A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  A nostalgic dream is at work here, a dream of returning to the Italy I arrived in twenty years ago where, to my immense surprise, coming as I did then from a bedsit in Acton and an office job in Shepherd’s Bush, I found that there was not a single black face on the streets. The great invasion from Africa was yet to begin. And if each town was potentially at war with the next, locked into that endless internecine struggle which is Italian unity, still each community within itself was homogeneous to the point of suffocation. Verona in particular was asphyxiatingly Catholic.

  Now things have changed, dramatically. Now in the humdrum bar where I go to read the Gazzetta dello Sport every morning over a cappuccino, I find an earnest man called Mohammed trying to explain to the savvy old barista that he has three wives and is about to take a fourth. This man sits in the bar for hours, invariably wearing a black woolly hat on woolly black hair, and usually what he does is lay his cheek on the Formica-topped table and fall asleep. But today he is scribbling fiercely on a large piece of lined paper. ‘To my wife-to-be,’ he says, and explains his complicated family position. ‘What about the mothers-in-law?’ the barista asks pertinently. ‘Do they get on?’ At the next table, the pensioners arguing over their card-games can’t decide whether they’re envious or horrified.

  And on the train, coming back late from Milan where I teach, four black prostitutes share my compartment and one of them is reading the Bible. Italian Catholics, I tell myself, watching the solemn face of this fat young woman licking her finger to turn the pages, do not as a rule read the Bible, never mind Italian prostitutes, and certainly not on the train. I have never understood why the black prostitutes of northern Italy move around from town to town in the evening and always on the train. Clearly someone is organising them. From the Bible-reader’s conversation, in English, as the journey progresses, it turns out that she is a Baptist. Martin Laursen, declared man of the match at Bari, is a Lutheran. So the local paper tells me. Does either of them know, I wonder, that last September the Pope pleased many of her potential customers, many of his most loyal fans, by reasserting in an official encyclical that the Catholic Church is actually the only church and, above all, the only way to eternal life?

  Luìs Marsiglia, meantime, having renounced that church and hence deprived himself of eternal life, continues to have his mortal existence heavily protected by the police, while a considerable group of left-wing students, arch enemies of the Brigate Gialloblù, are still spending their nights on the pavement beneath his bedroom window. Only yesterday, however, having failed to find any right-wing hotheads who might have been responsible for the attack, the police raided the very apartment they are supposed to be protecting, Marsiglia’s home, and took away the threatening leaflets we have all seen him photographed with on so many occasions. Why wasn’t this evidence examined at once, one wonders? And why is our trainer Perotti suddenly fielding a player we’ve never seen before, a player not even on the bench at Bari? Giuseppe Colucci. Another Colucci? Another southerner. Who’s even heard of him?

  Under the leaden sky, beneath a frenzy of banners and confetti, the teams begin to play. Not two minutes pass before Udinese hit the post, a shot through a scramble of players following a cross. Then only two minutes later Verona likewise hit the post after a move of such rapid and elegant execution that I can hardly believe it’s our lot producing it. A beautiful move. All of a sudden, people sit up; the boys seem to have made a huge qualitative leap. There is that rapid patterning of passes, that sense of geometry in four dimensions, at once shape and flow, that makes football so enchanting. And now they’re doing it again. They’re attacking again. Giuseppe Colucci is at the heart of it. He lifts his head. He places the ball. He rushes for space and receives it again, dribbles round his man. Who the hell is he? ‘From Bordeaux,’ Pietro says. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Italian playing in France. Just turned twenty. He’s never played in Serie A before.’

  So that first quarter of an hour was a revelation. In only fifteen minutes, the inadequate-seeming Perotti, bandy-legged and bespectacled, mild-mannered and dull in interviews, had impressed the Curva Sud. The brigate had forgotten Prandelli, they had stopped yelling Pastorello vaffanculo. We have a team. The kids can play. Facci sognare, flutters the banner. And then it began to rain.

  ‘Giove pluvio’, tomorrow’s Gazzetta will say, ‘doesn’t understand a damn thing about football.’ Giove pluvio is Jupiter the rain god; it’s an expression used to refer to only the heaviest of downpours, in this case an unremitting thundery grey deluge that would last right up to the final whistle. Within moments the ball has ceased to bounce. Passes stop dead. The goalkeeper fumbles. Puddles begin to appear, then ponds. It’s dangerous playing in these conditions. These expensive athletes, super-trained, endlessly spoiled, are hurling themselves at each other like urchins in a paddling pool. They are falling left and right, and not on purpose for once. There are sprays of mud. Shirts and shorts are barely recognisable. ‘Stop the game!’ someone shouts. But the game cannot be stopped, because there are television rights; there’s the Totocalcio, the pools; there are fifteen thousand spectators. Then a minute from half-time Captain Colucci (old Leo Colucci that is) goes down, his legs sliding open in a frightening split. He twists, shouts and raises a hand. Immediately, you understand it’s serious. Colucci never raises his hand. Colucci is the toughest. Our absolutely key man. He’s stretchered off and substituted.

  During the interval the talk is all outrage that the game hasn’t been stopped, and then memories of other games that should have been stopped. Do you remember Fiorentina in the fog, so thick that when we scored our second the curva only knew because of a roar from the other end? Or Torino in the snow? Do you remember that? The covers were taken off the pitch two hours before the game, just as the blizzard began. The game went ahead anyway, it always does, in a couple of inches of slush and ice. Torino scored, had two men sent off, then spent the rest of the match in their area defending. Successfully. That game should definitely have been stopped. It was scandalous. This game too should obviously be stopped.

  But secretly no one wants it to be stopped. It’s a scandal, they say, but everybody’s thinking: what if we snatch that goal, then pack the area till the end? They’ll never get through this marsh. And everybody’s thinking: let them battle it out, that’s what they’re bloody well paid for. That’s what we’ve paid for. Nobody, I would guess, and least of all myself, has so much as a thought for Leo Colucci, whom, as it turns out, we shall not be seeing again for a very long time.

  The referee reappears with a player from each team to check if the pitch is playable. If you’re looking for a good example of the role of the rule in Italian life, here it is. The rule states that when thrown in the air to a height of three metres or so the ball must bounce in such a way as to clear the ground. So, the referee throws the ball up in the air, the players’ heads lift, the Curva Sud begins a rising roar, as when someone runs up to take a penalty, the ball peaks and starts to come down, the roar reaches its climax, the ball hits the grass, throws up a shower of water and sticks firm. The fans cheer.

  Players and referee consult. The referee walks a few paces. He’s put on a dry kit. He looks neat. Again he throws up the ball, again the players raise their heads, again the curva roars and again the ball comes down with a splash and stays put.

  The referee is perplexed. What is he getting another kit wet for if they’re not going to play? They have to play. The game is on cable TV. Some viewers will have paid already. Others will want to know if they’ve won a billion lire on the Totocalcio before five o’clock. Heads are bent in discussion. The referee walks a good bit across the pitch, testing the ground with his toes. The ball is thrown up higher, much higher. The result is the same. It’s only on the fifth or sixth attempt that at last a piece of stubborn ground is found and an uncertain bounce is produced. The curva cheer. Anybody can see the game should be stopped, but we don’t want it stopped. The problem is the rule. But a rule is there to be stretc
hed to the limit. The referee throws the ball up again making sure it lands in exactly the same place. He watches its squelchy bounce. Good. He throws it up again, then again, always in the same place, then, at last, raises his whistle to his lips. The rule has apparently been satisfied. It’s important that a rule be seen to be satisfied. And that’s the referee’s job. Now the game can go on. Relieved, everybody remarks what a disgusting farce this is. ‘Perhaps they’re supposed to play the whole game on that one square metre,’ Pietro suggests.

  The players troop out. During the break they have been reminded how to play in these conditions. It’s back to basics. Foot under the ball, hike it up over the opponent. Don’t imagine you can run with it. Just kick it on. And however remote the chance, shoot, the keeper may drop it. Above all, be physical; no, be violent! What a far cry from the first few dazzling minutes.

  Perotti has taken off Mutu who doesn’t know what to do with a ball if he can’t dribble past his opponent. This handsome young Romanian’s vision of the game must be very similar to my own when I was nine years old. It’s a picture of yourself leaving four or five defenders behind, running round an impotent goalkeeper, perhaps leaping over the hand that seeks to grab your foot, then stopping the ball on the line and raising your arms to the adoring crowd who will for ever remember you as one of the great geniuses of all time. Mutu is not a man for a swamp.

  So the foreign star is replaced by the new boy, Bonazzoli, a very English looking centre-forward, all height and weight and muscle and long straggly hair held tight by a bandanna. In the curva the wise heads acknowledge the wisdom of this decision. But just five minutes into the game, it’s the more slender Gilardino, the pretty-boy blond, who surprises us. He picks up a through ball on the edge of the box, drags it along in the mud as if his left leg were a hockey stick, and simply scoops it past the approaching keeper.

  Goal! First goal of the season in the Bentegodi. First goal for Gilardino in front of his new fans. The boy runs to the corner flag, takes his blue shirt off, waves it wildly over his head and is promptly shown a yellow card. Why players want to take their shirts off, I have never understood. Especially in this rain. Why isn’t waving the arms enough? But then why should they be booked for the gesture when the crowd appreciate it so much? There’s a sullenness to the rules of football that I have never quite fathomed, a niggardliness that is essential to the game. The fans must feel that the referee is against them, even when they have just scored.

  Never mind. Like communicants in the Pope’s one true church, but with a little more faith and conviction, all the fans are embracing, they’re roaring. Now pack the box, Verona, pack the box in the mud, hang on forty minutes and we’ve done it!

  Every Monday morning the Gazzetta dello Sport offers various sketches of the previous day’s moves to goal – there are arrows and numbers and the same players will be drawn two or three times in different positions on the field. Often, in the bar over my coffee, I examine these sketches and puzzle over them and try to figure out who was where when, and every time I do so I’m bound to reflect that it’s impossible to represent football on paper, or even on the two dimensions of the TV screen. Many things must flow together, knowingly, coherently through time and space and against determined resistance, before you can score a deserved goal. More often, many things will tumble together only half-knowingly, or even totally accidentally and in lucky complicity precisely with the determined resistance – a crucial deflection, for example – and you have scored a quite undeserved goal. But either way, the spectator up in the curva stares down at the players embracing and the goalkeeper kicking the post in anger and wonders how it happened. The day after this game with Udinese, I studied the sketch in the Gazzetta and shook my head. How, oh how, I ask myself, in what was now an Irish bog, did Udinese get through the eleven guys packed in the box and stick that ball in the net?

  According to the Gazzetta, which is a serious paper, it had to do with an astute decision on the part of Udinese’s trainer, De Canio. After Verona’s goal he took out the Norwegian Jorgensen in midfield, brought on a no-name defender, and moved the big Ghanaian international, Gargo, hitherto at left back, up into the centre of the pitch, where Colucci was now conspicuous by his absence, thus taking control of the midfield.

  The Gazzetta of course has a vested interest in the idea that such very precise reorganisations can bring about predictable results. Otherwise how could football be given that aura of scientific solemnity that people seem to need nowadays before they can let themselves go, before they can justify the purchase of a paper every day? How could the game be endlessly pondered over and the myth of the great manager fed? Yet, suspicious as I am when I read the Gazzetta’s assessments, I too spend half the game jumping up and down and shrieking why doesn’t the trainer take this or that guy off the pitch. Why doesn’t he bring on so and so? Move so and so here or there. I too firmly believe that if given the chance I would be an excellent manager. I would revolutionise football. Nobody will ever prove me wrong.

  In any event, Gargo did make the difference. Interviewed the day before the game, this immensely talented player, black as coal, shiny as granite, newly arrived in the bel paese, claimed that he was going to make the Italians love him; he was going to eliminate racism from Italian stadiums, quite simply because people would admire and love him so much for the generous and gentlemanly and humble and dedicated way he played. A certain amount of delirium and narcissism is essential, I reflected, on reading this interview, for today’s hard-pressed sportsman to find the dedication he needs to keep going. Much the same could be said of the novelist.

  And anyway, Gargo continued to the willing pressmen, racism wasn’t actually that bad in Italian stadiums. ‘Italy doesn’t have a big racist problem in the stadiums,’ Gargo told the journalists. For someone in the entertainment business, I reflected on reading those words, a candid determination to please is another useful quality. Again the same is true of the novelist. I must keep my eye on this boy.

  Dominating the midfield throughout the second half, Gargo was relentlessly and shamelessly taunted every single time he touched the ball. Oo, oo, oo! Invariably, whenever he passed or was passed to, the core of the Curva Sud burst out in a barrage of monkey grunts, arms pumping up and down as if they were scaling trees. It was hateful. But it only seemed to encourage the black man to do even more to make people love him, to make people see how brilliant and humble and generous he was. He pushed ahead remorselessly. He played with style. And he sent one long ball after another through the defence to the head and feet of Udinese’s simply monstrous centre-forward, Muzzi.

  Intimidated, the yellow-blues fell back. There is no team more scared than Verona when they are winning. The rain poured and poured and one or two areas of the pitch had begun to reflect what little light was left in the sky. Big Muzzi pushed and shoved and kicked and spat. The water splashed about him. The referee gave fouls against him and eventually showed him a yellow card, but never looked like sending the man off. He was doing his job. And then at last, in a mill of players after a high free kick that bobbed here, there and everywhere, Muzzi controlled the ball rather clumsily between shoulder and neck and struck it past the goalkeeper.

  ‘Ferron is a Mongol!’ exploded the man who sits behind me. This man, who has sat behind me at the Bentegodi for at least five years now, always has a pet hate. This season, I fear, it will be our goalkeeper Fabrizio Ferron. ‘Why did Pastorello get us a Mongol in goal? And an old one at that. Hey Grandfather Ferron, you’re a Mongol!’ Muzzi’s shot had come from a mêlée about three yards out and was slammed into the top left-hand corner of Ferron’s goal. How could anyone have saved it? But I concede that there are moments when it’s hard to be reasonable.

  Driving home, Michele and I stopped to contemplate the Adige. ‘We were lucky to get away with a draw,’ I told him. The river was rolling and foaming down between its bridges, a strong brown god, untamed and intractable. Great logs and debris bobbed and dipped and bang
ed in the flood. ‘We should have had two penalties,’ Michele insisted. He was sullen.

  Floods were also the main subject on TV when we got home. There was flooding in Piedmont, flooding in Lombardy, a flood alert along the Po and another on the Adige. We changed channel and watched ‘Novantesimo Minuto’, where RAI’s round-up of the day’s sport always contrives to show highlights of Verona’s game last or not at all.

  ‘You see!’ Michele yelled. ‘You see!’

  He was right, damn it! There had been two clear penalties. His eyes are better than mine. A very deliberate handball on the edge of the six-yard box, then Gilardino sandwiched and bundled over in an evident scoring position just two minutes from time. ‘OK, make a note,’ I said, ‘we’ll keep a tally of how many times they didn’t give us a penalty. We’ll see at the end of the season where we might have been.’ Football offers unlimited opportunities for the mathematics of might-have-been, close cousin of paranoia.

  Flooding was still almost the only feature on the news the following evening when I turned on the TV in a hotel in Milan. Since I teach in the city Monday afternoon and again on Tuesday morning, I stay in a hotel for the night. Huge mudslides, it seemed, were sweeping through villages not a hundred kilometres away from where I lay, remote control in hand. Cars were tumbling upside-down through the main streets of Piedmont. Bridges collapsed. Press and politicians were engaged in the usual back and forth of accusation and denial over poor environmental planning. Grim victims interrupted their mud-shovelling to talk to pretty young journalists. One clip, endlessly repeated, showed three or four buildings sliding down a mountainside. It was awesome.

  All the same, on changing channel I was able to watch a more interesting programme that set out to analyse almost the whole, it seemed to me, of Inter’s game the day before with Napoli, even examining in detail and from various angles things like the back pass, how to slow the rhythm of a game before half-time, different techniques for throw-ins, and so on. A small man with flappy ears and disturbingly thick spectacles leaned forward over his studio desk and became extremely excited about the psychology of ‘administrating the one-goal lead’. A well-endowed blonde with a pretty lisp disagreed.