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One of Barcelona's leading defensive players a few years ago, Javier Mascherano made interesting revelation to the magazine El Gráfico, published last week. According to the defender, an expulsion by the Corinthians in 2006 changed its way of seeing football.
At the time, in the confrontation of the final eighties of Libertadors, before River Plate in Argentina, Mascherano was expelled from the match and became complicated with Faithful. Identified with the Buenos Aires team, the steering wheel was charged by the Alvinegra fans.
"Marcelo (Gallardo) was cunning because the second yellow card was he who forced me to receive, exaggerating the fall. That game of mine wasn't bad. It was terrible," he recalled. "That card complicated me in Brazil, so much that the fans came to talk to me," he added.
The red card complicated the Corinthians, eliminated in the game back after suffering another defeat in Pacaembu. Mascherano states that from that moment on he began to see football in another way. The emotion, according to the steering wheel, from there, was out of the field.
"There, in that failure, I realized that the game overflowed me, that I was totally taken. I'm very sensitive and I get emotional. I cry easy, too. I was so lost that instead of going to the locker room after the expulsion, I went around the field, behind the goal," he recalled. "Any gesture can have any interpretation, and after what happened to Corinthians, I preferred to step away emotionally in games like this. The fan's a fan, but how am I gonna have any reason to disrespect River with everything the club gave me? While I was warming up at that end in Japan, I would repeat to myself: 'Don't go in there, don't get emotionally compromised, you play as a central defender, if you go there, you'll take a shit and the team will lose because of you. I thought about it all the time, since the semifinal’, concluded.
Mascherano left the Corinthians shortly afterwards. The steering wheel acted in only 26 games with Timão's shirt.
