Andrea Pirlo my hero by Alessandro Benedetti

Pirlo is by far my favourite football player of all time and is quite unlike any other player who ever lived. As well as being a total demon on the pitch, he just oozes coolness and unlike a lot of names in the football world is rather suave and sophisticated. He is known for his deep-lying playmaker role and amazing variety of passes. However, aside from his unmatched career with AC Milan this guy has not only written a pretty good book but also has such a passion for wine that he has bought his own vineyard. Being Italian myself I like a glass of vino rosso or three so I very much share this enthusiasm. He is everything that the stereotypical womanising, beer swilling, vulgar footballers and their fans are not and this is why I think he is fantastic.

He grew up in Flero in the Lombardy region of Italy and his grandmother had a vineyard. The young Pirlo would help every year with the grape harvest and a love of wine was something that ran throughout his family. His vineyard is called Pratum Coller, meaning meadow hill in Latin and produces fifteen to twenty thousand bottles of wine every year with two varieties of red, a rosé and a white wine. Pirlo plans to spend his retirement making wine, which doesn’t sound too bad to Alessandro Benedetti!

So now a bit about his book, something that really sets him apart from his footballing colleagues. It is a refreshing insight into his world as a top player for AC Milan, with bluntly honest prose, not to mention a bit of risky humour. It has a slightly erratic feel, which I like and he often goes off on random and enjoyable tangents. ‘I think therefore I play’, is I think, one of the best titles of a biography ever chosen.  Here are a few of my all time favourite quotations:

“I strike dead balls alla Pirlo. Each shot bears my name and they are all my children. They look like one another without being twins.”

“I don’t feel pressure … I don’t give a toss about it. I spent the afternoon of Sunday, 9 July, 2006 in Berlin sleeping and playing the PlayStation. In the evening, I went out and won the World Cup.”

“We also need Mario Balotelli. I’m not sure he really appreciates it yet, but he’s a special kind of medicine, an antidote to the potentially lethal poison of the racists you find in Italian grounds..."