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Farewell to Franco Baresi, the number 6 who did not need a name

When I first got into football, back in the early 1990s, the first thing I learned was: "You'll often hear people talk about strikers, but if you really want to understand matches, don't forget to watch the defenders' performances."

I started with Franco Baresi, because in that period, if people spoke about "a defender", it was impossible not to think of him. People often said and wrote that a striker marked by Baresi had not played a great game. And, remembering that lesson, I always thought maybe it was not the striker who had played badly, but simply Baresi who had played well.

Over the years I came to realise that, very often, that was exactly how it happened. The clearest example? Romario, probably the best striker in the world, spent 90 minutes getting nowhere against a 34-year-old who had undergone meniscus surgery less than a month earlier. Ah, for anyone who still had not made the connection: it was the 1994 World Cup final.

I remember one of my classmates well, a diehard AC Milan fan who could argue for hours over one point: without Baresi, Sacchi's AC Milan would have won nothing. He was probably exaggerating, but who knows by how much. In the school playground he even tried to defend like him. He always stepped out early, tried to read the game before everyone else and started every move from the back. He almost never pulled it off, but for him defending meant doing what Franco Baresi did.
It was football from an era before players' names appeared on the backs of shirts, when even the numbers could pass from one player to another from week to week. But Baresi never needed a "fixed" number. You saw Milan's number 6 shirt and knew straight away who it belonged to. Few players carried that kind of instant association.

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For my generation, Baresi was "the defender". The benchmark. The comparison you reached for when a team-mate had turned in an exceptional display at the back. Just as, a few years later, we started saying "you looked like Buffon" to anyone who, for an afternoon, filled in as a goalkeeper.
Rare as it was for a player who wore only one shirt throughout his career, Baresi was never seen as an enemy by rival fans, not even as a sporting one. Baresi was pure, on the pitch and off it.
He won everything. Maybe he deserved a little more. Yes, he lifted the World Cup in 1982, but he deserved one as the main man too, under the Italian summer sky in 1990 or on that brutal night in Pasadena. The night when, after probably playing the best game of his career, he broke down in tears with guilt after missing one of the decisive penalties.
Like Roberto Baggio, many ended up defining him by those few seconds from the penalty spot. Football can be cruel like that, reducing 90 extraordinary minutes to the memory of a single act.

Too often, when we think back to Pasadena, the memory stops at that penalty.
Yet before those few steps from the penalty spot, Franco Baresi had spent 90 minutes delivering one of the greatest defensive masterclasses football has seen. He did it against the best striker in the world. At 34. Less than a month after meniscus surgery. It made no sense.
I wonder if we told him often enough. I wonder if we made him understand that when we think of that final, what has stayed with us is not the missed penalty. It is the image of a captain who, defying pain and time, played a match of almost moving beauty.
Missed penalties end up in the almanacs. Matches like Franco Baresi's, though, stay with those who truly love football.