Batistuta: Argentina's finest
Gabriel Batistuta's skills are as angelic as his name. But the one thing he is not religious about is football
Date: May 2000
By: Marcela Mora y Araujo
Source: FourFourTwo Magazine
Photos by: Stuart Freedman
Scanned by: Katy Ord
Although a room has been prepared for the encounter between hacks and players, Batistuta is cornered by a newspaper men barely a few meters past the front door of the hotel. As more and more journalists crowd around him, microphones shoved up his nose, it becomes increasingly clear that it will be a struggle for FourFourTwo to sneak him away from the limelight and into the intimate corner that has been prepared for our meeting. But we succeed and set about barring the door to exclude the interlopers from the daily press.
He claims that he is shy, hates interviews and is even less fond of photos. It is no secret that he can be irritable with journalist, although he is never rude. "I just like to defend my privacy", he says. He does admit to not being a very good diplomat and there is a story of a photographer who over heard him saying to a reporter, "I can't lie, pretend I'm pleased to see (the photographer) here. I can be pleased to meet new people, but I would so much rather he didn't have the camera."
He says that he has changed his mobile phone because "you lot keep getting hold of the number", and while FourFourTwo takes pictures he poses like a model while at the same time claiming that he doesn't know where to look.
"There don't seem to be many English journalists here," he comments idly, but there are, and plenty. It's just that they are waiting in the allocated room and are less noisy and easy to recognize for Batistuta than the press corps from back home, many of whom he has known for years.
The English press are there alright and will soon envelop him with the same old questions until eventually, at the end of the day, he'll put his foot down and cut The Guardian short: 'No, mate, I'm done.' Even the blandishments of his kit sponsor, Reebok, fail to persuade him to relent. He is tired by the end of the day, still suffering a mental hangover from Fiorentina's 4-0 defeat the previous Saturday. "A disaster," he mumbles, biting his lower lip and raising his eyebrows as he shakes his head.
Batistuta has been with Fiorentina since summer 1991, after he had guided Argentina to victory in the Copa America in June, scoring six goals in the tournament to finish as top scorer. His relationship with the club has become symbiotic: the one is inextricably tied to the other. Whenever there are rumours of Batistuta leaving - which is often - angry demonstrations by Fiorentina fans follow, calling on the club to keep him and calling on Batistuta not to betray his followers.
Even when Fiorentina were relegated from Serie A in 1993, Batistuta decided to stay with the club for the Serie B campaign. His diary entry for 6 June, 1993 reads: "We are deeply in the drama. Fiorentina has beaten Foggia (6-2) and my two goals were completely useless. We're precipitated ourselves into Serie B 55 years after our last and only relegation. In spite of my new personal record of 16 goals this season, three more than a year ago, my morale is on the floor. It is the day of the most useless double score of my career. I immediately fly to Argentina and promise to stay with Fiorentina even in Serie B."
In July that year, Argentina won the Copa America yet again. Batistuta scored three goals in two matches he played, prompting speculation in Argentina that he would stay in the country and maybe rejoin his old club Boca Juniors.
The Italian press duly picked up on the rumours, and soon the papers were quoting him as saying, 'I'd rather play for Boca than return to a Serie B team. I don't want to compromise my chances of playing in the next World Cup'.
Batistuta denied ever saying this: "I knew nothing of the statements coming out in the press. I'd said absolutely nothing to anyone. I decided to make a final statement: Fiorentina is my team." It is probable his denials were true: Italian journalists work without tape recorders or a codified shorthand system, so there tends to be many a slip 'twixt page and lip. He returned to Florence and helped Fiorentina back to the top flight. His loyalty to the club only reinforced his image as Florence's hero.
The local magazine Viola published an editorial saying, 'Batistuta is more than a key player of Fiorentina. He is part of the heritage of Florence, one of the city's messengers to the world.' Since then, every close season brings a new club acting as suitor in Florence's drama of courtly love
Gabriel Batistuta looks like a footballer. More specifically, he looks like a South American footballer. He has long, leonine, flowing locks and the big, blue eyes of a matinee idol. He is tall too, taller than most of his teammates, so he's not hard to locate when the Argentina team meet the English press at their training camp in Hertfordshire before the Wembley clash against England.