AC Milan star, Davide Calabria, showed great progress last season and this season especially. The player is performing at the highest level and this was rewarded by a call-up to the national team by Roberto Mancini. Unfortunately, the player's adventure was cut short today due to an injury.
The player granted an interview today to the microphones of RAI2. Here are his statements:
"Italy-Belgium will be a great match. They have been doing well for many years, like us, and it will be a great challenge, beautiful. It is certainly not like the final for the first and second place, but we must not underestimate the game, also because being a national team match it is obvious that we will always give 100%. Mancini told us that it will be important especially for the ranking, unfortunately there is no first place up for grabs, but it's never nice to lose. We always want to win, the sensations that come after a win are priceless so let's try to find them."
On Donnarumma:
"I felt sorry for Donnarumma who is a friend, we grew up together. He made his choices, others made theirs, then everyone has to take their responsibilities. I respect everyone's thoughts, but I honestly think in a different way: I would not have made a dispute of this kind especially because for us, when we wear the national team jersey, it is important to have a good match and it is never nice for a teammate to be booed like this. Then we lost on the field and not for these things."
On Lukaku:
"They were good derbies when we played against him.He is a top player in the world, I think he is their point of reference in the game, it will be a great challenge", declared Calabria.
On the unbeaten run in the national team:
"It will take many years to see a streak like this. We lost against a great team, young but ambitious like us. It's part of football, you can't always win. Surely it wasn't nice, I think we could to do better but it is part of the game. It was not a nightmare, on the contrary it was an absolute motivation because in any case it is the longest streak in history, something that must make the Italian people proud."
Calabria talked about Pioli:
"At the beginning, I was struggling to put his ideas into play, but now those ideas are bringing results both to me and to the team. The last two years have been very positive from a personal and AC Milan point of view. I renewed not so long ago with the club I grew up in, I often wear the captain's armband, we are playing a good game, we are up there in the standings, now the icing on the cake was the call-up to the national team. I'm happy with what I'm doing. We have a wonderful relationship. I've always said it, our relationship started a bit like this and he said it too, because we had arguments at the beginning, but then we found the right square and now we find ourselves even without talking to each other. He is our coach, we follow him, he has wonderful ideas that we can then bring to the field."
On Zlatan Ibrahimovic:
"He gave me the mentality of work. He too grew up from nothing, he has talent but he always has a frenetic desire to win, the desire to give everything in training and in the practice match. He has certainly raised the level of the team and of all, I think he really did us well because he was and is one of the absolute top players in the world. Playing with him has given us a lot of energy and even if he hasn't played much lately, he transmits his energy to us from the outside and in the field you can see."
