Lauri Dalla Valle - training for personal independence

Prodigiously talented teenage footballer leaves home and girlfriend for Liverpool

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By Petteri Ala-Kivimäki in Joensuu
     
      Lauri Dalla Valle is a 16-year-old from Joensuu. He is currently training 24 hours a day - at the skill of living alone and away from home.
      Dalla Valle’s apartment on the edge of Joensuu’s city centre is a genuine training lodge. And the boy himself is a splendid and distinctly unusual teenager.
     
He is a youth footballer from Northern Karelia, and big European clubs have been fighting over his signature. Liverpool’s Youth Academy won the competition, even though the cash-drenched Londoners at Chelsea promised to double the Merseyside offer.
      And the offer itself was not exactly peanuts: nothing has been said precisely, but Liverpool apparently paid a signing fee of between EUR 750,000 and one and a half million for the boy, who is an attacking midfielder and playmaker.
     
What makes Lauri Dalla Valle an even more curious package is that he is half-Italian (on his father’s side), and at the age of sixteen he lives at a different address from his mum.
      And as any good Italian man would tell you, ultimately it is never a good idea to leave the maternal bosom.
      Look, Lauri, are you sure you want to move away from home?
      “Yes, I am. I’m going there for the football”, comes the unshakable response from a kid who is undoubtedly one of the best footballing prospects ever to come out of this country.
      “There” in this context means the English northwest and Liverpool, where he will be heading in January.
      Right now his mother Marketta is just ten kilometres away in the village of Kulho, near Kontiolahti.
      From next year the distance will expand to a couple of thousand kilometres.
     
Dalla Valle has had six months of practice at living on his own.
      Do you miss your mother?
      “Nope.”
      But don’t Italian men always miss their mama?
      “I think I’m a bit more Finnish, then”, he smiles back.
     
For someone his age, Lauri Dalla Valle has achieved a very respectable degree of personal autonomy.
      “I do my own cooking, but not the washing. I don’t have enough sets of clothes that are the same colour. I’d need to wait too long to get a full washing machine”, grins the youngster, who also admits to a fondness for steaks and pasta.
     
His apartment of two rooms, kitchen, and bathroom in Joensuu is tidy.
      There is a tea-towel taped onto the fridge door with bluetac, declaring the virtues of “goods from the garden”, home-grown fruit and vegetables.
      “I was going for something with a sort of food motif”, he shrugs, and opens up the fridge door. The top shelf is dominated by a large glass jug that is half-full of a greenish liquid.
      “Mehukatti. The pear-flavoured one”, he laughs.
      The jug of saccharinated fruit drink is flanked by such items as grapes, two vacuum-packed fillet steaks, a stick of standard Finnish sausage for sandwiches, a bottle of tomato ketchup, and assorted yoghurts. Dalla Valle confesses that his favourite accompaniment to a glass of pear Mehukatti is:
      “A steak, and oven-made chips or potato wedges.”
     
Foodstuffs and the young man from Kulho go together very smoothly.
      Lauri’s father Loreno Dalla Valle is the celebrated “Boletus Baron”, who exports Finnish boletus mushrooms to Italy, where they are a highly-prized delicacy, second only to truffles.
      When the deal cut between Lauri Dalla Valle and Liverpool was announced, the first reaction of one poster on a club-related blog was:
      “Lauri Dalla Valle? He sounds like a new brand of probiotic yoghurt.”
      If all goes well, Dalla Valle Jr. will offer the Reds fans a rare delicacy - goalscoring and slick passing all the way from Northern Karelia.
     
But that is a long way off as yet. Acceptance into one of the youth academies of English Premiership clubs does not by any manner of means guarantee a place in the first-team squad a few years down the road.
      Maybe one academy student in three years makes it onto the Anfield grass. Nevertheless, Dalla Valle knows his talents and is confident he will get noticed.
      "The Liverpool squad and the reserve teams train at Melwood. In a year or two the object should be to get myself there. I’ve been told from the Liverpool end that it is a goal that can be reached if I only work at it hard enough.”
     
When they visited Liverpool, Dalla Valle and his father received the red-carpet treatment. Lauri got to meet the club’s Finnish central defender and national team stalwart Sami Hyypiä.
      “He was tall. And a nice guy. Pretty much the same accent as me, too”, says Dalla Valle in the endearing country burr that is found in the east of the country. Hyypiä hails originally from rather further south, in Voikkaa, near Kouvola.
      Lauri has no qualms about his new hometown, either.
      “It seemed a nice sort of place. The sea is quite close. And that’s where The Biitles came from, isn’t it, Liverpool?” he laughs.
      And I presume you'll be taking jumbo-sized containers of Mehukatti with you to England?
      “Ah no. I think maybe I’ll leave the Mehukatti here."
     
In addtion to his family and his favourite beverage, Dalla Valle will be leaving behind a girlfriend in Finland.
      “We’ve been together a year and a half. She’s in the ninth grade. Yeah, it’s a wrench, but it doesn’t mean we’ll never see each other again. We’ll meet up when I’ve got holidays and I come back to Finland.”
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 8.12.2007

More on this subject:
 Son of former drugs officer picks Liverpool
 From "the field behind the church" to Anfield, perhaps

PETTERI ALA-KIVIMÄKI / Helsingin Sanomat
petteri.ala-kivimaki@hs.fi