Nancy DellOlio - My Beautiful Game

Life has only one true attraction, which is the attraction of the game: but only if we do not care if we lose or win.

BAUDELAIRE

SOMETIMES IT TAKES JUST A SINGLE MOMENT TO MAKE US realize fully what it is to be alive and nothing can shock us more profoundly into that awareness than suddenly coming face to face with death. So it was for me at twenty-one, the coming of age and two years before graduation, that the unconscious moment of a drunken driver, no more than the careless toss of his cigarette butt, changed my life for ever.

The front door of my parents' villa in Apulia opened directly on to the village high street. As I stepped out into the road I had not a care in the world. The white Fiat came out of nowhere on the wrong side of the road. I never knew what hit me. No memory of the impact remains. But in my darker moments I replay the horror of the accident in my imagination like an animal worrying at a wound. I imagine the impact of the car on a human body the inanimate against the living thing. And I realize how fragile we are and yet so resilient.

The trauma of the accident has faded, but the experience of being near to death has never left me. Being in a coma was like being lost between two worlds. As I recovered consciousness I remember the clear light that led me out of that dark void; I was like a lost girl catching sight of her mother. The feeling of being guided has been with me ever since. Since the accident, my memories are often elusive, and the times I remember most vividly are the times when I was most aware. Like awakening from being locked in a coma, to me being alive is being fully conscious.

What we call a beginning is often an end and, strangely, the end is often where we start from. So my beginning will tell the story of the end of England's dream in Germany in 2006, with all the anguish and heartache it brought. The scar of what happened and the knowledge of what might have been remains with all of those involved. And the end for England meant another new beginning for me.

Although I fell in love with a football manager, my life is not defined by football. The game has become a passion for me, but it is by no means my reason to be. I have had the opportunity of a unique viewpoint on the English game over the last five years. I love the characters and personalities in English football; you will not find their like anywhere in the world. As one of several parallel themes in the writing of this autobiography, I will enjoy expressing my own unconventional views on the game and have no fear in voicing observations that Sven would never make. So, as caveat lector to all, be warned that my opinions are all my own and I take no responsibility for any offence I may cause to oversensitive egos in the game. Self-interested individuals have exploited 'the beautiful game'. Both its nature and its governance changed over my time in the UK.

In telling my story I have tried to be honest, although there is always room for self-delusion in recounting the cut and thrust of life in the public eye, especially in love and football. Some people I have known well and can make a judgement from having seen them in the round and from my own direct experience. Others I do not know so well and am only able to describe from limited impressions or a brief encounter. We mostly judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. The intentions of others are more or less invisible, while their actions are right in our faces. My actions have often been misread by others who have not understood my intentions. I will allow others the same comfort by readily admitting that I may also be wrong in my interpretation of what they have done.

The twelve chapters in this book do not represent the whole of my story. They do reflect the unfolding of my life as seen from a perspective after my turbulent years in England. As an American-Italian (my education was that way round), a Jew and a Roman Catholic, I feel that the exotic cocktail of my life has been shaken not stirred by my Anglophile's perspective and my five years crazy in love with London. After such an initiation I think I am entitled to call myself a cosmopolitan woman and a citizen of the world. I believe in the new internationalism and hope that the story of my life living out of a suitcase will be a testament to the positive influence of openness and greater globalization. Of all the great cities of the world, I feel most affinity with Rome. I love the people, the food, the history and the architecture. For me as a European, my Roman classical heritage is the profound cultural climate in which I live and breathe. It is also the greatest city of romance, and it was there that I met both my ex-husband and Sven-Goran Eriksson.

I am a sucker for love. My film archive is full of Audrey Hepburn and the heart of this book is my discovery of love and my love affair with life. From my infancy and early childhood in America through my school and university days (when some friends called me a bluestocking), I have always believed in Romance. Even when I fell in love, hurt others and got hurt, I have always believed that personal growth requires the emotional crucible of love to reach maturity. This is where the nature of women comes into its own. Women understand the selflessness of love in a way that men do not. Their biology is different, and so much of the journey of love is in realizing the differences and managing them in our relationships.