The 2006 World Cup Winner suffered a rapid decline after joining Juventus in the summer of 2007, Marco Jackson looks back at the career of Vincenzo Iaquinta.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” implored the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in a poem written near Florence.
They are words that Vincenzo Iaquinta would have done well to heed. As he approaches his 36th birthday (younger than Luca Toni and Miroslav Klose, it is worth noting) now three years removed from his last contribution to Serie A, he did nothing of the sort. After a decade of football Iaquinta’s career went so gentle into the night that it barely ruffled the bedsheets.
Indeed, given that he scored six goals for the Azzurri, including one against Ghana at the 2006 World Cup, Iaquinta’s meek disappearance is all the more surprising. His is a cautionary lesson to those players who strive only to be signed by a ‘big’ club, rather than the achievements that move may bring.
There was no indication of how Iaquinta would come to end his time in the game when he started out, however. A couple of relatively undistinguished spells in the lower leagues with Castel Di Sangro and Padova brought Iaquinta to Udinese’s attention and he was snapped up by the Zebrette ready for the start of the 2000/01 season.
The Crotone born striker went on to enjoy a relatively prolific seven seasons at the Stadio Friuli, scoring 58 goals for the club – just less than a goal every three appearances. It was enough to earn him a 2005 call-up to the Azzurri, though he remained goalless until the group stages of the 2006 World Cup – a tournament in which he featured in five of Italy’s seven matches.
He was, at this stage, a talented striker. He was tall and strong, willing and able to both hold the ball up for team-mates or wrestle space to create a chance for himself. His scoring figures, whilst not stellar, demonstrate that he was able to take a good number of those chances, too.
At the World Cup Finals in Germany, he was selected as understudy to Luca Toni which remains a relatively accurate illustration of his play.
A year after that famous victory in Berlin came a big money move to newly-promoted Juventus, with the Azzurri striker transferred from one Bianconeri to another for a fee in excess of €10 million. It was a high price for a player who was an obvious second fiddle to David Trezeguet and Alessandro Del Piero. Still, he managed 28 appearances and 12 goals that season, including a run of eight in ten games at the end of the season.
As La Vecchia Signora struggled to establish themselves at the very top of Serie A, Iaquinta found himself edged further out over the next couple of years, with the arrival of Fabio Quagliarella another sign that he was being marginalised.
That became brutally apparent under the stewardship of Antonio Conte. The strikers that had failed to produce for Juventus were, while not immediately cast aside, ignored.
Luca Toni – two goals in 14 games, and Amauri – 17 in 71 departed the club for good in January 2012, and went on to rebuild their careers despite their advancing age. Iaquinta did leave Juventus himself at this point in a loan move to Cesena, but returned to Turin in the summer.
He stayed. He did not appear on the team photographs, but he stayed.
The next year, he never got a kick. The year after, the same. Despite being made to train with the Primavera side, and offers coming in for him, Iaquinta opted to see out his contract rather than move on.
Handsomely remunerated by Juventus – they had signed a World Cup winner after all – Iaquinta effectively froze himself at 32. There was no decline, there was no raging against the dying of the light and there was no last farewell; his last Serie A goal an appropriate whimper, coming as it did in February 2012 in a 3-2 defeat at Lazio.
For a little while after he dropped off the radar, there was talk of a possible renaissance for Iaquinta. Nothing ever emerged, and it seems unlikely that any club would take a gamble on a 36-year-old who has been out of the game for three seasons.
In the end his career finished in mystery, hanging up boots that had been clean for more than two years.
