that it was actually a tool-kit. Players who were there remember staring desperately at the ground, terrified to laugh until he was out of earshot.

At Torino, Rocco would often drop into the bar at the training ground, have a couple of drinks, and then sleep them off on top of the lockers in the dressing room. He liked nothing better than sitting up late into the night downing bottle after bottle of wine with Brera, another northern Italian who shared his views on the how the game should be played. ‘The perfect game,’ Brera once wrote, ‘would finish 0-0.’ Rocco perhaps did not go quite that far, but he did have a fanatical aversion to the ball being lost in midfield with meaningless sideways passes, and insisted that all his players should track back, even the forwards. The idea was not always well received. The Brazilian forward José Altafini (or Mazzola, as he was known during his early career in Brazil), for instance, although he had a fruitful time at Milan, struggled to accept it, while it was one of the major sources of Jimmy Greaves’s dissatisfaction with life in Italy. It is often forgotten that Greaves, who returned home after just five months in Serie A in 1961-62, scored nine goals in the ten games he played for Milan, but for Rocco that was not enough. ‘Those two,’ he said, ‘need to understand that during a football match you get kicked, not just well paid.’

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Rocco’s catenaccio may not have been so defensive as some suggested, but it was still a very different game to that practised by Guttmann’s Benfica. They shared a cantankerous disposition, but Guttmann’s notion of football remained essentially romantic; Rocco simply wanted to win. Ahead of an Intercontinental Cup game against the notorious Argentinian side Estudiantes de la Plata in 1969, Rocco is supposed to have issued the instruction, ‘kick anything that moves; if it’s the ball, so much the better’. The story may be apocryphal, but it was not uncharacteristic.

When Ipswich Town were beaten by Milan in the second round of the European Cup in 1962-63, their captain Andy Nelson was left complaining that Rocco’s side ‘were up to all the cynical stuff - pulling your hair, spitting, treading on your toes’. In the final, the winger Paolo Barison, despite having scored freely throughout the tournament, was dropped and, with Bruno Mora switching from the right to the left flank, was replaced by Gino Pivatelli, who was given a specific brief to nullify Benfica’s majestic inside-forward, Mario Coluna. Perhaps it was bad luck or mistiming, but when Coluna was left
hobbling following a heavy challenge by Pivatelli a minute after Altafini had equalised, nobody was too surprised.

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Goodfella said:

A pic I took in San Siro Store

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