Giuliano Sarti, smoker and winner goalkeeper

Now they call it “building from below”. That is, the construction of the game must start from the goalkeeper, who passes it to the defenders, who often pass it (again) to the goalkeeper, etc. Once those who tried to “build from below” were simply called a “fool”. And the first “idiot” in history was a goalkeeper who won championships and cups, who triumphed in Europe, even if he started his career a little late. Before him he helped his father, a local greengrocer, and delivered fruit at home.

Giuliano Sarti (born in 1933, born on the outskirts of Bologna) begins in Cento (Ferrara) in the second category and ends his career at Juventus, after having moved from Fiorentina and Inter. At the age of twenty he is still in Bondeno (also in the Ferrara area) but he must be called to the military service. They visit him and discard him (too thin in the chest) and it is his luck, because they decide to hire him for 100,000 lire a year. He does not rejoice. “At the door I was bored, I was fed up, I was standing there, away from the others. I was left out. I often smoked half a cigarette, because there was always someone behind the door smoking. I told him to get me a tirade. It was heavy stuff, the Alphas or the first Nationals without a filter ».

And it is to combat boredom that Sarti sometimes goes out the door to reach his teammates and touch some balls. “This is stupid,” thunders a manager of Bondeno. But another manager takes him to Florence, where he is on the bench dr, Fulvio Bernardini. Puts him as a permanent holder. «I had never left Emilia. I saw the sea for the first time in Livorno, in ’54, when I went away with Fiorentina. I touched the sky with a finger ». With Fiorentina he won the first historic Scudetto of the Viola and reached the final of the Champions Cup (lost against Real Madrid). In 1963 Helenio Herrera’s Inter wanted him. Sarti is not an acrobat goalkeeper, but he has a sense of position. He knows where to go, he knows where the shot can go. His name is the first of the nursery rhyme sartiburgnichfacchetti. With Inter he won two league titles, two European Cups and two Intercontinental Cups.

Until June 1967 when, in Mantua, at the last championship, he let the ball slip in his hands. Inter lost the Scudetto (Juve won it) and three days earlier they had also lost the Champions Cup final against Celtic. The great Inter of the “magician” Herrera ends. Two years later Sarti goes to Juve. Even today, some elderly Inter fans have not forgiven him. Also because he goes to Turin to sit on the bench (the owner is Anzolin).

Few of his appearances in the national team. At the 1966 World Cup in England he was preferred Albertosi (who was his deputy at Fiorentina), Anzolin and Pizzaballa. An illness takes him away in June 2017. The “stupid” goalkeeper anticipated the story. Sixty years later, they all do like him. –