The lives and deaths of Marcel Sabou and Vasile Mănăilă

I saw Marcel Sabou playing quite a bit, I know more of the stories of Marcel Pușcaș and Gică Viscreanu. The first, dramatic, disturbing, second, full of suspense. I met Vasile Mănăilă, I talked, including after leaving Craiova and returned to Constanța.

To break a bone and a career

Marcel Sabou, former player in Spain at Real Sporting, Real Racing Club and CD Tenerife, was abducted by an amyotrophic side sclerosis

Marcel Sabou is a kind of character from the novels from now on a age and something, when the evil done in youth, unstoppable of enough repentance, revolves on maturity and leads to a fierce suffering, then to the implacable end. He had only turned 20 (born August 22, 1965) when he entered wild, without work with the ball, and dusts Marcel Pușcaș's foot.

Sabou played at Natal Timișoara, Pășcaș at Rapid. The career of the second is breaking at 25 years in one of the most terrible injuries in the history of our footballtransposed, but not in the contemporaneity, by the episode of Ardeleanu-Lăcătuș.

The victim's compassion

Then Sabou reaches Dinamo and runs to Spain with Viscreanu, in a series of Donquijotești adventures widely historically. Matches come to the Primera Division and then the serious illness, that terrible disease that melts on your feet. In all the years in which I knew that Sabou was seriously ill and that for him he would follow what could not follow, I had dozens of discussions with the victim.

Marcel Pușcaș, on the hospital bed, after the injury caused by the sabou

I did not meet the rancor, which is a rudimentary feeling, but something else. A kind of compassion, of dust that sits over the past events. Is it easy for such cases to want the good of the one who has taken you out of football? It's not, it has no way to be.

The “sailor” Oltean

Vasile Mănăilă's novel is less populated with such soul contradictions. The “Marinarul”, as in baptized Oltenia football, came to Bănie at a time (in 1984) when Balaci, Crișan and Donose were exiled to FC Olt, when Beldeanu and Stefanescu were preparing their withdrawal, when over Negrilă, Ungureanu and Tilihoi had begun to settle. Basically, Vasile did not catch Craiova Maxima, but only what was left of it.

Vasile Mănăilă died

Cârțu's favorite

It was initially a midfielder, then right defender. See Constanta's school on him, ran, dribbla, and not by chance was a basic man in the team who made the event in 1991, with Cârțu on the bench.

Theoretically, he wore 2 on his back, but it was much more than that. Basically, on the speed and the multipurpose he built Cârțu that team, in which there were only two non-Oltenians. Prunea, whose nation was drawn from Gorj, and “Marinarul”, who in the almost eight years spent in Craiova had become more Oltean than the Oltenians. Loved by the public, and in Bănie the public knows football, carefully chooses what to love.

Appreciated by Hagi

Too bad that a player of such value has not gathered than a single selection in national, a friendly with the US, in Brasov. First Iovan, then Rednic, then Dan Petrescu looked better than Vasilewhich after that glorious year with Craiova went back to Constanța, where he played for a few years for the Lighthouse, the Apoia entered the structures of Hagi's club, with whom he had been a teammate in Gică's first year in big football.

Two different stories, two people who came out of the stage of life at 59 and 62, two regrets. Rest in peace both!