REAL MADRID
Materazzi: "What I said to Zidane was really stupid"
Tomorrow it will be 10 years since the famous headbutt incident in the 2006 World Cup final: "I mentioned his sister but not his mother", Materazzi told L'Équipe.
Marco Materazzi is back in the public eye on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the 2006 World Cup final when he was on the receiving end of a Zidane headbutt. The Italian central defender recalled the event in company of L’Équipe and confessed that it changed his life forever.
The former Inter Milan has detailed what happened between him and Zidane at the Olympiastadion in Berlin in his new autobiography: "I decided to write a book about it because everyone kept asking me what I said to Zidane to get such a reaction. What I said was really stupid but my words didn't warrant such a reaction. In any neighbourhood - in Rome, Naples, Turin, Milan or Paris, you hear far worse things...".
Materazzi weant on to clarify: "What I said was in reference to his sister, not his mother, like I have read in some newspapers. My mother died when I was a teenager, when I was 15, so I would never have stooped as low as to insult his mother.
“I have never understood why that incident reached such levels of notoriety. The only thing I want to remember from that day were my goals", he continued. "Sometimes, in Italy, I meet fans on the street and they say to me: ‘Marco, you did well giving him that headbutt!’ And it makes me angry because... I was the one who was on the receiving end! But it shows just how strange it is that the story has been told and altered. It's no big deal, I don't resent it, and I never will”, he ended.