March 22, 2011A World-Class Talent Is Facing a CrossroadBy ROB HUGHES
Jon Super/Associated Press
Mario Balotelli being escorted off the pitch after being red carded
after he kicked an opponent in Manchester City's game against
Dynamo Kiev last Thursday.
London Mario Balotelli will turn 21 this summer. There is no telling at what age he might grow into his world-class potential. Poor, rich, gifted but confused, Balotelli called Cesare Prandelli, the Italian national team coach, this week.
“He asked me for help,” the coach told the news media. “He is sorry for what happened. He knows he was stupid and he asked how he can stop himself from destroying everything.”
Prandelli was sorry, too. Balotelli should be exactly what the coach needs as he tries to rebuild Italy’s team from a broken-down former world champion into a power again.
The coach is looking for youth. Balotelli has it.
Italy needs a leader in attack. Balotelli is that and more. He is built like a heavyweight pugilist, and he can shoot with violent power from all angles. He fears no defenses, but they fear him.
Yet, Prandelli dropped Balotelli from his Azzurri squad, which will play a European qualifier Friday in Slovenia. Another Italian — a former goal scorer, too, Roberto Mancini — put his own reputation on the line by persuading Manchester City to pay about $37 million to sign Balotelli last August.
Mancini, the City coach, also dropped Balotelli to the bench for the important English league match last Sunday at Chelsea. The coaches are in effect putting Balotelli’s back to the wall. Grow up, act responsibly, or you are no use to the team, they are saying.
“Our ethical code goes on, at all costs,” Prandelli told journalists, explaining why he is going to Slovenia without Balotelli and without Italy’s experienced midfield hard man, Daniele De Rossi.
Balotelli had been red-carded, and rightly so, after a reckless foul in which he kicked an opponent in the chest early in the Europa League match last Thursday against Dynamo Kiev.
De Rossi had been caught on video elbowing an opponent during the Champions League defeat that Roma sustained at Donetsk. The principled Prandelli will not tolerate acts of violence and indiscipline in his Azzurri.
“One must try to win, but my project is focused on players of a certain caliber,” Prandelli said. “To be credible, we must be loyal and be sportsmen.”
The Italians have a saying that translates as self-wounding. But Prandelli’s philosophy is strength rather than weakness. He needs the points against Slovenia, but he needs players he can rely upon to first stay on the field, and then go all the way toward restoring Italy to what its history says it should be: a world power.
Later on Monday, after he spoke with Balotelli, the coach held another briefing with the news media. He said that the exclusion of both players was for one game only, and that “we shall see for the game in Kiev.” Kiev is a friendly international — no points, only principles, depend upon it.
This short, sharp shock to Balotelli could be a turning point in his life.
He was reportedly fined two weeks’ salary — almost $500,000 — for his atrocious foul, and for letting the team down last Thursday. But can money mean so much to a young man who has been playing for more than he can spend since he was 15? Can Super Mario, super-rich by any standards, come down from his pedestal to achieve before he falls? Being something of a man-child can carry a player only so far. In some ways, coaches, and even teachers, do not know how to rein in the imagination that makes a player special.
Balotelli’s individuality was marked from early childhood. Born in Palermo to Ghanaian immigrants but fostered by an Italian family in northern Italy shortly after he survived a life-threatening intestinal disease at age 2, he has perhaps never known a normal existence. Blessed with amazing speed and with intuitive talent that can switch instantly from the violent to the sublime, he has scored many a goal. But he scarcely ever seems to make an assist, to part with the ball and give a teammate a chance.
None of us can know what it is like living in the skin of Balotelli.
Raised apart from his three siblings in their relative poverty, seemingly unsure why his biological parents let him go — according to quotations attributed to him, they never really took an interest until he was 15 and had already achieved fame — he can appear sullen and withdrawn.
“Why should I smile because I score a goal?” he once asked a television reporter.
“It’s the job I am there to do.”
Why should Italians, particularly Juventus and Genoa supporters, viciously taunt him in racist terms? Why should he care if people sneer at his lifestyle, with fast cars, with a former Miss Italy continually on his arm, with money to burn? There have been reports of delinquent behavior well into his late teenage years.
There was a photo shoot displaying his masculinity for Vanity Fair. There is a video of him walking around a town in Brazil that shows him looking haunted by the poverty there, but then coming alive when the children get him to play soccer with them.
There were team coaches — notably José Mourinho at Inter Milan — who cast him out and described him as unmanageable.
Mourinho proved his point by winning the Champions League, the Italian league and the Italian Cup last year, with Balotelli largely reduced to the sideline.
The owner of Inter, Massimo Moratti, wanted to indulge Balotelli. Mourinho had no time for that. Mourinho was on a mission to win, win, win and move on, as he did, to Real Madrid.
Even Mancini, who gave Balotelli the central striker’s role at Inter when Balotelli was 17 and took him to Manchester City, speaks of feeling betrayed.
“I trusted him 100 percent,” Mancini said. “But after this, it is very difficult to trust him. He has to stop losing control.”
Reports that Mancini threw a suitcase at Balotelli in the dressing room and shouted he never wanted to see his face again might be exaggerated. But between his two families, and between the coaches who depend on his goals, the time is fast approaching when Balotelli becomes a man of his talents, or the lost child of Italian soccer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/sports/soccer/23iht-SOCCER23.html?ref=sports
