A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  But who would be a referee? Above all, who would be a referee in Italy, a country that admires flare more than fairness, that has always put style before rectitude, or conveniently confused the two, a country where there is absolutely no stigma attached to a profitable breaking of the rules, whether it be the offside trap or the VAT return?

  I can only sketch a hypothesis. Wherever there is a vocation for anarchy, there are inevitably those who yearn for stability, who will support any display of authority, if only perhaps out of a spirit of contrariness. Commenting on the fragmentation of Italian politics, an editorial in Corriere della Sera says: ‘Imagine we travel the length and breadth of this country and find a hundred people all in agreement over the same issue. We bring them together; within two hours I guarantee that we will have a hundred separate opinions. And then there will be one person yearning to force all the others to agree.’ The referee. Perhaps he is genuinely weary of division. Or perhaps he is just a spoilsport. Certainly to deny ten thousand shrieking fans the most deserved of penalties must be a great pleasure for the person the Italians describe as a ‘guastafeste’ – one who ruins parties. When our other midfield player, Mazzola, throws the ball away, the referee who has let pass a dozen brutal fouls immediately presents him with a yellow card for wasting time. That will show everybody who’s boss.

  The only doubt that remains is whether the authority the referee imposes is that of the rules of Association Football, or that of the status quo, the powerful teams who, with much bickering, control Italy’s football league? ‘The reason Roma are doing well’, my small thickly bespectacled man shrieks on Monday night’s football programme ‘is that they now have a few saints in paradise, don’t they?’ By which he means, of course, that they now have powerful supporters in the Federation, people who can influence the refereeing. Knowing which saint to pray to was ever more important than the ultimate right or wrong of what one was requesting. And it’s not a question here of anyone taking back-handers for this or that decision. The truth is that a referee feels genuine respect for the big and powerful team. They have spent a lot of money on the world’s best players. They can influence his career track. How is he to behave if they start losing to a bunch of unsavoury provincial racist also-rans? On the other hand twenty thousand people just saw that foul.

  A good referee must have an appetite for such dilemmas. Like many spoilsports, he is also a masochist. His pleasure will come when he rides a fine line, walks a tightrope with success. One favourite solution is to blow for all the fouls, but give the yellow cards mainly one way, since such decisions are rarely examined on late-night highlights. A player with a yellow card is a player in a strait-jacket. He risks going off. But above all, the referee must be able to imagine himself fair, no, to know he is being fair, when in fact he is being patently unfair. If he achieves that, if he can defend his decisions with a clear conscience against all the evidence, he will win the recognition that rightly goes to those who do a miserable job for society: the shit-shovellers, the grave-diggers, the executioners …

  Was this, then, the game when it occurred to me that Italy should bring in foreign referees for Serie A games, men with other cultural backgrounds and mental constructs? I was proud of the idea and even thought of writing to some authority somewhere, until I discovered that the experiment had already been made in 1957. Presumably it was so successful that they had to stop it. Or perhaps the foreign referees simply adapted to the environment. Another corrective to the evident bias of refereeing was tried in 1984–85 when the referees for each game were selected entirely at random. That year Verona won the championship and again the experiment was terminated, or at least ‘corrected’. Now the Federation draws up a short list of suitable referees for each game, then draws from that list by lot. The football magazine entitled, wait for it, Rigore, is frequently able to ‘predict’ which name will come out of the urn.

  In any event, nil–nil still at half-time with the core of the curva inventing a little song:

  Ma quanto insegna ben, il Professor Marsiglia,

  Ma quanto prega ben, il Professor Marsiglia.

  How well he teaches, how well he prays, Professor Marsiglia! When the fans come to the word prays they all put their hands together and bow their heads a moment. Giggling. Marsiglia, it seems, prayed to the wrong saints. Nil–nil is always a good result with Lazio.

  Then only seven minutes after half-time, someone scores. Alas for Signor Trentalange, it was the wrong team. Mutu dribbled the ball down to Lazio’s touch-line, hit a low cross in the middle which caught a defender on the ankle and went in. Unbelievable. And the fantastic thing about a goal like this is that there is really no way a referee can disallow it. There can be no offside because a single player has taken the ball from midfield to touch-line, then passed it backwards. What’s more, there can be no foul because there was simply no other Verona player near the ball when the defender put it past his keeper. A referee can be forgiven then for awarding a goal like this. But now he has his work cut out.

  One can imagine his anxiety growing. The Curva Sud are dreaming of a quite unexpected victory. The applause is deafening. Lazio attack in wave after classy wave, but without breaking through. Finally Lopez beats the goalkeeper with an angled shot. Ferron gets a glove to the ball, but only enough to slow it down. The crowd waits hushed as the ball trickles towards the net. It has about three yards to go. It is bouncing along. This is it, the equaliser. The referee is raising his whistle in eager anticipation. But he has reckoned without the young Massimo Oddo. This promising young defender, after a sprint of some twenty metres, hurls himself on his back across the muddy six-yard box, hooks an improbable foot round the ball and sweeps it away at the very last second. The referee looks at the linesman. Did it go in? The man hasn’t raised his flag.

  Ten minutes later Trentalange is again impotent when Verona score their second. Mutu suddenly has the ball just outside the box. Again he dribbles round his man and this time shoots cleanly into the goal. How can this be disallowed? It’s infuriating. Everybody is going mad. Concentrating, the referee contrives to give Lazio a series of fouls around the edge of the area. Some of these are no doubt real and serious fouls. Apolloni and Laursen, the two central defenders, are nervous and under pressure. They are as ready to foul as any defender. But there’s a lot of pushing and falling going on, a lot of pantomime. Appetising place-kicks are lined up. Shot after shot goes over the bar. What’s wrong with these stars? Why can’t they put the ball in the net? That offensive racist grunting must be upsetting them, though none of them is black. Then a filthy foul from Mazzola provides Signor Trentalange with the excuse to send a Verona player off and make things a little easier. Still the stars make no progress. Time is running out. If only they could get one goal, surely Verona would lose their nerve. They would be blown away in a last-minute onslaught. It’s happened before.

  Suddenly Apolloni and Lopez are chasing a through ball into the box. Apolloni, like Ferron, is another aging and now inexpensive player whom Pastorello wisely brought into the team at a particularly gloomy moment last year. Lopez is the young and supremely expensive striker Lazio bought this summer. No sooner have the two men crossed the line into the area than the Spaniard falls over. With what relief the referee blows his whistle! Rigore! ‘Very generous,’ the Gazzetta will wryly remark the following morning. Perhaps the champions can still do it.

  Surprisingly it’s Mihajlovic who comes up to take the kick. Lazio have any number of penalty-takers, but it’s the big bad Serb who’s going to hit it. Why? Why expose himself like this? Does he want to show us that the barracking hasn’t bothered him? He’s shooting into the goal directly below the curva. The whistles and monkey grunts are deafening. All around me people are shrieking and shaking their fists. Strangely I’m calm. My son is yelling to my right. Pietro is yelling to my left. While all around leap to their feet, I keep my seat and simply will the guy to miss. Miss it, miss it, miss it! I can’t bear the idea that after being two�
�nil up we could blow it all in the last three or four minutes. Miss it, damn you! But this man is a specialist. He won’t miss it. He places the ball, looks up from beneath cropped hair, narrow eyes, high cheekbones, granite features. He knows he’s going to score. When has Mihajlovic ever missed a penalty? When has Ferron ever saved one? ‘Filthy racist pig!’ the boys in the curva are screaming. What a sense of humour! Mihajlovic runs up and sends the ball thundering against the post. Game over.

  ‘Afternoons like this’, is the first message to appear on The Wall an hour or so later, ‘repay all the shit we’ve eaten over the years. PS. Thanks to the butei who trampled all over me at two–nil.’

  The message is signed: enmancansadelcaval@trottaancaelmusso.it.

  Intheabsenceofahorse@evenamulewilltrot.it

  It’s touching to see this ancient peasant wisdom kept alive on the net and at the same time offering fair comment on the game. The Lazio racehorse wasn’t there. The Veronese mule trotted home. Or maybe I’m just in jubilant mood. I feel so good when they win.

  ‘Mont Blanc, Geneva and all the mountains around trembled to a single cry: HELLAS! Thanks to the guys with the mobiles who kept me informed and thanks Beppe. It still feels like a beautiful dream. Hellas, yellow-blue worldwide!’

  So it seems those mobile phones people insist on using despite all the crowd noise are not just for the odd friend stuck in a factory. This guy is from Switzerland. Someone writes from Hong Kong thanking the butei for the crucial call. There’s a message from Indonesia, one from Scotland, one from Germany. Xenophobic, the brigate spread out across the world.

  ‘Yellow-blue orgasm in the wastes of Northern Germany! Fuck, can it be true? Greetings to the Captain in Bussolengo, to Ardu and Rensu, to Carlin, Cini and the Radish! Verona cha cha cha!’

  The message is signed Mikele Briegel. The fans often sign themselves with the names of legendary heroes. Briegel was the German midfield dynamo in the year of the miracle: 1985.

  But will there ever be a message from Africa? Here’s a man from Turkey, with a Turkish name too, who claims he’s a Hellas fan. No one replies to him. What hope for the Ghanaians? Perhaps when we see the first black in the national team, when a black family put a photo of their dead on the obituary page in the Arena, when a black man steps on to the turf of the Bentegodi with a whistle in his hand, perhaps then the brigate will think of some other, less offensive circle to draw around themselves. Meantime, forgive them for enjoying a rare moment of glory.

  ‘Did you sleep last night, Paolo?’

  The Wall is deep blue, the type is a bold yellow.

  ‘Only after I stopped trembling,’ comes the reply.

  The following evening, in a bar in Milan, I was given as change a five-thousand lire note. Beside the handsome head of Vincenzo Bellini, not unlike Gilardino to look at, someone had scribbled: ‘Lazio Champions of Italy!’ Ludicrously – no doubt it was the coincidence of getting the thing just the day after the famous victory – I decided to keep this note as a talisman and have it always in my wallet at games to come.

  La Partita Della Fede

  The most wonderful thing was to kiss the Pope’s hand and hear the Holy Father say that he believes in sport as an instrument of peace and something that can bring all peoples together.

  Martin Laursen

  Bergamo in flames!

  Tex-for-Hellas

  LET’S SUPPOSE YOU have been ordered to imagine the most sickly and hypocritical misrepresentation of modern sport possible, the most absurd and sugary pretence of what is going on when people do battle on pitch and track. What do you go for?

  Vieira and Mihajlovic embrace after the game and, hand in hand, go to the Lazio fans to invite them to stop their monkey grunts. As the floodlights fade, the fans hold up their cigarette lighten like candles in the deepening shadows and start to sing, ‘Red and Yellow, Black and White, All are precious in His sight.’ Or some Italian alternative.

  Tame.

  OK then, OK, what about a packed stadium of a hundred thousand people to watch a charity game between two groups of paraplegics selected from every corner of the globe? The crowd are totally engrossed and urge on the brave handicapped sportsmen, or why not women, with strong and encouraging cries. At half-time they drink hot chocolate and chatter enthusiastically about improvements in artificial limb design and the capacity of the human spirit to overcome terrible hardships. At the end all participants (and possibly the crowd too) are given a medal irrespective of the final score.

  Actually, this is not bad. Immediately before the Lazio game, somebody phoned one of the public radio stations – I was fretting at a traffic light in my car – to complain about the inadequate coverage for the paraplegic games in Sydney. What was fascinating was to hear a panel of sports journalists casting about for face-saving excuses. Just as nobody called Marsiglia’s bluff, so none of these good people had the courage to point out the hard fact that the public wants their athletes to be physically beautiful, and their sportsmen to be as talented as ever a sportsman can be.

  Especially if he’s defending your goal …

  ‘Mongolo!’ the guy behind me screams when Ferron fails to come out for a cross. ‘O fenomeno! Go get your disabled pension!’ Two years ago it was our unhappy centre-forward, Alfredo Aglietti, who was given the treatment every time he touched the ball. ‘Handicappato! Paraplegico! Cerebroleso!’

  I turn round to see the source of this angry abuse. He’s a robust sort of bloke, dark fleshy face, deep eyes, always pulling closed his big black coat against the cold. Invariably pessimistic, often witty, he sits there expecting the worst with pursed lips. When we win he pretends mere amusement, but beneath it you can see he’s delighted as a child. His plump girlfriend sits beside him with the puffed-out oxygenated hair of an erstwhile dolly creature, and whenever you twist your head round to look, she raises her soft eyes in a pained expression, as if to say: ‘Oh I know, he really is incorrigible.’ On the extremely rare occasions when Aglietti did manage to score, I’d turn and say: ‘Well, what about that, Massimo?’ And he’d shake his head, trying to hide his pleasure. ‘Miracolo. Grace of God. Un fenomeno. O fenomeno!’ he stands up and yells. ‘Mongolo! Do your trick again!’

  I remember thinking once: if, in some fantasy-film scenario, Timmy Parks were to don his old boots again and get down there on the green of the Bentegodi to reinforce a faltering midfield – forgive me, but occasionally one does imagine these things – I would doubtless hear, raised above all the others, Massimo’s derisive voice shrieking. ‘O fenomeno. Mongolo! Handicappato! Get back in your fucking wheelchair!’ The truth is, almost all of us are andicappati when it comes to Serie A football. Massimo would be right to boo me off. I too only want to watch footballers who are infinitely better than myself. The paraplegics are welcome to sit beside me.

  So, the handicapped scenario is not bad. It’s wonderfully sick. But it lacks a sense of special occasion, a sense of awe. I’ve thought about this question quite a lot – what is the most outrageously awful politically correct sports scenario – and in the end I feel bound to accept that I personally could never have come up with something so superlatively false as the Pope’s Jubilee ‘Match of Faith’. Certain areas of invention, I suspect, are closed to me a priori; only a long tradition of religious orthodoxy and sleazy lip service makes some leaps of mendacity possible.

  Once again, after the Lazio game, il più bel campionato del mondo was to be stopped for a weekend. Once again the national team was to play. But this time the game was a ‘friendly’: Italy versus The Rest of the World, a team picked from among all the star foreigners playing in the bel paese. That is quite a squad to choose from. The occasion was to be a high point in the Catholic church’s Jubilee for the year 2000, a celebration which has seen great waves of pilgrims overwhelming the Holy City for imaginatively named events like, the Jubilee of the Young, the Jubilee of the Old, the Jubilee of the Politicians (for the first time I felt some sympathy for the odious Berlusconi when he chos
e not to attend the affair) and, just a couple of weeks ago, and rather quaintly, the Jubilee of the Pizzaioli, the pizza makers.

  The sportsmen’s Jubilee is to close the cycle in an orgasm of good intentions. Football needs to be made more human, we are told, more Christian! Why? In the week running up to the big event, the Pope has spoken out against doping. His timing is excellent, for at precisely the same moment a report has been published showing that throughout the eighties and early nineties, CONI, the Italian Olympic federation, which was entrusted with running doping tests in every area of the country’s sport, was actually giving work to a doctor who was seeking to develop undetectable drugs.

  The Pope has also surprised us all by speaking out against violence and intolerance in the stadium. However excited a crowd becomes, he says, fandom should never be offensive. ‘It’s me who feels offended, Dio boia,’ Massimo complains to me one day after a particularly wild outburst against Ferron, ‘you pay l’ira di dio [the anger of God] for your season ticket, and what do you have to watch? A mongolo! The truth is they have no respect for people who suffer for Hellas, people whose knees start to shake when they pass through the turnstiles.’

  Is Papa Wojtyla aware of this side of the problem? I suspect not. There he is high up in the Olympic Stadium in his bright green stole, leaning – a little heavily, truth to tell – on his golden crook, his golden mitre on his snowy head. The crowd rises to cheer. ‘What will you remember of this day?’ a journalist asks a fifteen-year-old girl. ‘The Pope’s beautiful smile,’ she sweetly replies.

  But where did they find all these fine people? It’s 29 October Courtesy of ‘those priests who can, now and for ever, command everything’, as Leopardi put it, the sun is shining after another week of heavy rain. God is good. The stadium is full of smiling faces, of happy families, men and women and children. These are not season-ticket holders, I tell myself, turning on the box. These are not the notorious Lazio racists, Roma’s knife experts.