A long but nice article on Baggio 
Soccer: Farewell party may encourage Baggio to stay
Rob Hughes, IHT Tuesday, April 27, 2004
On Wednesday in Genoa, Italy bids arrivederci to Roberto Baggio, a player who has bemused and bewitched his countrymen for most of his time in soccer.
Talented but brittle, poetry in motion through a pragmatic sporting era, "Roby" has been recalled to the Azzurri, Italy's national team, for the friendly game again Spain. For however long he plays, and however well, this, the coach insists, will be the final time he wears the No. 10 on the famous blue shirt.
Or will it?
Italy is in debate over whether, with Baggio at 37 and in his final phase as a club player, the team should actually call time on such an artist while he can still win a match.
"Baggio has left a mark on an era," Giovanni Trapattoni, the national coach, said.
"And not just in Italy."
Trapattoni has been in a position to choose or ignore Baggio for four years. He has selected him now only as a tribute, a footnote in history, to a player whose retirement from club soccer is set for the end of May.
It could be a decent gesture from a veteran coach. It could be a brief nod to history, and a stroke of what we now call public relations. And it could also have astonishing repercussions.
What if Baggio - "Il Divino Codino," or the Divine Ponytail - shows his magic? What if the game is locked in stalemate and he produces a swish of his exquisite talent to swerve a free kick into the net? What if his ability shows itself to be something Italy could still use, in match-defining bursts, when Euro 2004 kicks off in Portugal in June?
At Brescia, the lowly club where Baggio has chosen to end his 22-year first-class career, he remains a match-winner in an otherwise unremarkable squad. Brescia's newspaper has quoted Baggio as saying on Europe, "I don't know - Trapattoni decides." The paper concluded that Baggio was coming to the ball to show he can still dance.
Across Italy, the press is milking the Baggio phenomenon.
"He deserves to go to the Euros not for his extraordinary past, but because he is playing well and many of our strikers are having problems," the newspaper Corriere dello Sport said in an editorial. Opening its pages to fan mail, the sports daily carried one succinct, appropriate letter.
"Baggio makes us dream," it read.
Every great team needs a dreamer.
In the Bernabeu on Sunday evening, the humbling of Real Madrid by visiting Barcelona was embodied by the quality of Ronaldinho. Many have argued that while Ronaldinho takes the eye, the arrival in January of Edgar Davids has been the true catalyst to Barça's transformation from mid-table mediocrity to the hottest team in all Spain.
The observers miss the point. A pitbull like Davids, an energizer who gives the midfield zest and competitive bite, is indeed an ingredient to winning soccer - one that Madrid, with its obsession on recruiting so-called galacticos, has eschewed. But together, the fighter and the creator give Barcelona a blend. Whereas Real has asked attacking players Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo and David Beckham to scuffle around and make tackles that are not in their nature, Barcelona has the best of both. Whereas, Figo was sent off for making an ugly, studs-high foul on the ankle of Carles Puyol on Sunday, Ronaldinho won the night with his improvised and cheeky pass.
This has been the career of Roberto Baggio ever since, at nine, he was discovered scoring goals and inventing moves in his home town of Caldogno, north of Vicenza. The phases Baggio has gone through since then have divided the believers and the doubters.
There are those who point to his long injury spells, particularly at Fiorentina where the golden one spent two whole seasons out with cruciate ligament damage, as evidence that he was too delicate for Serie A. Others said it showed extreme courage, and desire, to come back from such a wound. There are those who argue, still, that Baggio's penalty miss in the shootout of the 1994 World Cup final in the Rose Bowl was a symbol of Italy's frailty. But they forget that it was Baggio, with five goals in that tournament and with other, beautiful, goals in 1990, who carried Italy, and often when he was kicked into what might have been submission in less brave athletes. There are some who denounce Baggio as some kind of freak for converting from Catholicism to Buddhism - he was a devotee of the Soka Gakkai sect in 1987. Others view his religion as his own affair,
and an example of a soccer player who thinks of more than the boozing and womanizing which seem to preoccupy many of the self-obsessed idols who fill the headlines. He is married, with two children, and he guards his privacy. Shock! Baggio hunts live animals, as his father did before him. Good grief! Baggio speaks to the media only once or twice a season, and prefers his performances to do the talking. He sips Fragolino wine and compares Zico, the Brazilian player he adored as a child, to Leonardo da Vinci because, as he wrote in his autobiography, they created things other people wouldn't believe in.
Aha, say the critics. There he is, the dreamer. Well, this is a dreamer who was voted the world's best player, in 1993. He is one of five men who has scored 200 goals in Serie A; the others were Silvio Piola, Gunnar Nordhal, Jose Altafini and Giuseppe Meazza. Baggio's total of 204 will need perhaps another two or three this season if he is to save, again, Brescia, his seventh Serie A club, from relegation.
The ponytail is graying, but if Trapattoni thinks Wednesday's farewell will be the end, he should heed the words of Gianni De Biasi, the Brescia trainer.
"Baggio is very determined," De Biasi said. "He's galvanized in a very particular manner by this call up. He's not going to treat it as an exhibition, he wants to do his best to show that he's well.
And if he's more than well, if the No. 10 produces moments than no-one else can better, will Italy not be a little bit tempted to take him to the Euros?
Form is temporary, talent is permanent.
(International Herald Tribune)
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