How I started to support Juventus
In summer 1998 I was a young kid, who had never seen a World Cup or a Euro before. I had already fallen in love with the Game, but hadn’t obtained a favorite team yet. I supported FCSM in mid-nineties, but that romancev didn’t last long (don’t know why).
That summer, like many Russian kids of my age I was spending time at my grandma’s dacha (yes, there is such word in English). A good friend of mine at the dacha, Serega, unlike me, was from Moscow. He was a happy owner of a League of Champions (season 97/98) official magazine. The magazine was in English (I didn’t know the language then) and made of thick quality paper. It was nice just to hold it. It contained a lot of stats (all games’ results, names of the scorers) and photos of the best players of that Champions League season. Among the players was Alessandro Del Piero.
I liked Alex’s appearance, I liked the fact that he scored a lot of goals in that tournament, I liked pronunciation of his full name. Everything about him was good to me. I decided to try to find as much info about him as possible. And I was lucky, because in few days the World Cup in France was about to take place. That meant that I would see a few games with Alessandro on TV.
It is to be said that Serega possessed not only the magazine. He also had an Inter Milan jersey and his favorite player was Ronaldo. I didn’t have a jersey, because it was too expensive for my parents to buy one. Please note that I’m not talking about a licensed jersey. A that time there were only legends about a boy, whose parents (or some other relatives, as an option) had been somewhere in Europe and brought him a licensed jersey from the trip. But no one knew the lucky guy personally.
Now, looking back, I think that the fact that Serega had Ronaldo as his football idol, pushed me to Alex. All teenagers want to be different from others, unique, I-am-not-like-you-type. So I opposed to Serega and chose Del Piero. I also started hating Ronaldo. Not because I really hated something about him, no. Only because I wanted my idol to be better than Serega’s idol. Kids are stupid, yes. And I wasn’t an exception.
Soon the World Cup '98 started and it was so great and astonishing to me that I’ll never find right words to express those feelings. Of course, even the crazy World Cup '14 will not eclipse it for me. And though Alessandro had failed the Mundial, I didn’t stop gathering pieces of info about him and his team, Juventus.
That is how my love for Alex and Juventus started.
Thanks for reading this. Please, leave your comments in English.
