Alessandrodelpiero.com the official website

29.05.2010The game that never started.

29th of May 1985, I was only eleven, but I remember it all really well.
 
My team has to win the Champions Cup. This time it just can't get out of our hands, we are stronger than before. The day after I had to go to school, but I knew that my parents would have let me stay up late, in any case there was no way I could have fallen asleep. Mine was a Juventus family : Daddy, Mummy, my brother. I already played that game in the afternoon with my ball, and then in the evening, before go to sleep I played it again in my mind, as usual in my imagination , trying to be every single player. The fantasy makes you fly, but some years later I was to find out that the reality sometimes can be even better.
 
It was one of those games that everyone talked about, especially in Veneto... Veneto is crowded with Juventus fans. But the match Juventus-Liverpool, Champions Cup final 1984-85 at Heysel stadium in Brussels, we watched together with Inter supporter: he was my father's good friend and colleague and we invited him for dinner. Nice chance to stay together, to celebrate, at your friend's and surely not at your opponent's house.
 
The time before the beginning of that match symbolizes for me all the best of football and the passion for my team. All the worst and the most dramatic that you can only imagine came with what had happened later.
 
I remember that I gobbled down my dinner to have a permission to run outside to play with my parents' friends' son before the kick off. I remember that we were waiting, but the match didn't start, adults were at the table, glued to the television, I heard from a distance the voice of Bruno Pizzul, that was reporting what was happening there. I was playing outside. Only later they explained to me what it was all about and I started grasping the real meaning of insanity, madness, bestial acts but also the human irresponsibility. We came back home between the first and second half. The game started, but it didn't really matter anymore.
 
That was some game. We won the Cup, yes we did. But there were 39 people dead at Heysel and 32 out of 39 were Italians, juventus supporters who wanted to celebrate as much as we did. People like us, they were us.
 
I'm the Juventus captain now. 25 years passed and since I was 17, I have taken swapped the sides. From supporter, to protagonist. Today we'd like to remember the victims of that tragedy. And I will do so, not only as a player, but also as a supporter that I was, as a 11 year old child I was, who had dreamt to play that final match.
 
We mustn't forget. And specially us, who are lucky to wear this jersey - doesn't matter if for a minute or for the life time career - have to think about the match, that never started and about those who lost their lives for that match, for the passion, for the Juventus.