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For Cesare Prandelli, what happens outside football is just as important as what happens inside it, a conviction that grew even stronger when he lost his wife to cancer in 2007

This article is part of the Guardian's Euro 2012 Experts' Network, a co-operation between 16 of the best media organisations from the countries who have qualified for the finals in Poland and Ukraine. guardian.co.uk is running previews from two countries each day in the runup to the tournament kicking off on 8 June.

When Cesare Prandelli inherited Marcello Lippi's Italy team in August 2010, he must have felt like a man taking over the estate of a fallen aristocratic family: he simply did not know whether he would find anything of value. Italy were in shock after the failure at the World Cup in South Africa, their efforts of regaining the trophy ending after just three games with the defeat against Slovakia. The disaster was evidence of what Italian football had become and that the country was incapable of producing new talents.

The clubs, too, had contributed to the downfall: José Mourinho's Internazionale won Serie A, the Italian Cup and, above all, the Champions League with 11 foreigners on the pitch and did not provide a single player for the national team. The disappointment hit even the most experienced players. "To me it looks like we will struggle to qualify for the European Championships," said Gianluigi Buffon. "It will take us more than two years to come out of this tunnel."

Pessimism was rampant and Prandelli was not sure about whether to accept the job or not. "The actual job of reconstructing the national team did not scare me," Prandelli says. "But at 53 I felt too young not to be out on the training pitch every day. I asked myself what I would do in the weeks and in the months between the games."

If Prandelli's relationship with the Fiorentina owner, Diego Della Valle, had not deteriorated, it is quite possible that the manager would have said no to the Azzurri. But accept the offer he did and he has done everything in his power to restore confidence and enthusiasm for the national team, not least with a qualifying campaign without a single defeat. The latest match-fixing scandal to hit Italian football has rocked the public's faith in the sport once more, but Prandelli cannot be accountable for that.

"I realised that the first aim when I took over was not the results in themselves," he says. "I didn't know when and if we would start winning again but I knew that the first thing I had to do was to bring the national team closer to the people of Italy again."

Lippi had chosen another philosophy. The Azzurri, under the former national coach, must at times have felt like Davy Crockett at the Alamo: outside the squad there was the enemy ready to use the fire of criticism. That sentiment and that climate had inspired the triumph in 2006 but had made the squad more unpleasant towards outsiders. The first thing Prandelli demanded from his players was that they would be more available to the public. "We are very privileged," he said. "Someone asking for a photograph or an autograph cannot possibly be a hassle."

Then he opened up the door of solidarity, a subject very close to his heart. He took the players to a prison in Florence. He made the players train in the heart of Calabria, on the new Rizziconi ground, which was built on land confiscated from the 'Ndrangheta (the Calabrian mafia). "Some things help people who live in particular situations and I hope this is not an isolated gesture," Prandelli said. "We all want to face the mafia and emphasise that the country is moving on, winning with its resistance."

The players have followed Prandelli's ideas, not only on the pitch but also when it came to the code of ethics that the manager imposed as a condition to wear the blue shirt. Those who do not adhere to it are punished and not called up for a while, a fate that has hit players such as Mario Balotelli, Daniele De Rossi and Pablo Osvaldo, who were all guilty of incidents off the pitch.

For Prandelli, who won two successive manager of the year awards in Serie A, what happens outside football is just as important as what happens within it. His greater perspective is epitomised by his declaration after Friday's 3-0 defeat to Russia that he "would not have a problem" if Italy had to withdraw from Euro 2012 because of the match-fixing scandal.

The conviction that there is more to life than football grew even stronger when he was dealing with the death of Manuela, his wife, in 2007. "It was the end of an ordeal that lasted eight years," Prandelli has said. "The first diagnosis was a lump in her breast. It seemed to have been resolved by an operation but two years later the problem came back, worse than before. I took her everywhere, to, for example, Paris, where the specialists gave us a lot of hope for a recovery. Things were going well but then, suddenly, the situation got worse. In the spring of 2007 the cancer attacked her liver and from then on it was just a fight for Manuela, a fight against a devastating pain."

Italy was moved by the tragedy in the late summer of 2004, when Prandelli left Roma two months into his first season at the club, to be with his wife at a critical stage of her illness. "Several people were surprised by my decision," he says, "but that is a decision everyone would do, finances permitting, surely? But then football is afraid of normality."

Prandelli (who used to be known as Claudio when he started out as a young player with Cremonese) and Manuela met each other over a hot chocolate in a bar when they were just kids. He came from Orzinuovi, a small town of 13,000 inhabitants between Brescia and Cremona, one of the more prosperous areas of northern Italy; she from a town nearby.

"We were married for 25 years and only fought once, over a tennis racket," he says. "She raised our children [Niccolò, who recently had a child and named her Manuela in honour of his mother, and Carolina], she was always close to me, even when it came to the small things. For example I used to always walk around without any cash in my pockets and I had never used a cash point. After she died, for several months I had to ask my friends if I could borrow some money from them to pay for some things because I wasn't used to having money on me."

He says that God gave him the strength to recover. Prandelli is one of those Italians with a devotion that is firm but never displayed publicly, a faith born out of childhood trips to the football pitches of parish churches.

Five years on and the memory of Manuela is still strong but life has found him a new companion, Novella, and they live together in Florence. "The main objective for a man," Prandelli said, "is happiness. I told my sons that with Novella's presence they haven't lost a father but they have gained a person who is richer again. I have met someone who has filled me with the desire to try the joys of love again. And without love I cannot live."

Marco Ansaldo writes for La Stampa

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هل تريد وضع المحتوى السابق فى موقعك او مدونتك مجانا؟؟
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.

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