FABIO CAPELLO threw one of his angry fits in Berlin last Tuesday, arms waving, a picture of studied intolerance. His England players had messed up a practice exercise and even those unused to this manager would recognise gestures Capello has developed over 20 years to the point of a trademark. Some footballers who have worked with him know them so well they can do a vivid impersonation, players such as Antonio Cassano, whom Spanish television cameras once caught mimicking his manager’s sergeant-major style.

Just as English football rolls out a red carpet for Capello after a successful year in charge of the national team, Cassano, the enfant terrible of Italian football, has been raking over the cinders of perhaps the most tempestuous relationship Capello the coach has had with a player. Cassano and Capello were together twice, at Roma and at Real Madrid, and in that time, Cassano estimates, they told one another to “f*** off” at least 20 times. At Roma, whom Cassano joined as a teenager from a poor, sometimes dangerous background in the southern Italian city of Bari, the striker would play the best football of his career. At Madrid, he would be marginalised by Capello.

For all this, Cassano describes the manager as “like a father to me. I miss him. If it’s a fact that he pushed me out at Madrid and left me out of the team from time to time at Roma, he was true to me in that when I was playing well he picked me and he was almost always right. Sometimes he was brave, selecting me ahead of great strikers like Gabriel Batistuta. He’s always said too that the best players he has coached in his career were me and [Brazil’s] Ronaldo, another one who he fought with a lot. I’ve had a million problems with him, and he’s hard. But he’s fair. He’ll stand his ground and he’s usually right. That’s his strength.”

Cassano’s autobiography hit the bookshops in Italy this weekend and in between the tales of fast cars and faster women – Cassano claims to have known “600 to 700” intimately, which is quite something for a squat young man with bad skin and a tendency to plumpness around the midriff – is yarn after yarn about his spats and rapprochements with Capello. If the absence of a father figure is a feature of his rough childhood, his relationship with Don Fabio is described again and again as “like father and son”. Of their first acquaintance, when Capello rang Cassano in anticipation of their working together in Rome, the player swoons: “I perfectly remember the deep voice, just like that square jaw, with the certainty and charisma of a great man.”

Soon enough, they would be falling out. “I loved him like a father and I hated the bastard,” recalls Cassano. “I looked on him as the source of all truth, and then thought [he] was about as genuine as a €3 coin. We couldn’t agree on anything. He would stress the importance of order and discipline, I’d tell him the reasons for disorder and indiscipline. I started doing the opposite of what he said.” In time, others at Roma would think Capello too indulgent of his talented, incorrigible protégé. Some of Cassano’s stories support the idea.

In one run of good form, Cassano decided he wanted to break a corner flag while celebrating a goal. He told Capello of his plan. “If we win, you can do it,” said the coach. “If you score two and we win, then you can break all four as far as I’m concerned.” Capello once told this reporter he felt it a privilege to work with a footballer so gifted.

At Madrid, the relationship deteriorated. Cassano arrived there before Capello and, after a confusing six months in Spain for the player, he was pleased to see his compatriot. They even conspired. “You must help me,” said Capello to Cassano, “and give me reports from the dressing room. I’ll help you.”

The alliance lasted less than a month. Dropped by the manager, then ignored by him after Spanish television broadcast Cassano’s vivid impression of his boss, performed in front of other, giggling players before a match in Barcelona, Cassano felt he had become, to Capello, “a malignant cancer, so that anybody with me would be considered an enemy to him. Like David Beckham, for example. When we were in front of the coach I pretended to hardly know Beckham, in case that made his life more difficult.”

Cassano still feels wronged by Capello “for not having given me an explanation” of why he was frozen out at Madrid. Italian football may not think it needs one. A few years ago, a new phrase entered Serie A vocabulary: “the Cassanata”, to describe an act of hot-headed wilfulness, a la Cassano. Telling the president of Real Madrid he was “second-rate” would count as a Cassanata.

Last summer Madrid ushered Cassano back to Italy after 18 months. There, he has played well enough with Sampdoria to return to the national squad. The Cassanatas seem to occur less often or with a little more decorum. Italy’s Gazza may have a few more chapters in him.

THE ITALIAN GAZZA

Public tears, a brittle temper and a reckless sense of mischief; you can see why Antonio Cassano is seen as the Paul Gascoigne of modern Italian football. Some of his appetites, though, surpass even those of the weeping Geordie. Cassano claims in his autobiography to have slept with more than 600 women – and he’s still only 26

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