It’s important not to lose shirt 10, says D’Alessandro, the last of the ‘hooks’

Andrés D’Alessandro, 41, is still trying to get used to the idea that the routine he has lived through for the last 22 years is over.

The biggest challenge, he says, is not the adaptation of the body, which was already asking for more rest at the end of the career, but the mental preparation to turn the key and face a new stage.

“Man, it’s a strange feeling. Every day we wake up and get ready to come to training, to the club, train, then go home, the next day there’s the game. And that has already changed”, says the Argentine, in an interview with Sheet.

“But the body doesn’t worry me, because I’ve always enjoyed training and I’ll continue doing other things. We have to worry about the head, to assimilate the moment. And to command the body, even.”

On April 17, the Internacional idol said goodbye to football in the 2-1 victory of the Rio Grande do Sul team over Fortaleza, in Beira-Rio, for the Brazilian Championship. With him, a kind of player, worshiped in both Argentina and Brazil, which is in extinction, also said goodbye: that of the “enganche”. In Brazilian football, our number 10.

D’Alessandro belongs to the lineage of great creative midfielders in Argentine football who have bid farewell to pitches in the recent past.

The group includes names like Ariel Ortega, Marcelo Gallardo, Juan Román Riquelme, Pablo Aimar and Leandro Romagnoli, technically undisputed and talented midfielders, especially with the ball at their feet, but generally inferior to their teammates and opponents in the physical aspect — and of little ( or almost none) participation in defensive functions.

To see this type of player in action, however, you will need to do a memory exercise or appeal to videos.

The present, after these illustrious figures have retired, sees a dearth of “hooks”. And the future of football does not point to its resurgence. The game has changed.

“That old number 10 shirt has been lost a bit. Football has evolved, and we have to adapt. Today the point guard needs more intensity, more movement, shadowing the rival midfielder, learning other functions. But it’s important not to lose this one. midfielder. For me, there would always be someone on the team, who thinks, who cadences the game, who manages the moments of the match”, he says, indicating the type of midfielder he may have in his team if he becomes a coach, one of the options that you assess for career continuity.

Not that Argentina has stopped creating talented midfielders. Some of them even start their careers as “hooks”. This is the case, for example, of Leandro Paredes, revealed at Boca Juniors with the nickname “new Riquelme”, ​​and of Giovani Lo Celso, who appeared at Rosario Central evoking the great midfielders of previous generations.

But the European elite, where there is little room for 10, transforms these talents into players capable of playing from one intermediate to another.

Today, in the Argentine national team, Paredes, who plays for Paris Saint-Germain, is the first midfielder in front of the defense, and Lo Celso, a Villarreal athlete, is positioned a little ahead of his teammate, on the left. On the right, completing the trio in midfield, another who was born “hook”, Rodrigo De Paul, from Atlético de Madrid.

In other times, they would possibly have been kept in the role that made them rise to professional football, following the Argentine tradition. Like Andrés D’Alessandro.​

A childhood fan of Racing, D’Alessandro was taken by his father to the Cylinder of Avellaneda to watch the team’s games. Eduardo felt that his son could build a career in football. Perhaps because of that, but also out of admiration, he asked little Andrés to pay attention to the Uruguayan Rubén Paz, Racing’s creative midfielder.

He was so good that, in the naked games that took place in the square or on the street, he sought to reproduce the plays of the idol, also left-handed and passing through Internacional in the 1980s. The first of the number 10 shirts that fascinated him.

“My dad came to my training one day when I was a kid, and I was playing left-back. When it was over, he turned to me and said, ‘Left-back, never again. You’re not strong, you’re not fast. , never again’. He asked me to see how Rubén Paz played because he thought I could be a good midfielder, he had that vision”, he recalls.

In futsal, where space is limited, he developed the ability to make quick decisions and dribble. His characteristic feint, “la boba”, in which he pulled the ball and invited the scorer to strike, appeared on the courts and accompanied him until the last days of his career.

When he arrived at River Plate in the early 1990s, he found a club that historically revealed socks that were fine with the ball. It ended up being the ideal school for their game.

“I was lucky to see guys like Ortega, Francescoli, Aimar, Gallardo up close. They were all well above average midfielders. River for me was everything, a very important time in my life and my adolescence. I arrived in 1991 and left in 2003, a lifetime inside”, recalls the now ex-player.

These were years of enchantment for D’Alessandro, who says he had fun growing up and dreaming of professional football. Now, he thinks, the training processes have changed. If before the base allowed the boy to have fun, the pressure for results from a very early age started to limit the development of talents.

“I’ve never been champion in the lower divisions of River. The message they passed was that I had to train players and people. I had a lot of fun at the base. Today there is pressure on everyone, the coach, the president, the players , which makes the result mean life or death. And there is no time to work on the athlete. This takes away a lot of the player’s freedom.”

This other football, which is not the current one, allowed D’Alessandro to fulfill his father’s prediction and his own will to become a great midfielder. He, who wanted to be Rubén Paz, was one of the main names of an Argentine generation that lived up to the tradition of talented midfielders born in the country.

Can anyone in tomorrow’s football be Andrés D’Alessandro?