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The best partner I had in my life

Alexis Sánchez and Antonio Di Natale were the perfect match at Udinese…

The best partner I had in my life

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Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to be Alexis Sánchez. Try, go on, really try. You’re born in the Antofagasta commune of Tocopilla, Northern Chile, a port city known for deep sea fishing, copper-concentrate plants, and being the birthplace of surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. And not much else, if we’re honest—it’s a tiny, tiny place with a population of 24,000. You show promise early, playing on the streets with your mates with balls made out of rags. Your friends call you ‘Ardilla’ (Squirrel) because you’re so good at retrieving lost causes, be that climbing up trees to get rogue footballs or running onto errant passes.

You’re scouted at age 12, and you have to pack up and move 1,611 km away from your mum and three brothers to the Universidad Católica academy in Rancagua, a place in the Región de O'Higgins, so named after Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme, freedom fighter and first ruler of a fully independent Chile. Yes, you read that right. He was a Basque-Irish-Chilean revolutionary called Riquelme. 

But back to Alexis. You do well enough over there, competing in national championships on teams bearing O’Higgins’ name, but something isn’t right. You’re homesick, so you go for a trial at C.D. Cobreloa, still 157 km from your mum but close enough to visit. You sign and make your Copa Libertadores debut at 16, with your deliberate, belligerent running at defences and ability to shoot on sight drawing the attention of Udinese. They pay €3 million for you, and off you go, sent on loan to Colo-Colo and River Plate for two more years. All of that before you’ve even got to Europe. You’d be cooked if you actually had to be him, wouldn’t you?

It’s a difficult thing, untapped potential. Take one wiry South American winger, test him and try him, see if he sinks or swims. Shuttling from place to place, seeking a home and a place to properly start. Now he’s in Udine, 18, over 11,000 km from home, surrounded by frescoed medieval buildings and Venetian arches. He needs someone who can mould him and shape him, and see the outlines of what he could become, not what he is right now.

Enter Antonio Di Natale—a man who spent his career rooted in two places. Ten years at Empoli and twelve with Udinese. Even when he started out as a youth teamer at the former, he got so homesick at first that he’d periodically run away, taking the train 300 miles to return to his parents in Naples and considering packing it all in if he couldn’t be with his family. He's a player who knew his comfort zone and liked staying there, understood the value of a place and the people in it. He’s exactly who Alexis needs.

Despite Di Natale hammering in 29 goals and winning Serie A top scorer in 2009/10, Udinese finished 15th and spent most of the season trapped in a relegation dogfight. He needed help of his own—a co-pilot and a comrade, someone who could share the burden of carrying an attack.

They started training together: “Every Wednesday just the two of us would stay back,” Di Natale once said of him and Sánchez, “and train shooting, our technique and long-range shots.” They’d lift weights together in the small hours and obsess over every detail of their games. Sánchez fills out, becomes thicker in his torso and in his legs; he looks less like a child and more like a man. 

Yet the 10/11 season begins, and Udinese lose four straight and are rooted at the bottom of the table again. It took until January for coach Francesco Guidolin to switch formations, moving Alexis alongside Antonio in a 3-5-2.

And all of a sudden, there's lift-off. The two tear through the league: Sánchez the twisty, knotty complement to Di Natale’s more composed killer, whereas Alexis is all about quick feet and big lateral movements, surging runs and skinning defenders, Antonio’s superpower is his mastery of space—his ability to render whoever was marking him irrelevant with a pass or a shot or a sideways step. He was also pretty good at twatting the ball in from long distances, which is a fun and useful skill to have as a striker.

Most Udinese scoreboards from January onwards would simply read DI NATALE SÁNCHEZ, DI NATALE SÁNCHEZ, DI NATALE SÁNCHEZ, with a metronomic consistency. They’re a whirlwind picking up serious steam.

Which leads me onto the reason for writing this piece in the first place: the 27th of February 2011, 2 PM, at the Stadio Renzo Barbera. Palermo 0–7 Udinese. A demolition orchestrated and executed by Alexis and Antonio.