Antonio and Emanuele Filippini, twins going at a thousand miles an hour

This is the story of two brothers born by chance from a single zygote, who came into the world, one after the other, on 3 July 1973, in Brescia, the ‘City of the Lioness’, and who have continued to hold hands and walk arm in arm throughout their lives. Their first toy? A football. Their first kick? Impossible to say. They were identical from their very first cry and have remained so even now that they’ve celebrated their first 53 years with a single cake. Emanuele is wearing a white T-shirt, Antonio a dark one, but even when you’re standing right in front of them, they remain two names lost within the all-encompassing first and last name adopted right from the start of the story: the Filippini twins, born under the sign of Cancer. Their real names have always come second…

“We used to play together even back in nursery school, in the garden at home, and in the churchyard. Our brother Fabio, who is five years older than us, used to bring the ball. If we rewind the tape, we reckon we realised at the same time that kicking a ball around could become a lucrative profession. Perhaps in our second year with Brescia’s Primavera team, certainly when we earned our first salary in Serie C.”

“Yes, we’ve always played not only together, but also side by side, never straying far from one another, right up until that fateful 6 November 2002, when Parma beat Brescia 4–3 – the match that would go down in history as the ‘twins’ clash’.”

“We were excited and also a bit embarrassed to find ourselves in that unusual situation, but when the referee got things underway, neither of us held back, even when we happened to be going for the same ball. After all, we were two fiercely competitive little flies, but we always went for the ball… We never hurt anyone…”.

“I remember it very well. Manuel Rui Costa had feinted to move the ball; I caught his foot squarely, he fell and broke his shoulder, but it was an accident, not a deliberate act.”

“His praise filled us with pride. At the end of a Fiorentina v Brescia match many years ago, he said in the heat of the moment that there were two of us, but we seemed like ten. And that every time one of us went down, the other would step up, and if the second one went down too, the first would step up again. On the pitch, he’d felt as though he was going mad.”

“Unlike Rui Costa, he waited until the end of their respective careers to reveal to the world that we had been his nightmare. Two brothers, but they seemed like at least five, racing at two thousand an hour, and he’d find them right on his heels wherever he decided to go.”

“Perhaps too much has been said about our limitations and the fairy tale of the lookalike brothers, and too little about what we were capable of achieving. Wherever we went, we played practically the entire season, and that cannot be a coincidence. Without false modesty, we believe we were ahead of our time and, in our own way, pioneers. Twenty-five years ago, we played with the very intensity that is so fashionable these days. We’d make hard tackles and win back the ball time and time again. Anyone who does that today is hailed as a national treasure to be preserved. We were simply the selfless practitioners of the footballing art of making do.”

“Mircea Lucescu, during half-time in a heated match between Perugia and Brescia, when one of us had been booked, suggested we swap shirts. Fortunately, we managed to talk him out of it.”

“It was the highlight, the madness, the most wonderful moment. We’ll always remember the warmth radiating from the stands, that unique atmosphere, the joy in the eyes of Mr Papadopulo and all my teammates, and Di Canio shouting his joy like a young fan. An unforgettable experience.”

“Roberto Baggio resided on the Mount Olympus of football’s elite. At Brescia, he was regarded and treated with the deference and respect due to a footballing god…”

“You should know that one fine day, the late Vittorio Mero brought his dog along to watch training. Mazzone flew into a rage. He said that, come what may, he never wanted to see that dog again. A week goes by and once again a dog makes an appearance on the touchline. Mazzone is on the verge of a fit of rage right there and then. The truth comes out in a flash. The players pointed out to the manager that it was Baggio’s dog. Mazzone went from anger to a knowing smile in an instant. And he asked the groundsmen to feed the ‘Divine Ponytail’s’ dog.”

“VAR has put every foul under the microscope. These days, every challenge carries the risk of a sending-off. Take Paolo Maldini, for example: his speciality was defensive sliding tackles, from which he regularly emerged unscathed. Nowadays, a single still image is enough to prove that, as well as the ball, you’ve caught the opponent’s foot, and you’ll find yourself on a red card or conceding a penalty. Not to mention the ‘step on foot’, commonly known as a stomp. It happens in everyday life too, but in football terms it has become an offence worthy of papal excommunication.”

“No, Antonio lives on Lake Garda, Emanuele in Milan, but we have remained each other’s mirror image. We are still in football. We are both coaches. After a distinguished career – spanning assistant coaching, first-team management, Serie D and Serie C – we are currently out of work, but we are taking it in our stride. In September and October, the first heads will start to roll, and two managerial posts will certainly become available, just for us. It’s so certain that one needn’t even feel embarrassed about being a bit of a jinx.”

“We would be delighted to manage one of the teams we have championed and fought for. If we were to take it a step further, the dream of dreams would be to manage a Serie A team together. Just imagine how wonderful that would be! Identical twins sitting side by side on the same bench. It would be the icing on the cake of a life lived in perfect harmony, racing at full speed, always close to where the other was, without ever stopping to work out who was running faster or was the better player. We found ourselves on opposite sides in just one match, but beyond the media hype and newspaper headlines, we weren’t even opponents on that one occasion.”