Pride and prejudice

One of Italy's most popular basketball players, Gianmarco Pozzecco, a 35-year-old, 5'11" point guard with great vision and a bizarre, ebullient mind, rejected a good contract offer the other day from one of the best teams in Italy, Virtus Bologna, after a friend text-messaged him to say he could just not picture Pozzecco wearing Virtus' black and white jersey.

The reason? Despite being born and bred in Friuli, the northeastern-most region of Italy, and having led Varese to the Serie A title in 1999, he had played for and developed an affection for Fortitudo, Bologna's other team, for three years (2002-2005), and as he told La Gazzetta dello Sport,'I never liked it when a player moved from Milan to Inter or Inter to Milan or from Juventus to Torino. I tried to join Virtus, but I just couldn't do it'.

Pozzecco's attitude has become something of a rarity in a world that has become so cynical that no one raises an eyebrow when Ronaldo comes to AC Milan as a saviour only five years after leaving town as an Inter icon.

Pozzecco's decision, soemthing of a rarity in a world that has become so cynical that no one raises an eyebrow when Ronaldo comes to AC Milan as a saviour only five years after leaving town as an Inter icon, came only hours after Francesco Totti had announced his retirement from international football.

He did so by stating the obvious; given the circumstances, the amount of competitive matches required of top players and his own physical condition, he's putting Roma's shirt ahead of Italy's and concentrating on the former.

A different kind of love for the jersey than Pozzecco's, and on a much grander media scale, granted. Totti was born and bred in Roma, grew up a Roma fan and wanted nothing more than to don the famous giallorossa (yellow-and-red) shirt, which at this point of his career is surely going to be the only one he'll ever wear at club level.

But his retirement from the national team caused sensation because of the words he used to decorate and justify it, which straddled the borders between sports and sociological analysis, if you are willing to confer that pompous title to them.

Instead of being humble and keeping a low profile about the fact he was leaving behind what most footballers would kill for, he turned on the offensive and transformed the press conference into a tirade against those who in his opinion have always opposed him and were never going to give him a break because - wait for it - he's from Rome and all the important media are from a different, ugly, dark place,'The North', which assumes an almost mythologically evil aura if you believe the Roma captain.

In short, Totti felt under-appreciated by a national media always ready to concentrate on his shortcomings and turn the other way whenever he did something brilliant, which he often did.

'I'm from Rome, they always have something against us. Had I come from a northern town, they would not have written so many bad things about me. Now, you'll see they will turn against De Rossi, then Aquilani', which of course are two of the best Roma players, De Rossi already well-known as a starter for Italy during most of the 2006 World Cup - until he was suspended for crudely elbowing Brian McBride in the face - and Aquilani possibly joining him as a regular member of the squad in the near future.

Playing victim is a favourite tactic among those who cannot seem to be able to face reality in full. You will all have had the schoolmate who blames a teacher for his or her own shortcomings or the workmate who says the boss has it in for him, so Totti's words will hardly surprise you.

But they evoked a sentiment which is widely spread among Roma fans and even those Roman citizens with limited interest in soccer but a strong sense of local pride. Having chosen to follow a path to iconic status in his hometown, Totti has been reaping the relevant rewards for a long time in terms of popularity and perks.

One former member of the national team staff whom a friend of mine spoke to the other day said Totti is a genuinely good guy but basically has the keys to the city of Rome and can do whatever he wants down there. To his credit, he has never made the news for the wrong reasons as many of his fellow professionals have done; in fact, he does a lot of charity work and has been a great ambassador for Roma throughout the years.

Not for him - as far as we know - antics like the one two weeks ago when Francesco Coco, the former Barcelona and Milan left-back who at 30 is under contract with Inter but has almost disappeared from competitive sight, went back to his Sardinia apartment.

He was accompanied by a girl he'd met in a nightclub only for another lady, in a jealous fit, to break in wielding a knife and threatening the player's new girlfriend, who had to run for her life and jump out of a first floor balcony. (She recovered nicely enough to immediately sell her story to a national magazine and have her posed pictures taken by a well-known paparazzo, all of this for those 15 minutes of glory).

But Totti's exemplary status in Rome has led to his becoming wrapped up in the perception that everything he does is right, and the plethora of hangers-on that surround him - horror stories regarding Totti's entourage came out of Italy's Euro 2004 camp - have not helped.

Totti has been a great leader for Rome and has led them to memorable triumphs like the 2001 scudetto; in addition, some of the stuff he does on the pitch is so brilliant that a celebrity Roma fan once left the Stadio Olimpico after half an hour because, as he said, he felt he was stealing money from the club since what Totti had done until then was worth more than he'd paid for his ticket.

But Roma's favoutire son has had limited success on the international scene, where his most memorabile moment was the unforgettable, chipped penalty in the shootout against Holland in the Euro 2000 semifinals, and only a warped sense of his performances has led many in Rome to believe injustice was done every time the Golden Ball candidates were named and he was not among the favourites - or even the nominees.

That sometimes people up North, including the media, are sceptical of all the clamor coming from Rome about'their' Totti, is true, based on what I've heard throughout the years from friends and acquaintances who, like me, live in these dreary part of the country (hi guys, just kidding).

Sometimes prejudice set in, as when Totti spat in the face of Denmark's Christian Poulsen in a Euro 2004 first round match and you could just feel, if not hear or read, many thinking that was Totti's "Roman-ness" getting the better of him - just as when De Rossi smashed McBride's face.

But on the other hand Totti has for a long time been a very popular face in a lot of TV commercials - once even for Turin-based Fiat, which selected him ahead of Juve's own Alex Del Piero - especially one for Vodafone alongside Rino Gattuso, for that same Roman-ness that some despise, and you know marketing executives might talk silly but usually do their homework before selecting testimonials for their corporations.

So Totti can't be too overlooked and unloved up North, and the fact many were disappointed at his decision to wear yellow-and-red exclusively for the rest of his career proves this, too.

Another thing. Totti argued that no such fuss, certainly not'a full year of criticism', had been made when Maldini and Roberto Baggio announced they would not wear the Azzurri shirt again and took it as another example of Northern bias against him.

But what he did not understand, or he pretended not to understand, is that both Maldini and Baggio declared their intentions once and for all and did not drag the situation one full year, as Francesco did.

Hey, he has every right to retire from international football if his heart and perhaps other weary and battered limbs - remember, he worked extremely hard to recover from an horrific ankle injury last year and play for Italy, and is kicked and hacked all the time in the Serie A - are not in it anymore, but for all practical purposes he had already called it a day right after the 2006 World Cup final, when Roberto Donadoni was beamed up from the dole queue to the job of national team coach.

Readers will be well aware of the fact that Totti had asked Donadoni not to be considered for inclusion in the squad for at least a year - September 2007 had been suggested as a tentative time for his return - and the saga of whether he'd be back or not, and who would have the final word about it, had been the reason for much of the criticism directed Totti's way.

Not to mention the fact he'd said Roma's trip to Old Trafford for the Champions League quarter-final second-leg meant more to him than the World Cup final. The on-off situation with Donadoni had also infiltrated almost every other question made to either Italy's coach or Totti, or both, during the past year, so much so that the whole thing had become annoying to watch and listen to.

Ultimately this may be the only good thing to come out of the international retirement of a great player who at 30 still had much to give the Azzurri, as his goalscoring performances last year for Roma proved: that we won't hear any more questions about it. In the South, in Rome, even in the obnoxious North.

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