It is all-too-easy to eulogize about Andrea Pirlo’s hipster credentials.
There’s his beard of course, fulsome but so immaculately groomed it could be painted on by Caravaggio. And let’s not overlook his hair, leonine but beautifully kempt, a hairstyle that has seduced a thousand glamorous women in subtitled films.
His vineyard in Brescia, Lombardy is another serious clue that this is not a footballer who cuts the toes from his team-mate’s socks for ‘bants’. Then there’s his love of vintage fashion and a propensity to quote Descartes.
But lording it above all other trendy traits, what made the suave Italian the hipster’s hipster, was the football he gifted us, for both Milan giants while also gracing Juventus betting tips, across two trophy-laden decades.
Starting out as a creative number 10, a trequartista in the noble tradition of Gianni Rivera and Sandro Mazzola, the stylish midfielder transformed into a deep-lying playmaker, a player who bolstered proceedings, not with steel and Kante-esque energy, but panache performed at a strolling pace.
At the heart of the action, Pirlo pinged passes to perfection, short or long. He dictated the tempo. He ran the show. And all of it was executed in the same leisurely manner of a man slipping into a leather, wingback chair and lighting up a Cohiba.
It should be noted incidentally, that Pirlo was not the first footballer to be reinvented in such a fashion. But he was the best. By some considerable distance, he was the best.
It was Carlo Ancelotti who made the seismic change, signing the then 22-year-old for Milan from arch rivals Inter and recalling how the out-of-favour talent had briefly excelled on loan for Brescia in a deeper role.
No longer expected to play one-twos on the edge of the box and dart into spaces, Pirlo suddenly had the full vista of a football field before him, a canvas on which he conceived many a masterpiece.
At Milan he became legend, orchestrating two Scudettos and two Champions League triumphs, in a period that also saw him claim the Man of the Match award in the 2006 World Cup final.
Later, at Juventus, he lived up to his nickname of the ‘Metronome’ - or the ‘Architect’, or the ‘Professor’, ‘or ‘Mozart’, the true greats typically lavished with a plethora of monikers - by choreographing four back-to-back league titles, as the Old Lady dominated the sports betting in the peninsula across the 2010s.
“Pirlo spots a pass in a split-second that lesser players could spend a lifetime waiting to see.” So said Ancelotti and therein lies the secret behind the midfielder’s remarkable successes while hard work too, is another factor in the forming of his iconic status, graft that is seemingly incongruous to how very easy he made his majestic football appear.
Because although it is easy to focus on Andrea Pirlo’s hipster credentials - and it is unquestionably fun to do so - that should not detract us from what an incredible player he was, or how the maximising of his rare abilities was achieved via dedication, toil and obsession.
Perfecting the artform of free-kicks is a good example of this, with countless hours spent studying other players’ techniques, before he ultimately settled on using his three external toes, to achieve the most effective spin.
Pirlo never played on English soil besides as a visitor and that is a genuine shame, but if he had he would have been one of the best Premier League midfielders of all time for sure.
And we would have marvelled at his exquisite distribution and poise on the ball and considered him the coolest of them all. A Mundial footballer in a FourFourtwo age.
It should not be forgotten however that the hipness was anything but effortless.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
