Class, vision and leadership. Andrew Fitchett waxes lyrical on why Franco Baresi should be considered as one of the best players in recent history.

FOOTBALL ITALIA & THE MIGHTY MILAN

Like many football fans old enough to recall the 90s, my memories of Sunday afternoons spent in the company of James Richardson, Paul Elliott and Peter Brackley are extremely fond. These men of virtue were the friendly face of Football Italia, Channel 4’s flagship Italian football programme which, for the first time on English domestic television, brought regular coverage of foreign league football to our screens.

As a 12 year old Tottenham fan, my interest in Calcio was piqued by the transfer of Paul Gascoigne from my beloved Spurs to Sergio Cragnotti’s Lazio. Despite this initial stimulus, my love affair with Gazza was to wane in line with his own fortunes at Rome’s second club. Not that Gascoigne’s undulating career mattered anyway – my head had already been turned by a more beguiling siren.

In Italian football, the early 90’s were dominated by one team: A.C. Milan. In the late 1980s, former shoes salesman Arrigo Sacchi had crafted an indomitable side of fantastic intensity, skill and effectiveness and it was left to greenhorn coach Fabio Capello to continue the Rossoneri’s success into a new decade. It was this brilliant Milan side – a team who I could watch untainted by the pugnacious tribalism of British football – that now fascinated me.

Aside from their success, Milan played the game in a way which was utterly – excuse the pun – foreign to me. For a start, they passed the ball. They passed with control, style, technique and an understanding of tempo which I had never seen. For fans of current Premier League football with its raft of continental imports this may not seem to be a revelatory observation. However, anyone who has seen a game such as the infamous Liverpool v Arsenal title decider from 1989 will know that at the time the game in this country was played in a fashion which was more action blockbuster than slow-burning drama.

It was the unique Milan style – the control of possession, the relentless pressing and organisation, all married to fantastic individual talent – which seemed to embody the fundamental differences between continental sophistication and good old English bluster.

At the very heart of it all – the personification of the approach – was Franco Baresi.

ENGLISH DEFENDER’S CAN’T ‘PLAY’

Baresi didn’t really look much like a footballer. With his stern expression and thinning hairline he seemed more like a teacher – the grown-up who was only playing to make sure no one misbehaved. Furthermore, the fact that he was a slender 5ft 9in with no visible scars made him an even less likely candidate to play in the same position as Steve Bruce, Tony Adams or Colin Hendry, the British defenders that I was accustomed to.

Part of the reason for Baresi’s seemingly incongruous appearance was the very fact that he didn’t play the same role as the stoppers paid to smear the Premier League’s finest strikers all over the pitch. As part of a back four, Baresi was still detailed with defensive work but he brought a surfeit of other talents to Milan and his relatively diminutive stature mattered less in a league which was more about technique than power.

Making the most of his talents, Baresi was a defender more likely to utilise grace and wit than dispassionate muscle, using his position at the base of Milan’s formation to see the game unfolding in front of him. This allowed him to turn defence into attack effortlessly, picking the opportune moment for his occasional surges forward that usually ended in a crisp, incisive pass and changed the emphasis of the game instantly. His propitious vantage point also enabled him to anticipate the play and glide into challenges unseen, taking possession with minimal fuss whilst unsuspecting opposition strikers wondered where the ball had gone.

There was something so assured and comforting about the way he played that it felt as if he could never err – yet it never felt forced nor robotic, just natural and right.

His list of honours befits one of the greats. Winner’s medals from 3 European Cups and 6 Scudetti bulge his trophy cabinet as well as the prestigious title of Milan’s player of the century.

OVERLOOKED?

Despite that impressive haul, he suffered the fate of many other great defenders, never being recognised in any of the major World or European individual awards (in the twenty years that Baresi played between 1977 and 1997, only one defender, Matthias Sammer, won the Ballon d’Or and none the Fifa World Player of the Year).  He also suffered the ignominy of being on the losing side in the 1994 World Cup Final and the one time he was in a successful Italian squad – at the 1982 World Cup in Spain – Baresi never played a game.

Perhaps it is these close run things that have seen Baresi often being omitted from lists of the ‘greatest players ever’, but as with anything in life that is truly glorious, it wasn’t so much what Baresi did, but how he did it. Effortlessly charming and ever sporting, he rarely lapsed into using the more cynical tactics that the English press loves to highlight whenever a domestic side are defeated by a foreign opponent.

There were a string of players at Milan that I loved over the years – Marco Van Basten, Dejan Savicevic, Zvonimir Boban, Marcel Desailly – but Baresi was the one who really stuck with me. Like all great players, he was about more than just individual talent. He embodied a footballing ethos and showed that the game is played with the brain more than any other part of the body, leading the way for one of the greatest club sides ever.

Upon his retirement, Milan made sure that no other player would ever wear Baresi’s number 6 shirt by retiring it. Considering he was the first player at the club to ever receive this honour – team-mate Paolo Maldini has recently joined him as a recipient of this accolade – it was a fitting tribute to a man who only ever served one club, and served them with unwavering class. Legend.