Back when Lamberto Boranga was entering his veteran years, a promising youngster came through the ranks at their upwardly mobile Parma. Carlo Ancelotti was still a teenager, still more a forward than cerebral midfielder and not yet worried about his creaky knees. The older players called Ancelotti Il bimbo (“the kid”), predicting he would go far.
Boranga was the Parma goalkeeper, important in their promotion to Serie B but, at that stage in his career, a man bearing a grudge: against time; against ageism. He was in his late thirties and joined Parma motivated by a snub. A previous Serie B employer, Reggiana, had severed contract talks, brutally, after successive seasons racking up clean sheets. “I was talking to the team director about renewing,” he recalls, “and he said, ‘My dear Boranga, at 30 a player can’t expect the salary you want. At your age, just think about what happens after football.’ ”
AC Milan’s Egidio Calloni celebrates a goal that Boranga was unable to prevent in his heyday
ALAMY
Boranga left the conversation without so much as an arrivederci and, as he tells it in his new book, Parare La Vecchiaia (“Parrying Age”), zoomed off in his Porsche “thinking about nothing but the methods and the disciplines needed to be young again”.
Safe to say, Boranga has thought long and hard on the same theme ever since. More than half a lifetime ago he put the Reggiana rejection in its place by going on to play four seasons in Serie A, with Cesena. And he kept going. More than 20 years after his first start as a top-division player for Fiorentina, making saves against the Inter Milan of Sandro Mazzola and 1960 Ballon d’Or winner Luis Suárez, he was still playing professionally, still working at whatever detail might prolong his sporting adventure. “At 44, my life had become a constant revolution of diet and training,” he remembers.
The octogenarian has won triple jump and long jump medals in various age-group categories
That was just the start of a journey that has made Boranga to athletic longevity what Ancelotti is to elite coaching. He is the everyman among Italy’s evergreens. Boranga outlasted his celebrated contemporary, Dino Zoff, who lifted a World Cup with Italy at 40; he saw off Enrico Albertosi, for whom he had deputised with the gloves at Fiorentina and who was still a pro at 44. Ever onwards went Boranga, greying on top but lean across his middle, through the semi-professional and then amateur divisions, from old millennium to new one, combining his sport with a career as a cardiologist, a track and field athlete, and a restless search for the Peter Pan formula.
Last weekend he broke another of his own records, for the oldest player in organised football in Italy, appearing in goal for Trevana. Granted, Trevana are in the Umbria section of the very broad regionalised seventh tier and, yes, Boranga let in five before being substituted in the 49th minute against Vis Foligno. But the ’keeper who replaced him, Maurizio Rossi, conceded another five in a 10-0 defeat.
Boranga demonstrates the age-defying agility that has allowed him to extend his career
Rossi is 26. Boranga turns 83 this month. “I made two mistakes,” he conceded, before adding: “But I made three or four good saves.” A degree of swagger and confidence has always been part of his persona, challenging those who giggle at his eccentricity to also admire his elasticity. “Youth,” he advises, “lies in enthusiasm and self-esteem.”
For today’s Serie A, that’s not a bad slogan, and if there is a temptation from elsewhere to survey some of the age-profile statistics of Italy’s top division and sneer about it being a “retirement home” for waning stars, then it’s worth pausing on some of the highlights from the weekend. Like the quick-thinking and exquisite passing of Pedro as he executed a nimble interception and, in the same move, a fabulous 40-yard through-ball for Lazio’s first goal in their wild 3-3 draw with Torino. That’s the same Pedro who won almost every trophy available with Spain, Chelsea and Barcelona, where he tended to let Xavi or Andrés Iniesta wow the audience with passes like Saturday’s.
Pedro is in his 39th year. Jamie Vardy will be in his 40th come January. That’s a ripe age to be making your first appearance in the San Siro and, on it, to be leaving your new head coach, Cremonese’s Davide Nicola, wondering if it might not have been better to unleash his Englishman earlier than the 58th minute, when the hosts, Inter, were already 4-0 up. Vardy, coming off the substitutes’ bench for his second Serie A appearance after his late-summer move from Leicester City, galvanised Cremonese and, even in a heavy defeat, took home a precious personal souvenir. Three minutes from full-time, chasing Inter’s Andy Diouf, a bristling Vardy stole possession with a sliding challenge, sprang back up to immediately receive the ball back and to funnel a pass wide for Jari Vandeputte to cross. Vardy’s run to the near post took two Inter markers with him, inviting Federico Bonazzoli to score.
Cremonese’s Vardy, who turns 40 in January, rolled back the years at the San Siro on Saturday
LUCA BRUNO/AP
Serie A is where Edin Dzeko is spending his 22nd season as a top-flight professional, Fiorentina persuaded that his 107 Serie A goals in the seven years he spent with Roma and Inter in his earlier thirties make him a reliable impact striker, at the very least. Dzeko will be 40 in March, is already off the mark with La Viola, and fully intends to be captaining Bosnia and Herzegovina at the World Cup.
Above all this is the league of Luka Modric, 40 last month and a principal reason why AC Milan, eighth in 2024-25, would, but for a missed Christian Pulisic penalty in last night’s 0-0 draw at Juventus, be top of the table this morning. Milan offered Modric a swansong after he completed his 12th season with Real Madrid in July. Only nobody called it a swansong. All things being equal, Modric will be skippering his country, Croatia, in North America next summer and very plausibly reaching 200 caps while at the World Cup.
Modric, Milan’s 40-year-old midfield metronome, mixes it with 34-year-old Kevin De Bruyne
DANIELE MASCOLO/REUTERS
Boranga, the everyman of evergreens, likes it that Modric is thriving in his fifth decade. “You can’t tell his age when he’s on the pitch,” Boranga told ANSA. “Modric has the sort of talent you don’t lose. And the age when you start being thought of as ‘old’ has risen. Even at 50 you can be deemed young… but in a different way.”
Even at 82, you can still set targets. Boranga will not be keeping goal for Trevana these next few weeks. He, like Modric and Dzeko, is setting off on international duty. He’s due at the European Masters Athletics Championships in Madeira, to compete in the high jump and possibly to add to the several medals — and world records — he has accumulated in various age-group categories at triple jump and long jump. And let nobody dare call it his swansong.