Ze Maria, 53, is a coach awaiting an offer, after a year ago his experience in Serie D ended at Olbia, where he had arrived in the 12th week with the team at a quota of only 6 points and managed to ensure survival by taking it to 42 points. The Brazilian is known above all in our country for his adventure on the bench of Tirana, which he led when it was in the First Category, achieving promotion.
"I always say that I would like to start a quiet job, at least to be able to prepare everything myself," he explains, proposing himself not as a "patch" for something that is going wrong, but as a coach who can and wants to start a season. "So far it has gone well, thank you, but it would be nice to start a job from scratch."
In the conversation with the "DoppioPasso" podcast, the Brazilian mainly talks about his career as a footballer, describing the peak reached with Inter as arriving in a reality where "snake eats snake" and talking about the "treatment" that José Mourinho reserved for Mario Balotelli.
It was 2004, after having established himself at Perugia under coach Cosmi as one of the best right-backs in Serie A, Ze Maria, at the age of 31, arrived at an Inter that was preparing to open the cycle that would culminate with coach Mourinho's Triple Crown six years later. The Brazilian player would only stay there for two years, precisely the ones that would see the Calciopoli affair erupt: "I always say that that group started winning and ended up with the Triple, when we were more or less the same group that started in 2004 and ended in 2010, when many of them left in those years. We arrived with that group, we immediately won the Coppa Italia, which they hadn't won for many years, with important players who had spent time in Milan: Ronaldo, Seedorf, Pirlo, many extremely important players had spent time there without winning anything. We won the Coppa Italia, the Supercoppa Italia, then the Coppa Italia a year later and the 2006 title, the famous Calciopoli one. I consider it mine, because that's how it is."
Ze Maria arrives at Inter and struggles to find space
At that moment, Ze Maria was already a very experienced footballer at the highest level, even with Brazil, but at Inter he still had to adapt by raising the standard very high, simply because he had no choice if he wanted to assert himself as in previous years: "I love Perugia, but the two environments cannot be compared. One fights for survival, which is still a title when you achieve it, the other fights to win the Champions League. In the world of football, these are two very distant things. So, at Perugia I was a point of reference, while at Inter I become like everyone else. These are things that are very different. I say that at Perugia we were a kind of family that always helped each other, whereas when you enter an environment like that of Inter, Juventus, Milan, I say that it is a snake that eats another snake. So you have to try to survive, to give your best, to do your best, to help the team. And every "You have to be careful these days, because there is someone who wants to take your place."
The internship with the Special One: the treatment he reserved for Balotelli
The former defender, who also played for Parma in Italy, retired from football in 2009, immediately embracing a second career as a coach. And what better start than an internship at Inter, to see Jose Mourinho's methods in the season that would culminate in the historic Triple: "I was there for a week with him, I saw the way he managed the team, because it was the time when Balotelli was emerging in a team where Milito, Eto'o, Sneijder were, there were some phenomena and Balotelli was looking for space. And I saw a situation where Balotelli was practicing free kicks and Mourinho said to him: 'It's useless to train, Sneijder will never let you take them'. And in another training session Balotelli raises his voice, he interrupts the training and tells him to be quiet, because otherwise he will send him away.
"I mean, this is Mourinho and then he treats him like his son. He treated that group like his children, who gave their all. If you go and ask those players, they will say that the best coach of their life was Mourinho."
