Picking your football team is easy, your Christmas cake less so...

The latest "Al Bar" column from Gino DB

If calcio has taught me anything it’s that picking your team is easier than picking your “under the tree” christmas cake. 

The year was 1986, it was a balmy late summer evening and I, four-year-old Gino who had only recently declared “pizza is the best” was on the way to my first football match. In the blue corner lay a diminutive genius and in the red corner, well, that was some team from “the dirty north.” My Uncle had a way with words. 

There was a corner. This small, long haired man picked the ball from his 6 yard box and ran. He toe poked it through two defenders – who seemed incapable of running any quicker to catch it – and then, in a one-on-one confrontation with the keeper, he just dragged the ball to his right, lost all sense of angle he was at and chipped it. 

This would be the moment where I tell you, “and it was that day I fell in love with Diego Maradona and Napoli S.S.C.” Instead it’s where I tell you that a young defender ran as hard as he could to crash into his post just to cover the chip which ended up hitting the crossbar anyway. That was the day I fell in love with Franco Baresi and that “dirty northern team”, A.C. Milan.  

I cried by the way. I thought my guy was dead.