Alessandro Nanni was one of the Italian champions present in the EuroHockey that occurred earlier this month in Oeiras, Portugal.
An athlete who showed spirit in the field and who has always believed from the first moment that his team was a winning one, specially in achievements and in the work for the dream which leads them towards a goal that can make this team worthy of this title.
When asked which team would be the potential winner of the tournament, Nanni didn’t hesitate to affirm, convict of his words, that it would be his team: “Of us all I think us. Because I want to win this Tournament but I think the other team maybe should be Scotland. Maybe Scotland, or us”.
Regarding to the Portuguese team, team which he had just finished playing against with, he tells us that the home squad is composed by “many international players”. Nanni thinks that “It was a good game. It was a hard game. Today we played very well”. He points again to the fact that they’ve already played against the Portuguese team, “Sometimes I played against them in other Tournament or indoor or something with the team of the city. In the Indoor Champions league I played against them and I think they were good players”, Nanny reveals. Still, there’s a problem that it is still common to both teams: “because we do not play as professional players.” As a player from HC Roma he states that even this isn’t a very well known sport between the general public, and also that they aren’t paid to play, he includes as a consequence the fact of not being able to “train a lot, and maybe in a higher level, is not the same of a team who can play as a professional”.
This wasn’t Nanni’s first time in Portuguese lands. Actually, the Italian player has already been in Portugal “two or three years ago in Lousada, next to Porto.” About our country he has a very franc idea, even because the things in common with his home country still persist: “I think it’s a nice country because it’s on the Atlantic Ocean. I like that because the weather is sunshine and so the people are like us in Italia.” And the conclusion taken from his testimony is that “[Italian and Portuguese] are very friendly and fun.”
The Italians see themselves as team whose ambition, as the others, is to “qualify to the Olympic Qualifying or maybe to the European A,” a goal that still hasn’t been achieved in this tournament.
But their morale is still unshaken. Despite of the hard days that this sport sometimes goes through, as the Italian player says: “to be a Hockey player means to be a sportsman, maybe the football is the first sport in the world, mainly because of the money. But I think this and the minor sports are the best, are really the Sports in which the players need to train strongly to attain their goals”
Nanni confesses of sometimes having to “we train so strong, so difficult to us because it’s a lot of difficult to train and as a national team we’ve only met three four months just before this Tournament and not one or two years as we have to. So it’s difficult but it’s a nice sport and I like it so much,” reveals the player showing his passion that moves him.
However, the difficulties are more than many, and it’s complicated when there isn’t a field for the young players to show their talent. This is what saddens Nanni the most. “I play in HC Roma indoor and we‘ve won the last championship season but just now we don’t have a field where we can train because the work in progress in the area so now we have to find other location to put our hockey field.” In the end we conclude that the biggest obstacles are the nonexistent structures for practicing the sport. “Sometimes is a sport – I don’t know here in Portugal – but in Italy is not popular, because we can’t see any hockey matches in TV, so it’s difficult to introduce this sport to people.”
A champion who still waits for some recognition for his work in terms of trying to show the world how good of a sport field hockey is, which reveals itself between a passion that drives him, at the head of his squadra in its battles.
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