A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Is there anything, I wondered, as the rain fell heavily outside on the streets of Milan, as it teemed down on the dark plain of Lombardy to the south and the great lakes and mountains to the north, is there really anything more important than football? Sometimes it seems to me that all today’s progress in electronics is being made only and exclusively to further a more complete, a more satisfying representation of football. Soon there will be holograms of football, miniature holograms on your sitting-room floor, allowing you to follow the game and play and replay the crucial moments. And still you’ll never understand. No, I’ll never understand how we let Udinese score in conditions like that, in a situation where they pretty well had to swim towards the goal. It was water polo, for God’s sake. Waking in the middle of the night, a doubt occurs to me: was Muzzi perhaps offside when he received that ball? I must see the video again.

  Rigore

  SADNESS is the only word that comes to mind in this moment. Sadness not only for the club we have and the miserable squad, but sadness too for how we’re treated by the national media.

  Paruca, brigate@piu-mati.it

  ‘YOU MIGHT LIKEN Patrick Vieira to an antelope, or a giraffe, or a flamingo,’ writes La Repubblica, ‘but not to a monkey. You could call him polite, reasonable, gentle, but not a “merda”. Mihajlovic got it wrong.’

  Mihajlovic, the Lazio left back and international star, has admitted that in Tuesday’s Champions’ League game against Arsenal he called Vieira, the Arsenal striker and French international star, a ‘scimmia di merda’ – a fucking monkey. As if to remind us that newspapers also sometimes get things wrong (Vieira ‘gentle’? Vieira a ‘flamingo’?) the article is headed: ‘from our correspondent, St Albany, Hertfordshire’.

  St Albany? For a moment it crosses my mind that they might have changed the Hertfordshire place-names in these twenty years I’ve been away. Could this be an Americanisation, a globalisation of St Albans? One thing that’s certain is that La Repubblica has now officially changed its position on Luis Marsiglia. ‘We owe Verona an apology,’ begins the main editorial in the same day’s paper. Marsiglia has confessed that he made up the whole story: no nazi skinheads attacked him; there is no need to raid the homes of the Brigate Gialloblù to find their clubs and crowbars. Meantime Mihajlovic is coming to the Bentegodi this Sunday. Verona are playing last year’s champions. It’s our first impossible game.

  Why do football and racism keep getting mixed up? The interview with Vieira is interesting. ‘What really offended me’, says Vieira, ‘wasn’t this or that word, monkey or bastard, but that Mihajlovic really believed what he was saying. It wasn’t part of the game, he wasn’t saying it to provoke me, or to make me screw up and foul him. He really meant it. You could see it in his eyes.’

  Vieira distinguishes then between a racism that is part of a game of insults on the pitch and a more brutal gut hatred. He isn’t thinking ‘racist’ or ‘not racist’, but in shades (as it were) of racism: nominal racism, gamesmanship racism, gut racism. In his defence, Mihajlovic claims that it was Vieira started it all by calling him a sporco zingaro di merda, a dirty fucking gypsy. ‘I am proud of being a gypsy,’ Mihajlovic says, ‘it’s not my fault if Vieira has problems being black.’ The belligerent Serb is promptly fined thirty thousand pounds and banned for two Champions’ League matches.

  Responding to Arsenal’s complaints about the constant barracking of their black players by the Italian fans, Lazio’s president, Sergio Cragnotti, all elegant suit and tie, says, ‘We’re not fascist, the truth is they don’t want us to win.’ It’s interesting that La Repubblica, always willing to extend the racism of Verona’s fans to the whole of the city, does not do the same when reporting on the Lazio game. Perhaps, in the way some people will limit sexual peccadilloes to trips away from home, Italy is eager to circumscribe its racism in the Veneto: southerners are poor and simpatici, northerners, or north-easterners, are rich and bigoted. This is the projected stereotype. But like it or not, it’s beginning to look like tomorrow’s match with Lazio will be a meeting of minds. On the same day that Marsiglia at last confesses, the Hellas website miraculously restores the famous Wall and within twenty-four hours this message has appeared:

  LAZIO AND VERONA, UNITED IN THE FIGHT ROME AND NAPLES, PIECES OF SHITE.

  AGAINST NE.GROES THE ONLY TWO CLUBS TO HAVE BEEN CONSISTENT AND WORTHY OF RESPECT IN THE WORLD OF FAN EXTREMISM: VERONA AND LAZIO. NEVER A FALSE STEP, NEVER A RETREAT, FOR BETTER OR WORSE [but the literal translation would be: ‘in good and in evil’] HONOUR TO THE UNMOVABLE ONES AND THE BRIGATE GIALLOBLU.

  In good and in evil, unmovable. Identity is more important than morality. Extremism offers an excitement that moderation cannot afford. The word negroes is written with a full stop in the middle to avoid The Wall’s censorship system. Defending political correctness with high tech smacks of Canute rebuking the sea.

  But aside from Lazio–Arsenal, another English–Italian encounter that took place this week was Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Milan. To my surprise, I found myself invited to a morning reception in the beautiful Palazzo Marino opposite La Scala. No French blacks or Serb gypsies ruffled the cordial surface of this encounter of thoroughbred Limeys and Eyties, but on the city streets outside the familiar lines of policemen held back the crowd, while once in the palazzo the guests showed that tendency to divide into two camps that occurs in every stadium.

  When the Queen finally appeared I was struck by the truth of something my wife has always maintained: Elizabeth II does indeed look rather like my mother. She even dresses the same way, though Mrs Parks achieves the effect less expensively. So that even if I didn’t quite get to shake the royal hand (it hovered for a moment six inches away), I nevertheless felt a keen sense of national, even racial, identity. ‘The Italians are OK,’ an ex-navy admiral told me, an engaging man with all the best of the old school tie about him, ‘but you’ll only regret it,’ he went on, and gave examples, ‘if you ever trust a Slav.’

  Mihajlovic, I thought! The game. I can’t wait for the game. How dull this reception is, I soon decided, perhaps even duller – is that possible? – than Écrire l’Europe. ‘Laursen for King,’ someone was yelling after the game with Udinese. The Verona fans are quite happy to crown a foreigner, though not as yet a black; as the British were quite happy some time ago to accept a German on the throne, but would hardly have brought back a tribal leader from the colonies. If my mother looks like the Queen, I reflect, on the train going home, gazing up at the mountains that divide northern and southern Europe, does that mean that I have German blood in my veins? Is there no end to the world’s endless mixing? After all, it’s only a month or two since a casual conversation in the family led to the discovery that my great-grandmother was Jewish. How hard it is to feel that one is any one thing in particular! The miracle is that everyone keeps trying.

  Marsiglia, for one. Luìs Marsiglia claims he was obliged to leave Uruguay because the right-wing Catholic organisation Opus Dei had it in for him for his left-wing views. He was then convinced that the well-to-do families whose children go to the Liceo Maffei had it in for him because he was Jewish. Clearly at some point Marsiglia chose to assume the identity of the victim. This is his way to selfhood. As a Jew, society and history offered him the role. He worked at it, in the teeth of a world that sought to help him and kind neighbours who brought him salamis and Valpolicella when he hadn’t even been hurt. Unpersecuted, Marsiglia wouldn’t know who he was. In this, curiously, he is not unlike some Veronese who can’t wait to be outraged when the press treat them badly, or again like so many fans from all over the world who won’t feel satisfied until the referee shows his bias against them. One thing is certain: had Maniglia ever stepped out on to the green spaces of the Bentegodi, he would have been disappointed if there were no monkey grunts for him. Reading about his background, the endless lies he has told, it crosses my mind that perhaps he is no more Jewish than I am. This man, I tell myself, may actually be no more one of G
od’s chosen people than Queen Victoria was English, or Paul Ince African. Identity is an effort of will.

  Whatever the truth of his ethnic origins, the unhappy schoolteacher was unmasked as follows: the threatening leaflets that he claimed had been sent to him were carefully examined. The headline-size letters, cut from newspapers and magazines, were unstuck. By seeing what text or photograph was on the other side of each letter and then matching this presumably unique occurrence with hundreds of editions of various publications it was soon possible to establish where those letters had come from: i.e. Marsiglia’s favourite newspapers, many of them Spanish.

  Declaring that he was now the object of police persecution, Marsiglia confessed. At once all kinds of information began to appear in the press: the scratches on Marsiglia’s forearms and the bruising on his shins were entirely incompatible, the initial hospital report had stated, with the aggressions he described. Why weren’t we told this before? During his year at the Liceo Maffei, Marsiglia made a film with his students in which he played the part of a poor tramp who gets beaten up by a group of Veronese skinheads, dies, then returns to the town as an avenging angel and slaughters his assailants. Entered at a festival in Munich, the film won first prize in a competition for films against racism. Why hadn’t we been informed?

  ‘I lost my head,’ Marsiglia explains to a journalist who manages to catch up with him at the airport in Milan. Accused now of simulating a crime, he is nevertheless allowed to board a flight to Uruguay, an option rarely offered to the arrested football fan. Alone, abandoned by his supporters, he must feel more than ever his victim self. ‘I was overwhelmed’, he says, ‘by the terrible injustice done to me when they moved me away from the Maffei. Now I have to leave’, he goes on, ‘because I have received a number of death threats.’

  ‘Thank you, Marsiglia, for reminding us how proud we are to be Veronese!’

  ‘Our grateful thanks to all those who’ve poured shit on our city.’

  ‘Shock horror, Marsiglia leaves Verona because afraid of the roars of the Curva Sud.’

  ‘Marsiglia in the stocks in Piazza Bra. With his pants down.’

  Such are the voices on The Wall. Still, the question that none of the fans, nor anyone in the press for that matter, is asking is: how could such an incompetent attempt to fake an assault have been allowed to generate a national scandal for more than a month? It’s true the man played to accepted stereotypes: the victim Jew, the racist Veronese. Past knowledge generates prejudice, puts the mind to sleep. When Verona play Lazio, for example, anyone who knows anything about football can be excused for presuming not only that Lazio will win but also that they will play the better football throughout and deserve to win. They are after all one of the most expensive teams in the world. You would have to come from outer space, or the USA perhaps, to imagine anything different.

  All the same, however strong the premises, however persuasive the prevailing myths, is there really any excuse for not opening one’s eyes? How could the famously intelligent magistrate Papalia ignore the obvious about Luis Marsiglia for so long? More pertinent to this book, though, is the question: how could the referee not see that Lazio’s striker Claudio Lopez deliberately dived in the box just a few minutes from time? How could he give the man a penalty, when it would have been evident to anyone not blinded by prejudice that Verona were playing the better football and the Roman team so desperate that their strikers were constantly diving to the ground like infidels in prayer?

  But let’s start at the beginning. The scene was set, the packed curva, the swaying banners, the shower of confetti as the players came out. Mihajlovic stepped on to the pitch to rousing cheers from the hardcore of the curva. True to form, the brigate have decided to applaud his racism. At the same time, everybody’s hoping that the Serb will be nervous after all the negative attention he’s been getting in the press. With any luck, he will make mistakes.

  And so he does. Lazio start brilliantly, as an all-star team should. What is stardom but an a priori acknowledgment of superiority? Lazio are the best that globalisation with all its mad mixing has to offer. Second minute: the Argentinian Crespo dribbles past his man and hits inches wide of the post. Third minute: our big Dane Martin Laursen just manages to steal the ball from the naturalised Spaniard Lopez as he is about to shoot at an open goal. Fifth minute: the Czech Nedved runs past a defender and crosses beautifully to the Argentinian Simeone whose header brings an unexpected reflex save from the aging Ferron, a man who spent most of his professional life in the small provincial team of Atalanta a few miles down the road in Bergamo.

  The first few minutes, then, are a vindication of the notion that what you get is what you pay for, even when it comes to football players. Then at last our young Gilardino breaks through, he’s headed for goal, and is at once savaged from behind by Mihajlovic. His legs are swept away. It is a dangerous and violent foul in a last-man situation. The referee doesn’t even show the Serb a yellow card. He could perfectly legitimately have sent him off. From that moment on, the curva changes tack. Every time Mihajlovic touches the ball he gets the monkey grunt treatment, loud, clear and remorseless. Oo-oo-oo!

  The following morning La Gazzetta dello Sport observes: ‘Without the shadow of a black on the field, the Brigate Gialloblù begin to taunt a gypsy.’ But the only prejudice this comment reveals is that of the journalist. He has misunderstood the kind of racism that haunts the terraces of the Bentegodi. He is making the same mistake as his colleagues who believed that the white Marsiglia was beaten up because Jewish. For if football is that place where globalisation and local dreams confront each other, the one on the pitch, the other on the terraces, then the dividing line, at least for the brigate, is colour. The whole white world, Mihajlovic included, is local, is on our side. At least potentially. A Dane, a Serb, a pale-skinned Brazilian are all permitted to further the antique cause of the Scaligeri, to wear the emblem of the ladder and the city’s ancient colours. Likewise they could shout from the curva, as I do, if they wished. An Englishman is welcome. For years I came with a Greek friend. He too was white and welcome. But the black who sits slumped over the table in a suburban bar, who shivers or sweats outside the supermarket selling contraband cigarettes, whose children go to school with my children, this man is beyond the pale. Only the black is not permitted to dress in yellow and blue.

  So Mihajlovic was taunted throughout the game, not because he was a gypsy, but because he was behaving badly. Lopez got the same treatment when he split Mutu’s lip with an elbow. The referee gave the foul, but again, inexplicably, no yellow card. Why not? These players are behaving badly because the referee is letting them.

  But, damn it, the man in black is getting nervous. He can’t give the champions yellow cards. For Lazio are suddenly wobbling. What is going on? Verona are attacking. They look good. As the ball curls over from a corner, Simeone places both hands on Martin Laursen’s back as he prepares to receive the ball and shoves him to the ground. It’s not one of those situations where two men go up for the ball together and you can’t really understand what’s happened but shout penalty anyway. No, it was the most evident and calculated thing in the world. The video bears me out. Tall Laursen lowers his blond head, leans forward a little. He has given his man the slip. He only has to nod the ball into the net, and instead he suddenly plunges forward on his hands and knees, Simeone is already protesting his innocence behind. The whole curva rises to its feet. Penalty! The referee waves his arm. Play on.

  The Italian word for penalty is ‘rigore’, which is to say, ‘rigour’, ‘severity’, ‘harshness’. Sometimes a TV commentator will say, ‘My hypothesis is that in that encounter there were indeed, technically speaking, grounds for the ultimate sanction.’ Which is to say: if the rule were applied severely (any rule applied in Italy is applied severely) that should have been a rigore. But the referee today, a certain Signor Trentalange, is not going to apply the rules with the champions of Italy. He no more gives a penalty against them than he wil
l show a yellow card to Mihajlovic when once again he brings Gilardino down from behind. A few moments later our midfielder Italiano tackles a Lazio player from behind and is at once shown a yellow card. The time has come to say something about referees.

  Who would ever do the job? is the first question. The player plays to display his talents, to achieve, to win, to be admired by women, to make money, and then because he loves playing, or at least he used to when he was a kid. The pitch, the stadium, the TV screen, they have become the chosen arena in which he measures himself against the world, and through which he establishes his particular identity: striker or defender, constant or capricious, dynamo or sylph, team player or individual, ice-cool or eternally irascible. Every sport offers its archetypes and every player wants to embody one of them, or some novel combination. ‘I want to be the new Hagi,’ Mutu says in an interview immediately before the Lazio game. The older Romanian star, sly and dangerous as ever, was present at the young man’s wedding. Our tiny Argentinian midfielder, Camoranesi, bought this summer from some team no one’s heard of in Mexico, denies any similarity with Maradona, but admits that he consciously models himself on his idol Romario. Fulfilling the fans’ dreams, the player seeks to become an idol himself, he dreams of seeing himself reflected in ten thousand pairs of dreaming eyes, arms raised to the ecstatic curva. Gol! At that moment, he exists more fully than the ordinary human being, his life vibrates with intensity. In this thirst for adoration, the player, I think, is not unlike the artist. Megalomania is an easy thing to understand.