Player Focus: Antonio Cassano - Ghirardi's gift to Parma

Antonio Cassano

What do you get someone for their 100th birthday? Parma president Tommaso Ghirardi asked himself that very question over the summer. He had the club’s centenary to plan and wanted to give Parma a gift. “We looked to do something special, something extraordinary to make our fans happy,” Ghirardi said.

They’d had it tough over the last decade, the parmigiani. It’s 10 years this winter since Parmalat, the food conglomerate founded by the Tanzi family, who owned and bankrolled Parma, collapsed with a €14bn hole in its accounts. The club’s glory days – recall Parma won the Coppa Italia three times, the UEFA Cup twice and the Cup Winners’ Cup and Italian Super Cup once between 1992 and 1999 – were over.

Times were hard. To illustrate just how hard, the £285.9m they brought in from the players sales of Seba Veron in `99, Hernan Crespo in 2000, Gigi Buffon, Lilian Thuram and Marcio Amoroso in 2001, Fabio Cannavaro, Marco Di Vaio and Matias Almeyda in 2002, then Evanilson, Sergio Conceicao and Adrian Mutu in 2003, wasn’t enough to stop the club being declared insolvent in 2004.

A new club was founded and the outstanding debts transferred to it. But Parma couldn’t cope under the strain. They went into administration. This was six years ago. It was then that Ghirardi bought the club. He appointed Claudio Ranieri, got Giuseppe Rossi in on loan from Manchester United and Parma survived. Alas they went down the following season, returning to Serie B for the first time in 1990.

It was a painful experience but Parma bounced straight back and have finished in the top half of Serie A in three of the last four seasons. Things have stabilised. An era of severe austerity ended. Parma still have to live within their means and won’t be blowing £22m on the likes of Savo Milosevic again – he was the last big signing by the Tanzi family – but Ghirardi could at least now permit himself to think a little bigger.

The present Parma got to unwrap was Antonio Cassano. Around 3,000 fans gathered at the Ennio Tardini to welcome him, a level of enthusiasm not seen since Parma bought Hristo Stoichkov from Barcelona in 1995. The Bulgaria international had won the Ballon d’Or the previous year and promised to score enough goals to bring the club’s it’s first ever Scudetto, a promise that went unfulfilled. Cassano refused to make any. “I have never promised anything in my life,” he said. “I prefer facts.”

To think, Cassano could have played for Parma during the Tanzi era too. He’d been taken for a trial as a 13-year-old and impressed so much that he was offered a place in their academy by its director Fabrizio Larini. Cassano’s mother, however, couldn’t bear the prospect of being so far apart from her son. Parma after all is nearly seven hours away from Bari by train. And so little Antonio was enrolled at his hometown club instead, with whom he’d make his debut at 17 against local rivals Lecce in the winter of 1999.

A week later he scored that goal against Inter. You know the one: the long ball from Simone Perrotta, the control with his heel and head before ghosting in between Laurent Blanc and Christian Panucci, the shot placed beyond Angelo Peruzzi and into the corner to seal a remarkable 2-1 win.

Memories of that and Cassano’s other prodezze are why Parma’s director of sport, Pietro Leonardi said: “Other teams must envy us” at the player’s official unveiling. Did they really, though? Wasn’t Cassano past his best now? Finished even? “Wait, they’ll have said fat too. They always say I’m fat,” he joked.

Can you blame them after that revelation in his biography about his time in Madrid? The waiter friend at the team hotel. “His job was to bring me three or four cornetti after I had sex. He would bring cornetti upstairs, I would escort the woman to him [one of the 6-700 he claimed to have slept with] and we would make an exchange: he would take the girl and I would take the cornetti. Sex and then food, a perfect night.”

Cassano has settled down since then. He’s happily married, has a couple of kids – the youngest is named Lionel after Messi – and the Cassanate – his tantrums – are fewer and farther between. Only a little, mind. At Samp, where he resurrected his career, he lost it with their late owner Riccardo Garrone, a father-like figure to him, and said the unforgivable. At Milan, he lashed out at Adriano Galliani – “all smoke, no roast” – for not keeping alleged promises. Then at Inter, Cassano fell out with Andrea Stramaccioni, the coach who he’d gone up to after a derby to say his neighbour Wesley Sneijder had told him that he was a fenomeno. It was a short-lived bromance.

Leonardi promised Cassano “a couple of slaps” if he repeats the same antics at Parma. Given the No.99 shirt, a figure that calls to mind the number of problems Jay-Z rapped about on The Black Album, they’re hoping Cassano isn’t one. Wishful thinking perhaps. Used as a bargaining chip in the deal that saw Ishak Belfodil move to Inter, journalists asked if that in itself reflected a decline in Cassano’s status; he’s no longer a player clubs are willing to spend £25m on like Roma did in 2001, but a makeweight. “I’m not a makeweight,” he said. “I’m a protagonist and that’s it.”

Antonio Cassano

He most certainly is. The thing you have to learn with Cassano is not to expect him to become someone he isn’t. Just enjoy the player he is. It wasn’t too long ago, remember, that his life was at risk after he suffered an ischemic stroke while at Milan. Before facing Cassano at the end of last month, his former coach Massimiliano Allegri said: “He’s among the best players in the world at passing the ball. There are few like him.”

He’d score against Milan in a thrilling [and controversial] 3-2 win – the goal was Cassano’s fourth of the campaign – but it was his performance the week beforehand at Sassuolo that had prompted Allegri’s praise. Awarded a WhoScored rating of 9.17, Cassano set up Raffaelle Palladino’s first half opener and unlocked the defence for Aleandro Rosi to put Parma back into the lead midway through the second half. He then got among the goals himself to complete a hat-trick of sorts.

Everyone, however, was talking about those assists. No Serie A player has completed as many accurate through balls as Cassano this season [6]. Meanwhile, in terms of key passes [2.8 per game], Fantantonio is only bettered by his former Roma teammate Franesco Totti [3.5], Bologna’s Alessandro Diamanti [3], and that’s it. His crossing has been of a high standard as well. Only Atalanta’s Luca Cigarini [2.8] and Cagliari’s Andrea Cossu [2.7] have been as accurate per game in this regard.

“Cassano is working well,” his coach Roberto Donadoni said. “From the beginning of pre-season to today he has lost a minimum of 7 to 7.5kg and this demonstrates the desire he has to put himself back into discussion as well as the determination he has to show everyone what a champion he is.”

Cassano celebrated his goal against Sassuolo with a samba. The question is: will he be at the World Cup in Brazil next summer? “I can only say that if Antonio continues to put in performances of this level it becomes difficult not to take him into consideration,” Donadoni said. “I don’t want to play national team manager [he already fulfilled the role between 2006 and 2008] because that’s not my job and I have too much respect for Prandelli who knows how to make the right decisions, but I believe it can be a positive thing for him to have players who are not so young anymore around who are still performing at an important level like Cassano, Totti or [Luca] Toni.”

Not called up since the final of Euro 2012, it seems Cesare Prandelli no longer considers him as indispensable as he did through qualifying for that competition. “Sure I think about Brazil,” Cassano told Mediaset, “It’s a lovely country: I’d definitely go on holiday there. But as for the rest, I think it’s very, very tough. Prandelli hasn’t called me in a year and a half. If he has called everyone else apart from me in that time there’ll be a reason, one I don’t understand or know. But I need to be patient: I’m not going to cry about it.” Patience is the right word. Prandelli has always kept his door open to the old stagers and Cassano, now 31, is considered one of them.

Cassano admits he has made mistakes and that he has only “achieved 30% of what I could have done [with the talent he has], 40% maximum.” From now until the end of his career, he wants to double that. “I’ve had big opportunities. I even played for Real Madrid, but I was a walking disaster. At times I ask myself: if only I’d had a head [on my shoulders] where would I be playing? On the moon by myself?” He could have got there, yes because there have been times – in fact, there still are – when the football Cassano plays is genuinely out of this world.