Like dad. Liam at the basket like his father Alessio who he never met because he died on a basketball court a couple of weeks before he was born. A story that continues. A story that ties together the thread of life between a father and son who have never met and which tells of the debut with the same basketball team, on the same parquet of a five-year-old boy a few weeks ago in Molinello di Rho. “It was difficult to enter that gym, but in a certain sense it seemed like the closing of a circle” explains Claudia Gabellone, mother and wife of Liam and Alessio.

The joy is for the child, at his first basket but the memory can only be for Alessio, her husband. Who played his last match in that gym. He played with the number 6, Alessio Allegri, who was something of a legend in the minors of Lombard basketball, with his standards between 30 and 40 points per game. He who had started playing football and who, thanks to an old coach, Angelo Castiglioni, had inherited that nickname that he would always carry with him: Koeman, like the blond Dutchman from PSV and Barcelona. And on December 15th, when he was five years old, he was playing when he felt ill, in front of his father Fabrizio’s eyes. Cardiac arrest and there’s nothing you can do

Alessio dies at 37 years old, 12 days before Claudia gives birth to their child. «Liam has never seen his father, but he has heard many things about him and knows him through many stories», he explains «Last Sunday we were there, in Molinello di Rho, and Liam scored his first point in his first game. With the same technique as Ale: stopping and shooting from afar. Yes, I closed the circle a bit, but entering that gym opened up a world to me…”. Of memories. And of thoughts that only she knows fully. But it is in her husband’s name that she immediately, together with her parents and his brother, created the Alessio Koeman Allegri association which in just a few years donated around twenty defibrillators: to the schools of Garbagnate, to families with children with heart pathologies in the province of Pavia, to Saronno and Caronno Pertusella. Thanks also to 3-on-3 basketball tournaments which annually commemorate Koeman, mini-basketball instructor for the San Luigi Oratory in Garbagnate Milanese and physical education teacher in the elementary schools of the same city and in Pisacane and Poerio in Milan. «We feel his presence in many things, even in these», concludes Claudia, always with a smile. «Alessio always told me to smile. As if I had to remember it, as if it had to stick in my mind. It is his teaching that I carry forward and which is also Liam’s. A joyful child. Despite it all”.