Angel Gabriel
Date: Nov 21st, 1999
Gabriel Batistuta, worshipped by Fiorentina's fans, has got Manchester United in his sights
It is close to midnight in Florence. Young Florentines walk through the Piazza della Repubblica, on their way home but in no hurry. Two women stop and joke with police officers, their little interchange dwarfed by the beauty, grandeur and sheer size of the old square.
A couple of streets away the Duomo cathedral stands in its piazza, a towering monument to an earlier civilisation. A short walk down to the river and there is the Ponte Vecchio with its rows of shops on either side, a bridge that takes you across the River Arno but lets you spend a couple of hours shopping along the way.
Eight years ago Gabriel Batistuta arrived from Buenos Aires and sensed he had come to a very particular place: "To tell you the truth, my first contact with the city was a disaster. I had arrived from Buenos Aires, where everything was modern, and the old buildings of Florence frightened me. They really intimidated me."
Time passed, goals were scored and Batistuta began to feel at home in a city where the majesty of the architecture is matched by the passion for football. Richer clubs than Fiorentina tried to lure him away; they told him he would win nothing in Florence, and even though he often thought he should go, Batistuta never did. Florence is his city, Fiorentina his team. Whatever he does, whatever the team does, they have agreed to do it together.
Tomorrow Manchester United will be in town for Tuesday's Champions League tie against Fiorentina. Should the players have a moment or two to kill, they could take in some of the monuments, including the statue at the Stadio Artemio Franchi where Tuesday's game will be played.
Knowing the players must pass this way to get to the changing room, 15-year-old Francesco Spataro waits outside the stadium. He does this a couple of mornings every week and hopes his parents will never drive past while he is there. Francesco goes to school when he can, to the stadium when he must.
"We see him as a god," he says of Batistuta. "He may be getting oldish now - in my opinion Rui Costa is a better footballer - but Batistuta has shown his love for Fiorentina by staying so long. His character is very strong."
It is what everybody says of him. "Before you look at Batistuta the footballer, you must look at the man first," says Fiorentina teammate Angelo di Livio. "He has the mentality that you find in England and Germany," says Fiorentina coach Giovanni Trapattoni. "He is the spirit of our team, whether it is in training or in actual matches."
Among his fellow players at Fiorentina, he moves like a good general, comfortable in their company but recognisable as the leader. "He is almost too important to the team," says di Livio, echoing a fear often heard in Florence. With 10 games to go last season Fiorentina were in position to win the Italian championship, then Batistuta was injured and that was that: the potential champions dropped to third.
After training on Thursday Batistuta and Balbo went to a community centre in San Donnina where the author Giampolo Mattei was launching a Catholic book entitled "Grazie Dio" (Thank You, God).
Both players had contributed to the book by talking about their Catholicism and how their belief in God has helped their careers. Sitting alongside Cardinal Silvano Piovanelli, Batistuta seemed embarrassed when asked to speak but then, typically, impressed his largely young audience by what he had to say. "The football of your childhood," he said, "is only a way of socialising. It is not a forge in which you try to produce new champions. You look upon me as somebody who is a star, but the star admits to the loneliness of a man who has enormous strength in his feet but who doesn't wish to walk upon those who have less."
"The important thing about Batistuta," says Alessandro Rialti, who helped the player with his autobiography, "is that he is not like other players. He is a very good professional who doesn't really like football. Once he leaves the stadium, he doesn't want football encroaching upon the rest of his life. He is a very sensitive and intelligent man. When we were doing the book, he came to my office and for five full days he spoke about his family and his life in Argentina. But when it came to the football and his career, he switched off. 'The records are there,' he said, 'you can look them up'." His life in Argentina and how it shaped his character is a subject to which Batistuta endlessly returns.
Football helped him to make friends, especially with the three Tozzi boys in Reconquista, but he was more serious about Irina, the teenage love who is now his wife and mother of their two children. Although he was strong and aggressive, nobody saw the young Batistuta becoming a professional footballer. "Such is your feeling for the ball, you look like you have learned the game by kicking around melons," one of his early coaches told him.
But what Batistuta had was an insatiable desire to win, and as he grew older and better understood the need for proper preparation, he made himself a stronger, fitter and more effective striker. One season with Newell's Old Boys, another with River Plate, a third with Boca Juniors and then the opportunity to to play Serie A with Fiorentina. He has been the most consistent goalscorer in the toughest league for
strikers.
Batistuta's influence stems from his do-or-die spirit on the field and the class with which he lives his life off it: "I am still moved by the little things in life; something my children do or my wife says, a call from my parents, from a friend, a song, a movie. I get a lump in my throat when I see old people struggling. A person who has given everything in life does not deserve this. It is sad to work for 30 or 40 years and not be able to reap the fruits of your industry and that, in the end, your effort does not get its reward. That hurts me a lot."
As a kid, Batistuta skipped out of school and spent days talking with the old fishermen at a village near where he lived. "The thing that struck me then," he says, "was that what mattered was what a man had inside, not what he had in his pocket."
"Jet-lagged and chronically tired, he was in no state to play but he did play. You remember when the Moors went to take Spain, the Spaniards put El Cid on his horse, even though he was dead. They strapped him to the horse, put him at the front of the army and when the Moors saw him, they ran away. Against Torino three years ago, Fiorentina did the same thing with Batistuta."
An hour before kick-off for yesterday's Serie A match with Perugia in Florence, the Marisa bar is packed with Fiorentina supporters. A six-foot photograph of Batistuta hangs on the glass door of the Marisa. "You Inglese," says Folco Camici, a Fiorentina fan, "I will tell you about Batigol [as Batistuta is known in Italy]. The best side of him is his character. He sees the door to the goal and he goes straight for it. He doesn't knock, he doesn't push, he just goes for it, 157 goals in Serie A. He is a warrior. Have
you seen Braveheart? He is Mel Gibson."
Camici then tells of the year he spent in London, of the few months he spent travelling the world but when he came back, he knew he could not change Florence for anywhere else. "I am really proud," he says, "that Batistuta will play all of his career in our beautiful city."
By: David Walsh
Source: The Sunday Times
Erected by the club's supporters, the 10ft-high statue is of Gabriel Batistuta. It captures him holding the corner flag, as he sometimes does after scoring but, in this pose, the pole is more weapon than prop to his celebration. The inscription tells the story of Batistuta's career in Florence: "He is a warrior who will not surrender, who is hard in the fight but who is fair in his soul."
On the training pitch close to the stadium on Thursday morning, Batistuta remains with his friend Abel Balbo long after the other Fiorentina players have left for the shower. First they practise free kicks, then Balbo crosses the ball for Batistuta, who tries to finish with a volley or header, and every finish is struck with venom. Injured earlier in the season, Batistuta is recapturing his best form.
The eldest boy in a middle-class family which had fallen on hard times, he was deeply affected by how hard his father Osmar worked to re-establish the Batistuta family. Now 30, Gabriel still does what his father tells him and will not take any important decision without first discussing it with him. In the early years Osmar Batistuta was a farmer who had to work in a factory. Now, through Gabriel's money, he owns a cattle ranch near the town of Reconquista. "I would love to be able to show my love for people more than I do," says his son, "but I can't. My own father did not really express his love for me and I am the same with my own kids, Thiago and Lucas. We feel this love but are not good at showing it."
Batistuta enjoyed a specially close relationship with his grandparents, Melchior and Catalina: "When I was a kid, grandfather would take me hunting. Up at 5am, he would cook breakfast, fried egg and steak; we'd eat it, he'd say, 'Let's go!' He was the hunter, I was his dog. I would hear the shot, the bird would fall in the water and I would dive in to retrieve it."
On the field he is, as Trapattoni says: "The force that moves Fiorentina." For much of this season, the team has underperformed as he has struggled with injury. Trapattoni said he would resign if the team did not do well against Arsenal at Wembley and there it all changed; Batistuta scored a typical goal and the team won. Manchester United will encounter a better team than the one that eliminated Arsenal.
On Tuesday evening Batistuta will lead his team into battle against United. From the front. "Fiorentina is completely dependent upon Batistuta," says the biographer Rialti, "for his presence, for his fighting leadership. It has been like this since he came nine years ago. Once he went back to Argentina to play for his country in midweek, returned on a Friday flight from Buenos Aires and was virtually sleep-walking when he got off the plane on Saturday.