Ongaro and his last Italy jersey, fourteen years on

There is a jersey pinned to a wall, in a courtyard in the Veneto, among the flags and the tables of a charity afternoon. It is not just any jersey: it is the one from Fabio Ongaro’s last match for Italy. Fourteen years have gone by, and he looks at it the way you look at a family photograph.

On 17 March 2012, at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico against Scotland, the hooker closed an international career of 81 caps. And yet, of that day, Ongaro remembers almost nothing about the rugby.

What does he actually remember about that day?

Not a lineout, not a scrum. He remembers the evening: the first time he felt his son move, the boy who would be born that August. It is the only sharp image he carries from one of the biggest matches of his sporting life.

I remember that in the evening I felt the first movements. It was the first time he moved, in my wife’s belly.

He admits he threw almost everything away: mementoes, photographs, shirts. What is left is a visual memory that keeps the happy moments and a few less happy ones. Even the defeats, he says, were worth something positive. And in his Italy there were more defeats than wins.

“You cannot compare national teams”

The conversation drifts towards the fashionable comparison: the generation that went “beyond the obstacle” against the players of today. Ongaro refuses to play, and he widens the frame instead. Before his Italy, he says, there was another one that made his own career possible: the side of the great 1990s upsets.

That team beat France 40-32 at Grenoble on 22 March 1997, a first ever win over the French, three years before Italy joined the Six Nations. Ongaro also points to the win over Ireland and to a tour of Australia he still rates as outstanding.

You cannot compare national teams, because rugby has changed so much.

Every side belongs to its own era

The reasoning is simple and honest: the last three Italian generations have different qualities, and each one belongs to the period it landed in. Asked the classic bar-room question – what if that team played now? – Ongaro answers that nobody can know. Credit to all of them, in different times. Full stop.

It is a position that does a former player few favours, but it does the game a lot of good: it stops measuring today’s players against somebody else’s memories and lets them play their own match.

What stays

That is what the shirts on the wall are for. People walk past and ask who you are, because time moves quickly and the new generation does not know anymore. Ongaro is not bothered. If anything, he sees the point of the whole day in it: using rugby to keep people together and to raise something for charity. The rest – the jersey, the fourteen years, the last match – is just a good excuse to meet again.

Read also: Ongaro on Italy’s scrum: “The credit is theirs” · all DanPat Rugby news · the video archive · Checchinato and the 2000 jersey that changed Italian rugby

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