Source :- THE AGE NEWS
Alameda: Many years before he decided to play for Australia over Italy, it felt to Cristian Volpato that Australia had already decided it didn’t want him.
Twice.
Volpato’s long estrangement from the Aussie game can be traced back to a tearful car ride with his old man, Oscar, in Sydney’s western suburbs in 2019.
A teenage Volpato had just been cut by the Western Sydney Wanderers, having two years earlier been released from Sydney FC’s academy. Each club had arrived at the view that he wouldn’t make it in football; at least not with them.
“I got told from both of them that basically, I’m not good enough to play,” Volpato said.
“I just remember the car ride home with my dad. I was crying, and he just says, ‘We’ll go to Italy now, and we’ll try it.’”
The Volpato family decided to stake almost everything they had on the belief that their boy had talent that two of Australia’s biggest clubs couldn’t see, and the hope that some strangers in another country would.
His mother, Claudia, sold her cafe so that she could follow him to Italy, where he had a trial with Serie A giants AS Roma – one more chance, and probably his last one, to turn his passion into a career. There were no guarantees.
“We leased our house, we left everything just to go for a trial,” Volpato said. “And we thank God I made the trial, and my life changed from there.”
In his first formal press conference since his dramatic late inclusion in Socceroos coach Tony Popovic’s 26-man squad for the World Cup, Volpato revealed on Monday the extraordinary chain of events, competing interests and conflicting emotions that led him back to the country where he was born and raised.
Only weeks ago, after a visit from Popovic and his assistant Paul Okon snr in March, Volpato told Italian media after a Sassuolo game that he was still “waiting for Italy” – seemingly dashing any hopes that he would wear the green and gold.
Those comments, he said, were borne from a desire not to rock the boat at his club, where he struggled to see regular game time this season.
“In that time period, I was still thinking about my club football because obviously, I haven’t gotten a lot of minutes, or the minutes that I’d have liked,” he said. “I just felt like staying in my comfort zone in Italy, trying to get as much minutes as I can – I didn’t really think of making a change then.”
It wasn’t until days before Australia’s World Cup squad was due to be officially lodged with FIFA that he made the call to switch his international allegiance from Italy, who he had represented at youth level.
In fact, Volpato can almost trace it back to a single moment: after his final game of the Serie A season for Sassuolo, against Alessandro Circati’s Parma, on May 24. A close personal friend, Circati had long been on his case about playing for the Socceroos, and finally, he relented.
“Something clicked, and my heart said, ‘Just go, I think you belong there,’” he remembered.
“I didn’t want to come being 50-50. If I wanted to come, it’s because I wanted to come, and because I felt it was right. I just one day woke up literally, and I talked to my family. I said, ‘Mum, I want to play for Australia.’”
Had he waited much longer, Volpato might have missed the World Cup altogether. His Australian passport had expired, triggering a frantic dash back to Sydney to renew it before joining the squad in Los Angeles, where he met his new teammates for the first time.
“Thank God … [I’m] thankful to the people at the passport place who helped me get it quickly,” he said.
Volpato admitted that Italy’s failure to make this World Cup – and his omission from an Azzurri squad named on May 26, almost entirely comprised of players aged 22 and under – played at least some role in his decision, but not a big one.
“Kind of yes and no,” he said.
“For me, it was just like, I want to play for Australia. Because Italy could have called me to the World Cup … but I wanted to play for Australia. I felt like it was right. I felt like I could be myself and I could show myself here more.
“It’s been a long time, but I’m grateful that I made my decision, and it came from me, it came from my heart. Some things may take longer than others, some people are different. But with me, I felt it was time, and I’m so happy I made the decision.”
But Volpato will always owe Italian football a debt of gratitude for giving him a “second opportunity” in football – and understandably so.
Though he denied that his experiences in the Sydney FC and Wanderers academies had fostered any animosity towards the Socceroos, the reality is that Italy embraced him at precisely the moment he felt Australia had turned its back.
His debut for AS Roma in December 2021, under the legendary Jose Mourinho, kicked off a 4½-year saga in which Volpato repeatedly turned down Australian overtures, choosing to represent Italy at junior level while knocking back senior call-ups from the Socceroos – including from former coach Graham Arnold, who wanted to include him in his squad for the last World Cup in Qatar.
He is acutely aware of the things that have been said about him since, and that some fans thought – or perhaps still think – that he doesn’t deserve to wear the shirt.
“I’m human, like everyone else,” Volpato said.
“I’m addicted to my phone like 90 per cent of the people in the world. I see everything, but sometimes there’s going to be stuff said about you. There’s going to be good things, there’s going to be bad things. As a footballer, you’ve just got to be resilient. Sometimes you can use it as fuel. And I like to use that as well.”
But there was never any escaping his Australian roots, even in Italy.
His first agent was Roma and Azzurri great Francesco Totti, who scored the controversial spot kick that put Italy through to the quarter-finals of the 2006 World Cup at Australia’s expense, a game Volpato said he has watched “probably like 100 times” – and then in 2023, he transferred to Sassuolo, where he was coached by Fabio Grosso, the player who (allegedly) dived over a prone Lucas Neill to win the penalty.
“It’s a bit like … you know what I mean?” Volpato said, laughing.
“I spoke to Grosso … he didn’t even know what he was doing, he felt a bit of contact, he went down. They got the pen; Totti just shot as hard as he could,” he said.
Volpato is a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, so he wouldn’t change any part of his journey. In the end, it has gotten him exactly where he wanted to be, all along: playing for his country, on the biggest stage his chosen pursuit can offer.
Already, he has shown why there has been such a clamour about his international loyalty: in his two appearances, Volpato showed a tendency to spark attacks by running directly at opponents, a trait seemingly rare in Australian players.
It hasn’t taken long for Socceroos fans to embrace him, either. On the streets of Vancouver, hours before the team’s 2-0 win over Turkey, one of them held aloft a sign which read: “Keep the Colosseum, we got Volpato.”
They’ve even come up with a song for him: “He’s one of our own, he’s one of our own – Cristian Volpato, he’s one of our own.”
“My sister, my family, they were sending me videos of it, so it was lovely to hear that,” he said.
“I felt it from the first game against Turkey, just seeing after the game when we won, and just that support with the fans and the players was just amazing. I loved every bit of it.”
