If it is true you learn more about yourself when you lose, there cannot be much left for Sergio Parisse to discover. Parisse has played in 134 Tests for Italy and lost 100 of them. From the first, 64-10 to the All Blacks in Hamilton way back in 2002, to the last, 29-27 to Scotland in Rome last March, Parisse’s lost every which way a man can: trounced, thrashed, pummelled, pipped, robbed and routed. One hundred losses is a record. No one else even comes close. Next on the list is his old teammate Martin Castrogiovanni, on 88. Outside Italy, it is Gethin Jenkins, on 70 and after it all, Parisse still carries himself like he is undefeated.
There has never been a champion quite like Parisse, who has lost more matches than many greats ever play. He is not done yet. Next Saturday, he will lead Italy out to play Scotland at Murrayfield. It will be his 66th Six Nations match, which will put him one ahead of Brian O’Driscoll. Another record. By the end of the year, after the Six Nations, the World Cup’s warm-ups, and the tournament itself, the 35-year-old No 8 will be closing in on Richie McCaw’s all-time haul of 148 caps.
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None of which seems to mean all that much to him. “Sometimes,” he says, “You stop for a moment and think: ‘Wow, I’ve played a few games’.” Most of the time, he says, he is too busy thinking about the next one to worry about the last. “Maybe it will be my last Six Nations, but I don’t like to think or talk too much about the future. In my head, I know I want to play in my fifth World Cup.”
That’s a short list, too, just Brian Lima and Mauro Bergamasco long. “That would be great, it would be a dream, I never even really imagined I’d play in one when I was kid. And then, after the World Cup, maybe I’ll stop, maybe I’ll continue, it depends how I feel mentally and physically and, more than that, on what’s going to be best for the Italian team in the future.”
You have to respect history. Italy got in the Six Nations by beating good teams
Which is the sort of thing players say because they ought to. With Parisse, though, you know he is being genuine when he says the team is the only thing he cares about, because you can be sure he is not in it for the glory. “Every time I put on the Italian jersey it’s really important to me that I feel I’m representing the history of the team, the culture,” he says.
“Sometimes you play well, sometimes you play badly, but every single time I put on a jersey in the Six Nations it is a moment to enjoy.”
Parisse almost quit Italy in 2015, but the head coach, Conor O’Shea, persuaded him to stay on by talking him through his long-term plans for the wider development of the sport. He wanted Parisse to help him rebuild the whole Italian set-up. “In the last three years with Conor, together, we’ve made a lot of changes in Italy,” Parisse says. “We’ve been working a lot behind the scenes with the two franchises, Zebre and Treviso.” It’s paying off, he says, only you would not necessarily know it from the national’s team’s results.
“There’s been a lot of progress in terms of the system, but not in terms of the results. Which is frustrating, because it’s difficult to say we are growing but we are still losing games.”
O’Shea agrees with him. He talks glowingly about the talent Italy have coming through their age-groups, and the improvements made at Treviso in particular. “But, God, we want to win, we so badly want to win”.
Italy have won three games in the past two years. “Yeah, we beat Georgia, Japan, Fiji,” Parisse says, “the teams who are around us in the rankings. But it’s not enough just to be content, it’s not enough just to say: ‘Italy can play at this level’. We want to achieve more.”
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Victory over Georgia was sweet, at least, since there has been much talk about whether they should replace Italy in the Six Nations. “Georgia are doing good things and good for them,” Parisse says, “but we showed last November that we play on another level to them.
“You have to respect the history. Italy didn’t get in the Six Nations by saying: ‘Hello, we’re Italy, can you give us permission to be involved?’ No, we did it by beating good teams and showing that we had progressed.” In short, Parisse says, they earned it.
The trouble is, this is Italy’s 20th season in the championship and they have never finished even so high as third. Right now, they are on a 17-game long losing streak in the competition. When Parisse says “we don’t win consistently” what he really means is that they don’t win at all.
How many times can one man keep getting knocked down? “I’m the kind of person that’s very positive anyway,” he says. “I don’t get excited when people say: ‘Wow, what a good player’, or ‘You’re playing well’, and I don’t get down when people say I played badly. I just continue on, follow myself, trying every time to be positive. Even when I stop playing I’ll be the same person, in everything I do, I never give up.”