I played with Zidane & Pirlo – I’d have given it all up to be a cricketer

Christian Vieri was one of the most expensive footballers in Italian history. Big and powerful, the striker scored more than 100 goals for Inter Milan during his nomadic, yet successful football career in the 1990s and 2000s, but the former Italy international said he’d swap it all for the chance to play professional cricket.

Rather than some wayward fantasy, Vieri is not only hugely passionate about cricket, but played it extensively in his youth in Australia, where he spent the early part of his life, living down under for 10 years between the ages of four and 14, after his father moved there to be a football coach in Sydney. Could Vieiri really have played cricket professionally? GIVEMESPORT investigates.

Vieri Has a Passion for Cricket

The striker spent his formative years in Sydney

As reported in Australian newspaper The Age, Vieri’s preferred sport growing up was cricket. His idol back then was Aussie captain Allan Border. Playing as a left-handed batsman, Vieri would be a regular watching the test match team play in Sydney. Looking back, he compares his playing style to big hitting West Indian batter Chris Gayle – as reported in The Sun. He is also clear that he might not have been best suited to test cricket and a better fit for the one day and Twenty20 formats.

Naturally, he played football growing up too. Talking as recently as 2021, Vieiri spoke of his ambition of representing the Italian cricket team, who in the Twenty20 format, are ranked 29th in the world, just behind Qatar and Jersey. Italy have faired well in recent matches. In June, the national side won five one-day matches, with wins over France, Turkey and Romania. He did, of course, grow up playing football, too. His achievements in the game shouldn’t be underestimated either. He was top scorer in both La Liga, for Atletico Madrid, and in Serie A, beating the likes of Adriano, Filippo Inzaghi and Rivaldo in the process.

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Vieri Had Huge Belief in his Cricket Abilities

Ex-Inter striker believes he could have been one of the best

Growing up in Australia in those formative years, which was between 1977 and 1987, you can imagine Vieri playing cricket. He has the rugged look of the Australian cricketers of that era and would not look out of place, physically at least, alongside Aussie players of the time like Dennis Lillee and Vieri’s hero Border. In some ways, the Aussie way of life and sport, of giving as good as you get and never giving up, very much informed his playing style as a footballer. Known in the game as Il Toro, the Bull, Vieri was in many ways more Australian as a player, in mentality, than he was Italian.

Never afraid of speaking his mind, and as reported in the Sun, Vieri said:

To football fans who remember Vieri playing in the Azzuri blue and terrorising defenders, the whole idea of Vieri being a cricket fan may sound absurd, but those who doubt the claims need only look up any interview the striker has done in English, in which not only is he a fluent speaker, he clearly has an Australian accent.

Vieri admits his wife shows a mixture of disdain and confusion when she catches him engrossed in YouTube footage of Aussie test matches from the mid 1980s, but as Vieri says, “she is going, what is wrong with you, why aren’t you normal?” But for Vieri this was the time when his love for the game burned brightly. Could Vieri really have made it as a professional cricketer? Well, he certainly had plenty of grit and athleticism as a footballer, but sadly, for the cricketing world at least, Vieri moved back to Italy as a teenager – with cricket’s loss clearly being Italian football’s gain.

Stats via Transfermarkt.