I’m the most famous interrupted footballer – Marco Van Basten
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I am an interrupted footballer. Perhaps the most famous in this category. I have not gone in peace. I don’t hide that reinventing myself as a person was hard.” With these words, Marco van Basten reveals his dark moments after his footballing career was interrupted due to a persistent ankle injury.
Marco van Basten, who with Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaar marked the golden era of Dutch and AC Milan history, sopped playing at 28.
Asked whether he was afraid about the future, Marco Van Basten said “that evening I only thought that my life had been football. Now it had become a sewer. I was only 31. My liver was broken for painkillers. I had huge pain in that cursed ankle. I was desperate. Later, when I got out of it, I realized I had experienced something like depression. At the time I didn’t understand. I was too focused on my feeling bad. I wondered why this suffering should have touched me. I never found an answer. ”
Asked about his family, Van Basten said “I’d like to tell you that my wife, the family, helped me. Instead I was a burden on them. Those were very bad years. Maybe I had to hit rock bottom and then start my new life. ”
There hasn’t been a morning when I haven’t thought about what could have been.
What would Marco van Basten become with a normal ankle? “Basically I stopped playing at 28. I had won three Golden Balls. Look at the over thirty year old Ronaldo and Messi, where are they at now.”
Asked about his tribute match at the end of his time with Ac Milan, Van Basten said it was all very sad. “The looks of my former companions were sad. I tried to avoid eye contact. I had promised myself not to cry. It wasn’t a party. There was sadness everywhere.
“I didn’t want to show that I limped, I clapped people. And in the meantime I thought I was not there anymore, I seemed to be a guest of my funeral.”
Speaking about his period in Milan, Van Basten said “In Milan I felt like I was part of a family. Together we lived a whole life. You saw me born, as a player and as a man. You saw me grow up. And unfortunately you have seen the end.”
He said that Johann Cruyff was special, so much that he was the most important football figure for him. “By being told that I was special, I ended up believing it too.”
About Sacchi he said there has never been a personal feeling between them. “He never gave me the impression of being honest in human relationships. It was never direct. It was zigzagging. When he was not happy with how we trained, he took it out on the young, the weakest, who perhaps were in the lead pulling the group.”
He said that the most beautiful moment in his career was “when Ac Milan did not win anything yet.” Just before the first Champions Cup won against Steaua Bucharest the coach tried going up the ramblas of Barcelona invaded by AC Milan fans for the Champions League final. “That evening I thought I was running pushed by an invisible hand. ”
Asked why he failed as a coach, he recounted “When I went back to Ajax a boy provoked me. You’re van Basten, he said passing me the ball, show me what you can do. But I could no longer move my ankle. At that moment I understood that I could never be a coach like Cruijff, who also lived on what he had been. That impertinent boy was Zlatan, his surname was Ibrahimovic.
