Gian Piero Ventrone RIP

[arnoldlayne]

If it was undiagnosed APL, this is even more sad… it’s the most curable form of acute myeloid leukemia, if you have time to treat it.

I think it has a rapid mortality if diagnosis too late? Not an expert on this

 

[matthew.absurdum]

Miss him already

 

[ZiggySpurs]

Tributes to Gian Piero this weekend | Tottenham Hotspur

Following yesterday's sad news, we can confirm that we shall pay our respects to Gian Piero Ventrone at Saturday's Premier League fixture against Brighton & Hove Albion at the Amex Stadium.

www.tottenhamhotspur.com

 

[Riandor]

? very sad news.
One of the Spurs family and will be missed.

RIP.

 

[rossdapep]

If it was undiagnosed APL, this is even more sad… it’s the most curable form of acute myeloid leukemia, if you have time to treat it.

That's incredibly unfortunate!

I wonder if it's one of those cases in which when you are engaged in something so strongly and don't have time to stop you don't recognise anything, but the moment you stop out get it checked out it suddenly becomes worse?

Like when you are under stress and as soon as you take a holiday you get a cold. The body is quite resilient when it needs to be.

 

[Gassin's finest]

Gian Piero Ventrone: The much-loved 'Marine' who helped forge Conte's will to win

Gian Piero Ventrone was much more than a fitness coach to Antonio Conte and the Tottenham players - he was an inspiration and confidant...

theathletic.com

Shortly after Serie A named Romelu Lukaku the league’s MVP, he reflected on the sheer relentlessness of Antonio Conte’s approach at Inter Milan.

“To learn how to win is basically pushing the barrier,” Lukaku said. “Every trainer has a different way of coaching, but with Antonio, we really learned how to go to the red zone. That was it.”

Conte knows what it means to push yourself to the absolute limit. He does not put his players through anything he didn’t experience himself. Gian Piero Ventrone, the Tottenham fitness coach who passed away on Thursday after a sudden illness, helped make Conte who he is today.

Ventrone was a member of Marcello Lippi’s coaching staff at Juventus in the 1990s when Conte needed to bust a gut in midfield in order to get through the running necessary to support Fabrizio Ravanelli, Alessandro Del Piero and Gianluca Vialli up front. Ventrone instilled the discipline Conte continues to live by. He was nicknamed ‘The Marine’ after serving in the San Marco battalion of the Italian Navy and the gruelling training he underwent in the US became the foundation of a “revolution” in football fitness.

Giancarlo Marocchi, the former Juventus midfielder and Conte’s old team-mate, reported for pre-season in 1994 knowing a training camp like no other awaited him. “I’ll always remember my astonishment at seeing the gym. I’d never seen one like it before.” Asked for his impressions years later, goalkeeper Angelo Peruzzi said: “My abs are still hurting.”

Ventrone turned Juventus into a unit. They were drilled to go harder and deeper than anybody else.

“We’d get up at 7am and do a triple session. There’d even be one after dinner,” Ravanelli explained. “We’d do strength and conditioning, weigh-ins, core. Once, at half-time during a friendly in Chatillon, the players who got subbed off had to do eight one-kilometre intervals on the treadmill, a mind-blowing endurance test.”

Those sessions not only informed Conte’s methodology, they forged his mentality.

Juventus had gone nine years without winning the league until Ventrone’s arrival, their longest title drought since the Second World War. But the second half of the 1990s belonged to them and the turnaround — five scudetti, four Champions League finals and a Club World Cup — understandably left a strong impression on Conte, who credited Ventrone with “contributing in a fundamental way to our success”.

The work, work, work, work, work side of Conte derives from this time, synonymous as it was with win, win, win, win, win.

“He slaughters us!” Conte wrote of Ventrone. “He has the toughness of a soldier and never cuts anyone any slack, whether you’re a big-name player or not. One of his favourite incentives was ‘the bell of shame’. He placed a big golden bell in the corner of the pitch and whoever quit before finishing the set had to go ring it. I didn’t hear it ring very often at Juve in those years.”

Those Tottenham players puking their guts out during pre-season in South Korea this summer were doing a session aimed at developing a good Delta, the kind of resistance training where you want your 20th sprint to be only slightly slower than the first.

Vialli remembered doing this exercise in the book he co-wrote with Gabriele Marcotti: The Italian Job.

“In football, a good Delta can be vitally important, particularly for strikers and central defenders,” Vialli explained. “You don’t want their pace to drop off late in the game but to remain as constant as possible. I have to say that the Delta was one of my strengths. I might make 15 runs against my marker during a game and, for the first few, I might get beaten to the ball. By the end, however, if my marker did not have a good Delta, my repeated runs would wear him down and I would be beating him. This would allow me either to get to the ball first or at least to get open, forcing the other defenders to make an adjustment and clearing space for my team-mates.”

Vialli remains the last Juventus captain to lift the European Cup.

The Turin club’s success in that era aroused suspicion, with the former Roma coach Zdenek Zeman highlighting how Vialli and Del Piero had, to his mind, bulked up. His observation that football was “in the hands of the pharmacists” contributed to the launch of a doping inquiry and although none of the players were ever sanctioned, Juventus’ team doctor Riccardo Agricola won an appeal and the case was archived once and for all in 2007 when the statute of limitations passed, a shadow was cast on the era.

The players’ esteem for Juventus’ staff was undiminished throughout. They loved Ventrone then, could see the benefit of the hard yards and long hours, and this has endured. “Normally when you have a fitness coach like that who is running you ragged you start to not like him, but that’s not the case,” Tottenham wing-back Matt Doherty said in pre-season. “We all absolutely love him.”

Conte began working with Ventrone again at the very beginning of his coaching career in 2005.

Siena were looking for an assistant manager to work under Gigi De Canio and one of the reasons Conte accepted was Ventrone’s presence on the staff. They kept Siena in the top flight for a third straight season but it was a close call and when Juventus came to Tuscany in late April and were 3-0 up after 10 minutes, Conte and Ventrone, ex-Juventus employees, had to sit and take the abuse from the home fans. “In all my career I’ve never heard chants against the No 2 and the fitness coach,” Conte said.

In the end, they would have the last laugh as Reggina’s win over Messina saved Siena. The club then decided to go in a different direction. De Canio’s contract wasn’t extended and he joined Queens Park Rangers. Conte struck out on his own rather than stay on and advise him in the dugout at Loftus Road. As for Ventrone, he re-joined Lippi’s Italy staff for the 2006 World Cup and followed him to China’s Guangzhou Evergrande where they delivered on their remit to win the Asian Champions League.

That year Ventrone and Conte spent at Siena has often been forgotten but without it, you wonder what trajectory the latter’s career takes.

Siena’s sporting director Giorgio Perinetti liked the rigour and discipline he saw on the training ground and wanted Conte wherever he went. He made him head coach at Bari and then Siena. The tenacious former midfielder won promotion both times, then leveraged those successes and his past with Juventus to convince Andrea Agnelli over dinner to give him the job he’d always dreamed of.

Conte’s impact in 2011 was like what he’d experienced under Lippi and Ventrone in 1994.

Reto Ziegler didn’t finish training camp. Felipe Melo and Amauri lasted two days. Conte wanted his players to eat grass and their opponents to spit blood. Giorgio Chiellini recalled walking out for training one day, having plucked up the courage to tell Conte he still hadn’t recovered from a knock he’d picked up at the weekend. He couldn’t work out that day. Without looking at Chiellini, Conte handed him a bib.

Juventus became tougher, resilient, brilliant. They won the league three years in a row, going undefeated in Conte’s first season and racked up 102 points in his last. Ventrone wasn’t with him at the time but Conte restored the winning culture from his playing days and Juventus again began to live up to one of the club’s mottos: “Fino alla Fine.” They were a team that went all the way to the end.

Reunited less than a year ago in north London, Conte sought out Ventrone after Antonio Pintus — who had also been his conditioning coach at Inter — instead returned to Real Madrid.

Ventrone did more than fill the hole Pintus left. In no time at all, Tottenham’s physical data became as good as anyone’s in the most physical league in the world.

Spurs officials had been keen to get a bit more experience on the coaching staff. Once Conte and his backroom team had arrived, they were delighted with the amount of ‘grey hair’ in the building — literally in the case of Ventrone. He symbolised everything good that Conte brought to Tottenham.

For years the club had been desperate to get the players back to Mauricio Pochettino-era levels of fitness, and were hugely encouraged by Ventrone’s commitment to doing just that.

But it wasn’t just that fitness work which saw him leave a mark. Son Heung-min developed a particularly close relationship with Ventrone, and was seen celebrating with him after he scored a hat-trick in last month’s 6-2 win over Leicester City.

Speaking after that match, the South Korea international said: “He’s a killer, to be honest. But I have a really, really good relationship with Gian Piero.

“Obviously, his English isn’t perfect and sometimes he comes with his phone to translate into English from Italian. It means a lot. Not just football-wise, but life-wise, he gives me so much advice and I am really grateful for that. It’s been so helpful and I always give him a big hug, even in tough times.

“He’s always been next to me at every stop. Even today, before we left the hotel, we had a couple of minutes and a nice conversation which made me really comfortable and really grateful.”

The Marine will be missed.

 

[McFlash]

A guy who worked for me died of leukemia suddenly about 10 years ago. It wasn't diagnosed. He went in for dental work, and passed away that night. He was 22 at the time ?

Yeah, it took my dad really quickly too. He was just 40, a month before my 10th birthday.

 

[EQP]

Lovely tribute by the traveling Spurs fans to sing "There's only one Gian Piero" while Hugo held up a jersey with Ventrone's name on it. Hard not to tear up hearing that. RIP Gian.

 

[mark87]

 

[Misfit]

Just learning about this. How tragic. Lost my step-father in similar circumstances a couple of years ago. Today must have incredibly tough for everyone involved.

RIP

 

[fridgemagnet]

I only saw this today; peace be the the journey Gian Piero

 

[EQP]

Lovely tribute by the traveling Spurs fans to sing "There's only one Gian Piero" while Hugo held up a jersey with Ventrone's name on it. Hard not to tear up hearing that. RIP Gian.

 

[aliyid]

 

[dovahkiin]

Antonio, players and staff plant a tree for Gian Piero at Hotspur Way | Tottenham Hotspur

There was a poignant moment for Antonio Conte, the players and staff ahead of training on Monday, as the Club planted a tree in memory of Gian Piero Ventrone.

www.tottenhamhotspur.com

 

[mil1lion]

It's times like these where I love the family feeling around the club
Forget these sides with revolving doors, this is a very special squad

 

[BorjeSpurs]

 

[Mattspur]

I don't know why it's never occured to me before, but our poor form has coincided with the sad passing of Gian Piero Ventrone. Maybe it's having a bigger effect on the team than we realise.

 

[$hoguN]

I don't know why it's never occured to me before, but our poor form has coincided with the sad passing of Gian Piero Ventrone. Maybe it's having a bigger effect on the team than we realise.

It almost certainly will be