In tears for Alex
it's Del Piero mania
Autographs and tenderness, attacked by hundreds of girls. In a hard time after Agnelli's critics but still an idol: last night the police had to save him...

August 11, 2000
La Repubblica

CHATILLON - Little boy yes, but never mummy's: from the Italian daughters instead, who last night screamed to Alessandro Del Piero endless love messages (sweet ones, but also malicious: "Nude! Nude!"), wedding proposals, declarations of eternal faithfulness. "I love you, I want to marry you" said the girls who have taken part of the encounter with the player, before the incredible and unpredictable crowd change to excitement and then danger and fear in the end.

Del Piero was supposed to be with the fans for about half an hour, him sitten on the stage and them on the audience, but soon the passion has started to press the girls on the first row, especially when Mummy's boy has come down the stair to sign autographs. When a young girl around the fifteen years of age has stopped to sob out of emotion (many of them cried) and has started to agonize with "I can't breathe, I can't breathe" always weaker, someone has finally realized that the situation was already getting worse: the girl has been recovered as she was about to faint and Del Piero has gone away on a hurry in a way things could calm down. This way the Alex-girls could reopen the lungs and recover their dreaming eyes.

The Delpieromania is a phenomenon that has no precedents in our football. The screams, the tears and at times the hysteria of last night (three girls got on the first row at one in the afternoon, to get ready for the encounter at eight) reminded of a Beatles concert, not of a short conference of a footballer.

But the love for the star is uncountable, it's also on the letters he receives, the gifts that accumulate on the door of the summer village (stuffed animals: and the girls say that Alex is just like that, sweet as a puppet), the e-mails that come from all corners of the world.

Del Piero's people aren't always Juve's, if it's true that to the black-and-white squad's trainings attend around two thousand people a day, and the female part is more than fifty percent: they travel for the champion, not for the squad. And there are cases that really reach the limits of the fanaticism: the girls arrive from Umbria and from Puglia (one girl, from Bari, has made her whole family travel with her), all of this to get a glance of a second and maybe not even an autograph.

To the people, Del Piero always answers more with a smile (open, sweet, surely very expressive) than with words, which in public are always measured, as if he was always afraid to be misunderstood: it happens even with the journalists. "This one of the fans that love me is the kind of football I imagined as a kid. The rest no, it's not exactly up to my dreams", says Alex who, in the mean time, has rigorously protected his privacy (but even this year the gossip magazines have managed to get him, at nowhere less than Bora Bora), who hides the girlfriend Sonia and who denies any incursion on his private things. Gorgeous, sweet, intelligent, unreachable: wouldn't you travel across Italy for him?
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