MILAN – Bremen, 7 December 2010. It's 21:50 on a cold Champions League night. Having already qualified for the knockout stages, Rafa Benitez's Inter are losing 2-0 to Werder on their way to a 3-0 defeat when the Spanish coach decides to bring on a promising 18-year-old by the name of Felice Natalino. Who was enjoying the most exciting fortnight of his life.
He had made his Serie A debut in a 5-2 win over Parma at the San Siro 10 days earlier, on 28 November. Five days after that, he made his full debut at the Stadio Olimpico against Lazio.
The board held up by the fourth official, Suleyman Abay, in the 54th minute of that game in Bremen displayed a green number 57 and a red number 4. Natalino was coming on for Javier Zanetti – his boyhood idol.
His appearance at the Weser-Stadion that night looked as if it would be the first of many European nights for a Nerazzurri academy product who had already wowed so many.
It all began on a football pitch in Sambiase, near Lamezia Terme in the south of Italy. Felice played his first games under the watchful eye of his dad Pasquale, coach of Virtus Sambiase, and his granddad Francesco, the club's president. Born into a family of Inter fans, Natalino's destiny seemed to have been written from a young age.
2200 kilometres separate Sambiase from Bremen, but to get there he had to go via Crotone. Martino Salerno and Carlo Cimicata brought him to the attention of Gino Porchia, head of Crotone's academy, where Felice would spend several years playing in the youth leagues.
In 2008 he caught the eye of Inter's scouts and the Nerazzurri bought him on a co-ownership deal with Genoa.
From Milan to Bremen the distance was much shorter. Felice established himself as a permanent fixture in Inter's Primavera side, playing first as a centre-back and then at full-back. And after realising his dream against Bremen he returned to the Under-19s to help the Nerazzurri win the Viareggio Cup in 2011.
Alongside him in the team that beat Fiorentina 2-0 in the Viareggio final was Lorenzo Crisetig, who will be back at San Siro on Sunday in a Crotone shirt.
Natalino won't be on the pitch on Sunday though, and there will be no hugs between old friends as team-mates or opponents.
The reason for that is ARVD. Arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia is an inherited heart disease – the same one which caused the death of Piermario Morosini, who collapsed to the ground during a Serie B match between Pescara Livorno on 14 April 2012 and passed away in hospital a few hours later.
Two months before then, on 11 February, Felice played what turned out to be the last competitive game of his career, although he didn't know it at the time. He wore the No.57 shirt of Crotone, where Inter had sent him on a six-month loan just a few weeks earlier. Shortly after that game, during a routine check-up, CONI doctors ordered him to stop playing after seeing something was not quite right.
It was the start of a long ordeal from which there seemed to be no way back into the game for Felice. The situation suddenly deteriorated when he suffered a heart attack in February 2013. He was rushed by military plane from Catanzaro to San Raffaele hospital in Milan, where he was operated on. Having risked his life, Felice decided it was time to hang up his boots once and for all.
Nearly five years after that night in Bremen, on 11 August 2015, Inter announced via Twitter than Natalino was joining the club's academy scouting team. A year later, on 17 September 2016, the club promoted him to the first-team scouting set-up.
Felice had found a way to beat the hand that fate had dealt him.
“If you can't be a highway, then just be a trail. If you can't be the sun, be a star,” wrote Douglas Malloch in a poem made famous by Martin Luther King.
That's exactly what Felice Natalino has done. And that's why Inter v Crotone is his game.
Davide Zanelli
