This week's guest on the Balls.ie Football Show is the Podfather himself: James Richardson. Across an extensive interview, Jimbo recalled the days of Football Italia, gave an insight into what makes a good pun, and told the pretty terrifying tale of finding himself abandoned in the middle of a riot by Genoa Ultras. Listen to the full interview below, or by subscribing on iTunes or your Android podcasting app, just search Balls.ie Football Show.
Presumably aware that we were speaking to Britain's voice of Italian football that afternoon, Francesco Totti announced his retirement just after lunch, officially calling time on what seemed an ever-lasting career in the eternal city. Totti made his debut for Roma in 1993, at the age of 16. Totti went on to score 307 goals in 783 appearances, along with creating countless memories with his boyhood club across a 24-year career only occasionally decorated with club success: one Serie A title, along with two Coppa Italias and one Italian Super Cup.
Richardson spent ten years in Italy with Channel 4 between 1992 and 2002, and lived in Rome, meaning he has a better insight into Totti's legacy than most.
Totti, Richardson admits, was "a genial fella, but not, to be fair, the most interesting of interviews", and had a reputation for not being the most intellectual of footballers. This, however, he was happy to indulge for a good cause, as Richardson explains:
I don't think there is a footballer in Italy who has appeared in as many ads as Totti, and always playing the same character: this genial, slightly cheeky fellow. He had this reputation for not being the sharpest, and they released three books called Jokes About Totti. He certainly gave them his name and his approval, and they would go like "Totti walks in with his Jigsaw puzzle and says 'Darling, darling, I finished my jigsaw puzzle! It only took me three weeks, and the box says it would take 3+ years", and so forth. But it was a lovely sign that he could indulge himself such self-deprecation for such a good cause.
In spite of that, Richardson says Totti was a phenomenally intelligent footballer, as he showed with his longevity at Roma. That loyalty, however, will forever be tinged with the idle wonder of what might have been:
There's an extraordinary statistic, that this season, something like 33% of the players in Serie A were not even born when he made his debut. Along the way, living in Rome and doing the show, there were a couple of occasions we would go along and get an audience with Francesco Totti.
But he was always a pleasant fellow, and even then, in the mid-nineties, he was the centre of everything at that club. And it's remarkable, and when you look at others - you could say Wayne Rooney, for example, almost ten years younger than him - how Totti has evolved as a player, not just in terms of conditioning and how he has lived his life, but tactically, and how he has remained relevant. Perhaps not this season, but last season he played a huge role in Roma's campaign, approaching his forties.
It's a testament to the fact that he was always depicted as this happy child almost, he is, in football terms, a very, very intelligent man. Yeah, an absolute legend, and some of the goals he scored....
One of the things about Totti, he is of course a Bandiera, he never left Roma, he is Roma through-and-through. He was certainly there to see the European Cup defeat to Liverpool back in the '80s, and there is all this mythology around how much he represents the club, and how he never left when Real Madrid came calling, when Milan came calling, which is fabulous.
But part of me really regrets we didn't get to see him at a Real Madrid. I know it is almost heretical to say that, but it would have been fascinating to see how his career would have evolved, and maybe how appreciation of him would have spread further, had he been put in another context, and what it would have brought out of him. With the best will in the world, Roma have been under-performing for a few too many seasons now.
It's a bit of a shame. It's a little bit like having an expensive painting and hanging it in a slightly unlit, unfrequented area at the back of a gallery.
You can listen to the full interview on the podcast.
