The Italian’s incredible first season in England and his road to the top of the Premier League has been a constant battle as shown in this our post.
For Maurizio Crozza, it was a stand-up sketch just waiting to happen. Imagine a slightly less imposing and slightly more Italian version of Dara O Briain. During his new Friday night show, the comic launched into a parody of the agghiacciante diatribe. Mimicking Conte’s nasal Salento accent, Crozza-Conte is besieged by lawyers. They continue to pop up in every corner – even when he’s in bed with his wife. The whole sketch is rounded off as Crozza doffs his lavish wig in homage to the manager’s artificially augmented barnet.
Conte later admitted that even his other half was a huge fan of Crozza’s impersonation. Whenever he got angry, she would chant, “Agghiacciante! Agghiacciante!” back at him. All of the stress, he joked, “was making my hair transplants fall out”.
DEMANDING CONTROL
“Our only option is to win,” he told the press. “A draw, at this stage of the season, is just the same as a defeat. And to win we have to attack.”
As Conte writes in his autobiography, Head, heart and legs: “It was there that I brought ‘my’ 4-2-4 into being – very high wingers, mobile strikers, two midfielders and a solid back four.”
Several weeks of quasi-military training passed by without result. Sporting director Pieroni, writes Conte, “started to grumble again. During the week he would always wear that irritating expression of someone who, if it was up to him, would do things differently.”
Antonio asked a couple of his staff to drive him over to the club.
WINNING: THE OBSESSION
The Italian press has likened Conte to a Guardiola-Mourinho hybrid, with the Spaniard’s vision of football and the Special One’s cunning. However, Conte is also a great educator. Pirlo played for him during the Indian summer of a golden career, yet declared him “absolutely the coach who’s taught me the most”. At the start of Conte’s tenure as Italy manager, he held a two-hour session in Coverciano’s main lecture theatre to school journalists about his philosophy of football.
It is said that away from the game Conte is great company – both kind and fascinating. Although that’s a bit like saying that away from megalomania, Donald Trump’s an unassuming chap. When he was at Juventus, Conte was once asked how much of his day he devoted to football.
“Do the maths,” he replied. “There are 24 hours in a day, I sleep for five, I spend three with my family, that leaves 16.” He forgot to mention he tends not to sleep well.
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