Mountain folk hail good guy’s rise to top

Football these days is full of greedy young men and grasping young women, players and their WAGs, a set of people who inhabit a world of their own, utterly separate from the world of their fans.

That’s how it seems until you come across a story that proves football has a human face after all.

It is hard to imagine anyone less like a WAG than Dania Gazzani and any player more deserving than her husband Emanuele Giaccherini. The shy girl from a seaside town and the modest boy from a village in the mountains who triumphed against adversity — brought together by fate and bound together by faith. It seems too good to be true.