Patrice Evra has a vivid memory of his first job in Italy. It was the summer of 1998, an optimistic time for anyone associated with French football, and he had just accepted a professional contract.
He was 17, his new home was to be on the remote western tip of Sicily, his employers the island club Marsala.
His instructions were to meet up with his new teammates on the mainland, where Marsala were in pre-season training. He travelled from suburban Paris, his home, to the Norcia region, a site in the Apennine Mountains that Marsala had chosen to avoid the searing heat of Sicily in July.
Evra arrived and, as a welcoming gesture, the club offered him a sample of the produce for which Norcia is famous: cured meats, and a fine, typically Italian salami.
Evra recounted the story when he arrived again in Italy in July, to start his second stint in the country.
He recalled, in strong Italian, a language he mastered in Sicily and has kept polished, his emotions back then, how in joining Marsala, he felt he had passed an important threshold.
Disappointment at not having made the grade as Paris Saint-Germain as an apprentice, he had at least ended up in the country most respected by his country’s best footballers.
Senior players in the France team of 1998, the World Cup winners, used to credit the lessons they had learned from Italy’s Serie A for their historic international triumph, lessons from a league that employed so many of them.
Those included Zinedine Zidane and Didier Deschamps at Juventus; Marcel Desailly at AC Milan; Lilian Thuram at Parma; Youri Djorkaeff at Inter Milan, and enjoyed a reputation in the period as the world’s best.
Though Marsala were in the third division, Evra felt he was on a middle rung of the right ladder to the top.
Sixteen years later, Evra is at the top of the Italian ladder, even if Italy’s club game is no longer quite at the top of the world. Tonight, he prepares for a Serie A summit meeting, Milan against Juventus, the defending champions who the former France captain joined from Manchester United in July.
Between the Evra of Juventus and the Evra of Marsala is a vast body of experience, achievement and a few changes of direction.
At Monza, in the second tier of Italian football, at the age of 18, Evra began to consider that his youthful role as a speedy left-winger might not be the one that would best advance his career.
He struggled to make the Monza first XI as a primarily attacking player and, returning to France, and Nice, he began to evolve as a full-back.
At Monaco, under Deschamps’s coaching, he made his reputation as a left-back, and reached the first of four Uefa Champions League finals in his career.
It is that acquired know-how in European elite competition that Juventus wanted to graft on to their domestically dominant squad.
There is a natural fit. The feistiness that has always been part of Evra’s personality, and which has sometimes led him to confrontation, notably when he led a players’ uprising at the 2010 World Cup, will be admired in a defence that includes the granite Italians Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci and goalkeeper Gigi Buffon, as well as the tough Swiss right-back Stephan Lichtsteiner.
Evra said at his presentation to Juve supporters he relishes their shared target of a fourth successive scudetto.
He might have stayed at Old Trafford, where he played for eight seasons, and had a year on his contract to run.
But he knew that the Juventus coach of the past three seasons, Antonio Conte, had for a while admired the competitor in Evra.
Even when Conte moved to take the Italy national team job in July, Evra liked the idea of Juve. His first impressions, he told reporters after his debut last week, are of “hard work, maybe the hardest I’ve ever done”.
Max Allegri, Conte’s successor, likes the way the Frenchman has responded to that work. He also recognises that elements of the flying winger of a decade and a half ago are still alive in Evra.
He sees him applying himself to the various formations that Conte cultivated, including the 3-5-2, with Evra advanced to wing-back, supplying crosses and calling the left flank his own.
One useful gain from Evra bringing his expertise to Juve is that Kwadwo Asamoah, often used as a left wing-back under Conte, can now occupy his true playmaker’s position.
Against Malmo in midweek in the Uefa Champions League, Evra, on the left, and Asamoah, more central, combined well several times.
Against Milan tonight, Juve face a stiffer challenge, first-place hosting second in the table.
That is pretty much the Milan-Juve hierarchy Evra would have recognised as natural when he first got to know the Italian game, looking up from the tip of Sicily, 16 years ago.
sports@thenational.ae