Last fall, I told you about my despair at not having a favorite NFL team.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed. I still have a tough partisanship, in all sports, for both clubs and athletes. I can assure you, it’s not misanthropy. There are plenty of athletes I like to cover or follow: Félix Auger-Aliassime, Leylah Annie Fernandez, Édouard Julien, Marie-Philip Poulin, Alexis Lafrenière, Evgeni Malkin, Dawson Mercer, Samuel Montembeault… I like to watch them play. I wish them success. But do I have a giant poster of them on my living room wall? No.
In 20 years, there has only been one exception.
Nacho Piatti.
I loved it. So much so that in 2017, before I returned to sports writing, I splurged. I bought an autographed jersey that he had worn in a game—a first for me. By the way, the jersey is still in its original box. We should hang it somewhere. On the living room wall, honey? No? In the dining room, then? In our bedroom, with the pictures of the kids?
(Silence)
We agreed on the office wall.
Nacho Piatti had it all. First, he was a dominant player. Very strong for the league: 66 goals and 35 assists in 135 regular season games, plus a few more in the playoffs. He was spectacular. Able to dribble his way between three defenders, then make a hook to beat the goalie with his weak foot. He was charismatic. His smile and love of the game were contagious. Finally, he had that je ne sais quoi to create a dramatic effect in the stadium.
Remember the time when, after scoring two goals at Saputo Stadium, he took advantage of the post-match interview on the field to publicly negotiate his next contract. It took cojones. Balls. Courage. Something Nacho Piatti never lacked during his stay in Montreal.
With Nacho Piatti in the lineup, anything seemed possible. Even a necessary two-goal comeback with 10 minutes to play.
PHOTO BERNARD BRAULT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Ignacio Piatti with the Montreal Impact in 2016
CF Montreal will pay tribute to him on Saturday at Saputo Stadium. The former number 10 will be inducted into the Wall of Fame – the club’s highest honour – even though he hasn’t retired for five years, as required by the team’s internal rules. The failure to respect this deadline caused a bit of a fuss this week on social media.
Seriously, who cares! If there’s one player the club can make an exception for, it’s him. Here’s a reminder of his track record: between 2014 and 2019, he received the Giuseppe Saputo Trophy four times, given to the club’s best player, in addition to being named three times to the MLS All-Star team, twice to the league’s XI of the Year and being chosen as the Canadian Championship’s MVP in 2019.
Met Thursday at a press conference, Nacho Piatti was touched by this attention. “I am very, very happy,” he said, recalling all the sacrifices he had had to make to come and play here, including moving away from his family.
He recalled his early days at the club. “In 2013, Nick De Santis came [me rencontrer]. I was happy in San Lorenzo. I wanted to play in the Copa Libertadores, the South American equivalent of the Champions League. “I told him no. In 2014, he came back. I spoke with my family, and accepted. It was the right time to go. Now, I am very happy that I chose [Montréal] at that time.”
He talked about his most memorable goals. The first one he mentioned? The one against Club America in the Champions League final in Mexico. A memorable match? The other part of the final, played in Montreal. “We were leading 1-0 at halftime. Sometimes, dreaming about that match, I can’t sleep. We came close to winning.”
His brilliance with the Impact has obviously sparked curiosity elsewhere. He stressed that he had refused an offer from Argentinian club Boca Juniors when their striker Carlos Tévez left for China in 2017. “I was happy. I wanted to stay here.” He ultimately wore the bleu-blanc-noir until the end of the 2019 season. “I would have liked to stay a little longer, but there was my father, my mother and my child [en Argentine]. Sometimes it’s hard being away from family. You see them once or twice a year for five and a half years.”
I wanted to stay [à Montréal]but I had something else on my mind. My father had health problems. If it had been just me, I would have stayed until now.
Ignacio Piatti
The first thing he did when he returned to Montreal this week was take his daughter to her old elementary school. “She remembered it. For me, it was an incredible satisfaction to go back [là]to look at the city… I don’t like snow, but all the other things [rires]. »
Then he paid tribute to his former teammates. He named almost two dozen of them: Marco DiVaio, Didier Drogba, Blerim Dzemaili, Saphir Taïder, Marco Mancosu, Laurent Ciman, Evan Bush. The good old days. It’s hard not to compare the team of that time to the one of today, which has just been crushed two games in a row and was eliminated from the Canadian Championship last spring by a club from a lower division.
CF Montreal so desperately needs a designated offensive player like Nacho Piatti. A playmaker ready to carry the team on his shoulders. A leader on the field capable of making us believe again that anything is possible.