Mister Nicola to L’Unione Sarda
Davide Nicola gave an interview to L’Unione Sarda on newsstands today. It was a wide-ranging chat with journalist Luca Telese: from the redblue current affairs with the new challenge that began last July 8 to the personal sphere, memories, roots, ambitions and philosophy of life and work.
The following is an excerpt from the interview published in the newspaper today.
HIS CAGLIARI
“I have a team that has absorbed so much of what I have transmitted. I immediately felt dedication to work, a sense of belonging, identity: the most experienced ones show me this without sparing themselves. It is an added value. I already see important potential. There is work to be done, but they have the numbers to reach the awareness of what they will have to be in Cagliari. Someone will go to mature elsewhere, someone has already gone, others will come because I, the director, and the company have clear ideas about what needs to be done and what we need.”
DAILY WORK
“Now we calibrate ourselves for games that last at least 95 minutes. And last year, in one of the most important challenges, we played 103 minutes and 36 seconds. If you think about it, it’s almost like an entire overtime. So, when I have to look at the data of a game, to understand, I simplify a lot. In these 95 minutes, how many times did I enter the funnel of the opponent’s area? With how many balls? I’m not interested in possession, especially if it’s a sterile horizontal exchange. I’m interested in how many truly dangerous balls I produce. The fundamental data is how many players did I bring into the area to close the action. Did one, two, four, six enter? How consistently? What is the total number of useful crosses? Obviously, let’s start with this data. I can prepare a job for the guys, but if I don’t know how much effort it costs the group, the individual, how can I plan the commitments and the loads of each one? Diversity is the salt of the teams”. We all start from the schemes, but in football it’s not always possible to implement what you prepare. The scheme is a geometric relationship between players, which they must know how to recognize, destroy and rebuild, following their intuition. The development of the game always arises from contingent situations, and always produces unpredictable variables. I am never a slave to schemes. If I have a player of a certain age who has two strong qualities, I must exploit him to enhance him, without asking him to do things that – penalizing him – damage the team; if I tell him to make a move, but then I realize that he instinctively makes another but it is more effective, I am the one who models the formation on the field, exploiting his talent for the team!”.
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ISLAND
“I discovered Sardinia as a child thanks to Abele Atzori, a dear friend my father used to visit in Piscinas, in Sulcis-Iglesiente. When he came back he would tell us about this wonderful land. Then Abele came to live in our town. When we saw the first snow in Vigone, thanks to their stories we had the sea, the sun, the myrtle bushes and the prickly pears in our eyes. I fell in love with this land even then. Abele has always had a relationship with him and with us that allowed him to tell us about Sardinia with enormous passion. Thanks to him I know that Cagliari is much more than a team, the identity of the people Riva spoke of”.
NEW CHALLENGE, NEW MOTIVATIONS
If you look at my career, you will see that the seasons in which I took over are less than half. I went from Lumezzane to Livorno to Crotone to Turin, Genoa and Udine, coaching with relative ease. Apart from Turin, where I already knew I could not stay, I fought to start again once I had achieved salvation. I did it in Salerno: I was confirmed, and that year Salernitana was never in the relegation zone. After my career as a footballer, I spent more time coaching serenely in Serie A, than engaged in impossible salvations. For this reason, the label of “Miracle Man”, even when it may seem useful, or flattering, does not interest me”.
ORIGINS
“I started playing football late, because when I was a child there were no cell phones. I was born in 1973, and until I was ten I liked only one thing: running. Just running. I was born in Luserna San Giovanni, a small village of seven thousand inhabitants in Val Pellice, a mountain area near Turin. My hometown, however, is Vigone, southwest of Turin. I would leave home running and start going from one village to another, often just for the pleasure of pushing myself further and further away. I liked the wind on my face while you run, the idea of freedom that it instinctively communicates to you.”
FAMILY
“I was the only son, I have two sisters, one older and one younger. A very close-knit family, founded on sharing. My father was a great example for me. I am a bit like him: restless inside, passionate, eager to do and try. And then he was right about me. The horizons of freedom that I was looking for, instinctively, to grow up, I then found them in the green rectangles of the soccer fields. My mother can now enjoy her retirement with my father, but she worked for almost her entire life in Vigone, as an Oss, a social health worker. A hard job, which she loved so much. The total passion for assisting others, a generosity in giving, for me almost astonishing. We never lacked for anything. In my family the first lesson was this: nothing is achieved without effort, passion and hard work. Merit comes before anything else. It was the first lesson of my life, I fully agree with it, it is the one I try to pass on to those who work with me”.
