Italy legend Roberto Baggio says that he can’t get over the penalty he missed in the 1994 World Cup final against Brazil. Il Divin Condino was speaking with Corriere della Sera about his career and recounted a particularly painful memory that he’s never been able to move past:
“A match I would like to replay? The 1994 World Cup final in Pasadena, Italy-Brazil. I can’t forget it. We arrived a bit cooked, we had gone into extra time with Nigeria and half an hour more, at those temperatures, kills you off. If we had been more lucid perhaps it would have been a different game. I was looking for a shovel, I wanted to bury myself. You can’t erase things like that, I can’t get rid of them. That match, just Italy-Brazil, I had dreamt and imagined it many times when I was a child. I was three years old but I couldn’t forget the defeat of ’70. I wanted to avenge Riva and the others. It was my dream. And when it ended like that, the world collapsed on me.”
“Role models? Sentimentally Paolo Rossi. He played in Vicenza, my city. And I used to go cycling with my father to see him. And he was always a spectacle. From a playing point of view, I fell in love with Zico. I used to dream about him at night.”
