The Italian international Sandu Tonali (24 years old), legitimized at the English football band Newcastle United, spoke about how he healed by the betting vice in an interview for the publication “La Repubblica”.
Sandro Tonali stood for a while outside the lot, atoning his punishment
Sandro Tonali told his relationship with gambling, which brought him a punishment received as a result of the rules: “I closed in me. Neither did the people who loved me know I had an addiction”.
Sandro Tonali has passed over the prohibition received and resumed his life in the Newcastle T-shirt. He has no barrier to talk about the delicate period he went through when everything came to light. “It is not an exaggeration to talk about a first and second life. My lifestyle was negative. I was closed for everyone and that made me change my behavior. I was so in the cantonment and at home, with friends and family. Today, fortunately I am different“He said in an interview for Republic.
The healing process included a few decisive steps. The first was to give up the mobile phone: “I didn’t have six months in the last year. I felt a feeling of freedom: the feeling of being good even without it. Before, I could not go from room to another without a phone. Now I use it to call my mother, my father or someone in the family. And the intercace with social networks is minimal. If I remember the first bet? Not. It has become a custom at 17-18 years. And normality was when it started to take up so long. The fact that it was online blinded, I closed in my carapace”.
Tonali also revealed that he did not realize that gambling became an addiction: “When a person is in such a situation, it is difficult to ask him if he is sick. He will always tell you that no. Even if he feels it is not good. He doesn’t believe he has this problem, so he tends to hide it. In the last few months I have spent a lot of time with the psychologist. His job was to make me understand how I fell in that”.
“I could not take medicines”
He recovered when he saw that he could lose everything: “Usually, it is understood the situation when something is lost: family, job, salary. In my case, however, my financial availability did not make me achieve the severity of the problem. It was a difficult recovery job. I could not take certain medicines, because with 95% of them I would have been positive for doping, so everything was a mental trip. It lasted Monday, with a psychologist and a psychiatrist. In the first two months of disqualification, I broke from everyone, then returning to life, training every day without having matches, I understood that I pay for what I did”.
AC Milan’s former midfielder woke up from nightmare and became a messenger trying to help others. “The most interesting meeting? In Newcastle, in a factory that produces caps for ocean gas pipes. I was there because the gambling are very popular in England. There were a few who told me, a few months after disqualification: “I stopped betting because of what happened to you.” They have been compulsive players for years. An Italian told me that an employee earns 2,000 pounds a month, but sometimes he has to make overtime to maintain his family: throw too much money at gambling”.
Who is tonal today? He says itself: “Someone who can talk to everyone: with those who need help and those who do not”.
