Claudio Ranieri: a delicate and principled man nearly everlasting life

Leicester City’s players were not the first to hear Claudio Ranieri ring his imaginary bell. Danny Drinkwater provoked much amusement among the British press corps last month, when he revealed the manager’s technique of saying “dilly-ding, dilly-dong” to restore focus whenever energy levels start to dip during training.

Back in Italy, though, at least one observer had a different reaction. Ivo Pulga played for three seasons under Ranieri at Cagliari between 1988 and 1991. When he came across Drinkwater’s comments, what he felt was a wave of nostalgia.


“You need to write that he invented this bell at Cagliari!” Pulga says. “As soon as I saw the story in England last month, my mind immediately went back to the training session where it happened. It was very early in the morning and us players were all a bit sleepy. [Ranieri] could see that mentally we were still in bed, so he shouted: ‘Dilly-ding, dilly-dong! Training has started! Dilly-ding, dilly-dong!’ After that, it became the calling card for our season. At Christmas, he gave us each a bell with ‘Cagliari Calcio, dilly-ding, dilly-dong’ and his name on it. I still have mine at home.”

Ranieri’s simulated alarm call was no less whimsical to Italian ears three decades ago than it is to English ones today. And yet, in both countries it has worked. The manager did not win a top-flight title with Cagliari but he did guide them to consecutive promotions from the third division all the way up to Serie A. He kept them there at the first time of asking, before landing the Napoli job in the summer of 1991.




The bell came with Ranieri to Naples, and seemingly everywhere else that he has worked since. The former Italy midfielder Antonio Nocerino, now with Orlando City in Major League Soccer, remembers him deploying it even at Juventus. “When we had a morning practice session, and some players were a bit sluggish, he would call them out to the middle of the pitch and shout: ‘Dilly-ding, dilly-dong!’ When I read this story about Leicester, I just started laughing because all those funny moments with him came rushing back into my head.”

That Ranieri has a sense of humour is hardly new information. This is a man who, while coaching Roma in 2010, closed out a tense press conference before the derby against Lazio by answering a Norwegian journalist’s question about John Arne Riise in English. When Ranieri rose to leave afterward, domestic reporters roared in anger at his failure to provide a translation. He flashed the mob a smile and lied: “I told him our starting formation.”

Just because the jokes come naturally, however, does not mean that they are without purpose. Talk to Italian players who have worked under Ranieri and almost all will all use the same word to describe his penchant for joking around. He does it to sdrammatizzare – to diminish and defuse the tension his team might be feeling in a given situation.