Graziano Mesina died: he, Riva and the Cagliari of the Scudetto 1970

Between a crime and an evasion, after a trial and before an escape, confused between the crowd, the bandit of Orgosolo Graziano Mesina, known in Italy as “Red Primula”, during hiding he entered the Amsicora stadium of Cagliari, took place in the stands and – hiding his identity, favored by the reflection of the slap of the sun, from the complicity of his people and the proximity of the perspective often. – He enjoyed the hour and a half of the football match of his team of the heart and more than anything else, as he would have told him, he returned him happiness to know that at the center of the attack there was a man for whom he nourished a profound esteem, for what he was and for what he represented, Gigi Riva. The fact that Mesina left today – April 12 – somehow Riannoda the thread of a story that at the time was known by a few and that over time has cloaked in legend. Today, in fact, fifty -five years ago, on April 12, 1970, Cagliari lived his day of glory. At the AMSICORA stadium with two Sundays in advance on the end of the championship, the team of Albertosi and Niccolai, of Nenè and Gretatti, of Domenghini and Tomasini, beat Bari 2-0 – after the advantage of Riva, Gori marked the doubling – and delivered to the city, to the whole island, the first championship of its history, while in the riot of enthusiasm of that Sunday, the whole Sunday reiterated its Sunday. Identity to whole Italy.

The passion for Gigi

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Mesina loved Riva, as all the Sardinians loved him, because it was the man who gave certification of existence to Cagliari, a city in exile from Italy, the suburbs of everything, an isolated outpost of a country that in those years lived the last rice of the economic boom. It was the one who – chasing a ball, kicking him with the sharpness of certain definitive brushstrokes – gave citizenship to a people of pastors and miners, last. In the ICLELLE with crystal bones capable of overcoming two serious injuries, always with the national team shirt, in that shady man from the profile of a Greek God, the bandit also found a form, the purest, of the character of those people. Mesina, this console thinking, saw above all a right man on the shore, that right man that he had not been able to be. And in the trace of a suffering silent in the shadows of the rhombus of thunder, with the shadow of solitude to precede it; Perhaps the red primrose also identified a trait of itself. Once Mesina said that “Riva constituted the idea of ​​freedom”, that freedom that – for its criminal conduct – the red primrose has always lived in a hovering. And Gigi Riva himself one day he said he found it in front of him, like a ghost that appeared out of nothing in one of his deliberates. Graziandu went up in the car with the champion, probably spoke of football – that was the period in which Riva was concluded by Juventus – but, as Gihhi explained, “Imagine if I was impressed by him, I always decided on my head”.

The letters of Graziano

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There is a secret to combine the champion and the bandit. A secret that was revealed when the weather had now collected all the dry leaves in a corner of memory. The truth then made its way between the legend and imposed its strength, with the confessions of the same shore. “Mesina every now and then – said Rombo Di Tuono – sent me letters with regular stamp, with these words written in block letters:“ Sunday I come to see the game. We win! Forza Paris!, Which in dialect means “strength together!”. Riva spoke of it with his friend and teammate Pierluigi Cera. Gigi had recommended to burn all the letters. And things had gone so. Those letters no longer exist. They are ash. The two then found themselves face to face again on February 9, 2005, when Cagliari decided to withdraw the number 11 shirt. It happened before the friendly between Italy and Russia. Graziano Mesina was also present in the Sant’Elia in the stands. The two exchanged a few jokes, who knows what they said. And then on the day when the story of Cagliari, with its lights and his shadows, reassembles his puzzle, we must return to the words of Gigi Riva to understand the spirit of that time, to have the idea of ​​how – in Sardinia – the love story between those champions and the island was special, from Bosa to Maddalena, from Bortigiadas to Ulassai. In fact, Riva said that, mindful of the letters that the bandit sent him home, at the entrance to the field, when he set foot in the Amasicora, he launched a furtive look behind the benches and more than once he seemed to see, face among the faces, the red primrose in the grandstand, with a beard, motionless like a statue, like the “Nuraghes” who scattered on the entire island to the great novel of Sardinia from Sardinia from Sardinia from Sardinia