04/25/2024 6.04pm
10 April 1939 last match of the season for the Cagliari by Winkler. In the same days Italy annexed the kingdom of Albania, with just a few months left before the outbreak of war in Europe and just over a year before Italy’s involvement. Meanwhile on the pitch in via Pola, the rossoblù host Foligno e Roberto Renza he is the protagonist of the match with a hat-trick.
It will be the highest moment of the career of the young right winger, native of Formia. Renza, ambidextrous and hurdler in his youth, had grown up as a footballer in the Sardinian capital and had played for the legendary Pro Calcio San Giorgio, before moving to Cagliari in the 1937-38 season, in the Serie C championship. After this first year, disastrous for the team , too weak to face the eleven much better equipped opponents, but useful to the eighteen year old Renza, who will gain experience. In the 1938-39 season the promising right winger from Cagliari scored on several occasions, until his convincing success against Foligno. During the 1939-40 championship, the last of peace for the Italian teams, Renza continued to grow and Cagliari with him. The team fought for the top positions for most of the tournament, with sensational results, such as the 8-0 and 8-3 at home against Vis Pesaro and Rimini respectively.
In the 1940-41 season Cagliari was forced to compete in the first regional division for security reasons. Some members of the team leave Sardinia, others receive the call to arms. This also comes for the twenty-two year old Renza who is overwhelmed by events. September 8th and the armistice lead to the deportation of numerous Italian soldiers to Germany. Roberto Renza also ends up in a prison camp. For over a year nothing more was known about it. Everyone gives him up for dead, until a letter delivered to the journalist Antonio Cardia, after the end of the war, informs that Renza is hospitalized in Rome and the long detention has undermined his body. A knee that is completely out of action will no longer allow him to return to the field. At the age of twenty-five he sadly had to hang up his shoes. Thus he ended the career of one of the most promising right wingers in Cagliari’s history. Roberto Renza died in Cagliari in 1998. Renza is one of the heroic footballers of the rossoblù club, today unjustly forgotten, who deserves a place of honor in Cagliari’s sporting memory.
Mario Fadda
