by Tim Parks
Wojtyla, decrepit with Parkinson’s, had been expected to watch just half of the game, but then insisted he must see the whole thing. This has pleased the journalists immensely. ‘He remembers fondly’, they enthuse, ‘when he used to kick around a ball as a kid.’ Papa Wojtyla then confesses that he has never watched a game before, a real game in a stadium. Seeing him helped to his seat, finding it difficult to hold his head up, I can’t help feeling that he’s left it a bit late.
It’s Sunday. My son returns from his morning game with the local village team, Juventina Poiano, furious with the referee who sent off one of his companions merely for complaining that he wasn’t offside. Can you believe it? He refuses to tell me by how many they lost. A rugby score. ‘Want to get angrier?’ I ask him. ‘Look who’s refereeing la partita della fede.’ It’s Signor Trentalange.
First there’s a race round the athletics track by a group of paraplegics on their specially designed racing wheelchairs. The commentator explains that the slow start is due to the inertia of the big wheels. Of course, if one thinks of all the background to such a race, it is indeed heartbreaking. And thus not the kind of sporting event you would normally pay to see. The athletes are politely applauded. Then the players come out on the field. And now the next surprise: Mihajlovic is there! For the Pope’s match of faith, hope and charity! ‘Siniso Mihajlovic is Russian Orthodox,’ the commentator tells us, and as the team lists scroll up, he runs through all the religions of the participants: Negrouz is Muslim, Gargo is Baptist, Baggio is Buddhist, Laursen is Lutheran, Mutu is Russian Orthodox …
Laursen! Mutu! ‘They’d better not get injured,’ Michele shouts, jumping off his seat, his features suddenly alive with concern. ‘If they get bloody injured just for a stupid friendly!’
‘And Nakata, the Japanese star, is an atheist,’ the commentator concludes.
‘Be pretty bad form if an atheist scores,’ the second commentator complains.
The Match of Faith begins.
Of course the unspoken subtext of the expression ‘friendly game’ is that other games are unfriendly. That is the long and the short of it. Even if you could never call them un-friendlies. ‘You have to be really angry to win,’ says Inter’s new trainer, Marco Tardelli. ‘Give me two grappas,’ says one of the brigate at the station bar shortly before we set off for one game, ‘it feeds my anger.’ The lady serving is a pleasantly overweight grandmother figure. ‘I don’t know why you want to feel angry, dear,’ she smiles. ‘I really don’t understand you young men.’
What I don’t understand is how the commentators can say the things they’re saying. ‘The Pope is the real champion in the stadium today.’ ‘The Pope is an athlete of God.’ ‘If only every Sunday were like this, this generosity on the field, this kindness, the players constantly giving each other their hands, the fans so well behaved.’
Do they mean it?
Trentalange, meanwhile, must be having a whale of a time; he doesn’t have to worry about who’s winning. The church is winning. ‘I use sport as a form of communication towards people who have problems,’ he tells a journalist before the game. His vocation for the sanctimonious is clearly a serious one. ‘This Pope is truly a saint,’ he adds, safely. And Trentalange himself is truly in the spotlight, he’s lapping it up, though it must be a trifle frustrating having nothing to do. I count exactly seventeen minutes before the first foul comes along.
In short, the game’s a great bore. The Pope can barely keep his head up. If this is football, he must be thinking, how on earth do people manage to get excited? The pictures of him, every time the ball goes off the pitch, and sometimes even while it is still in play, are becoming embarrassing. Has he fallen asleep? Is he dying? But the genius of the kind of mentality that invents these sick scenarios is its inability to be embarrassed, a resource that arises from the complete and unquestioning commitment to an agreed façade. ‘There’s a flash of interest,’ remarks one commentator eagerly, when a slight roll of Wojtyla’s grizzled head coincides with a kick upfield.
Michele and now Stefi too have come to sit beside me and determinedly we try to watch the thing through. It’s hard. Even Trentalange must be getting bored with it. The halves were supposed to be forty minutes long, but to the surprise of the players the referee blows his whistle after only thirty-five. Stefi says Laursen is terribly handsome, and Frey, the young French keeper, is fantastic. Will I let her download his photos off the web? I’d never thought of this, but girls perhaps have fewer problems with a friendly.
In the second half the substitutions are incessant. Since nothing is going on on the pitch, the commentator interviews the stars as they come off. Usually outrageously behaved on the pitch, football players tend to be the last word in conformity and caution off it. ‘The most intense and special emotion of my life,’ announces the young Hernan Crespo. I shake my head in wonder. Has this rich, young, handsome man never been to bed with a woman? Has he or has he not scored important goals and won trophies galore? What did he feel like when he heard that Lazio were offering 170 billion lire to buy him from Parma? Michele says, ‘I’ve experienced more intense emotions yelling at the cat.’
Gianfranco Zola, who has been long enough in England to feel a bit out of it, isn’t enthusiastic enough. Manfully, he tries to talk about the need to clean up sport. The interviewer isn’t satisfied. ‘How do you feel, Gianfranco, moved?’ ‘Yes, it is a special emotion,’ Zola begrudgingly admits. ‘From a deeply moved Gianfranco Zola, let’s get back to the game,’ says the commentator. He must have wondered for a moment whether the lad mightn’t be about to say something honest.
Then something real happens at last. Poor Del Piero misses an open goal. Alessandro Del Piero has become yesterday’s star. Accused of doping a couple of seasons ago, this once-brilliant striker has melted away since. Is it because they’ve had to go easy on the illegal substances? Who knows? Anyway, he just can’t do anything right. Above all, he can’t put the ball in the net. He gets in the right places, he has the ‘sfera’, as the Italians love to call it, at his talented feet, but he can’t put it in, damn it. Already hated all over Italy because he plays for the odious Juventus, he has now become the butt of his home crowd too. People can’t understand why he’s playing for them any more. Not a single soul knows why he’s playing for the national team. There are murmurings of sponsorship contracts.
Absolutely without charisma, Alex mumbles his excuses in endless interviews. Returning from the European Cup final which Italy lost to France, he is described as sitting alone on the plane, refusing to be comforted after missing yet another vital goal. Perhaps, it occurs to me, the Match of Faith has been named especially for him, for Alessandro Del Piero. Perhaps this game will be the turning point. There’s a clever move on the right. Alex is steaming up from the left. Then, here it comes, a great through ball, perfectly paced for him to run on to, and suddenly he’s all alone streaking into the box, nobody at his heels, just the keeper to beat. He hits the ball way over the bar. At once the few real fans in the crowd are on their feet whistling, outraged. ‘Mongolo!’ How can a guy they’ve paid to see miss a goal like that? It only lasts a moment, but it’s real and immediate. They’re furious, derisive. Del Piero no doubt is hurt. His cruel isolation is confirmed. Shortly afterwards, at the other end Adrian Mutu, brought on only a moment before, slips his defender and slots the ball coolly into the net. Goal! The Romanian is ecstatic. Gooooooooal! He starts the regulation cartwheels. Signor Trentalange is alarmed. Mutu again! Doesn’t that kid understand? He runs back, consults with a linesman. Offside, he decides.
‘Offside?’ Michele yells.
Offside.
‘Clearly nobody’s supposed to win this game,’ I tell my son. ‘Don’t you see, Mick, it wouldn’t be right for anyone to lose. Losing isn’t nice. Winning is like cruelty to animals. Everybody should get a medal. This the Partita della fede, the faith match. Faith and losing don’t go together, do they?’ But Mutu is bewildered. He knows he wasn’t offside. T
he TV, usually so avid to replay these things, chooses not to.
Mutu is upset. The commentator tries to explain this departure from script. He glosses: ‘Of course, it’s also right that each person should want to win a game, isn’t it?’ He asks help of his colleague, but the other man doesn’t reply. ‘It wouldn’t be loyal’, the commentator stutters on, you can sense he feels betrayed, ‘to play if you didn’t want to win. Your team-mates expect you to want to win, to put heart and soul into it. And so of course Mutu, who is Russian Orthodox, wants to win and when he thinks …’ The speaker hesitates. For a moment it seems he might be about to tackle the immense conundrum of competitive team sports, the intense and confused emotions they arouse, emotions that lead a man to punch an old friend in another team, or alternatively to make a generous pass in front of goal to some team-mate he despises, then actually embrace the hated man when he scores.
‘Yes, it’s right to want to win,’ the commentator repeats vaguely, ‘as it’s right to play fair.’ Again he hesitates. How perplexing it is! ‘The Pope must be enjoying these emotions,’ he decides. Somehow it’s as if old Wojtyla were our child for the day, a little boy we’ve brought along for his first game. My own impression is that the poor man fell asleep some time ago. O fenomeno, wake up!
Meanwhile poor Mutu is still protesting. He can’t get into the spirit of the thing. He’s sure it was a goal. ‘I love him!’ I shout. ‘I love that horrible kid. I’m so glad he plays for Verona. Go Mutu! Go!’ But almost at once this dangerous boy is substituted. I swear he’s only been on the pitch for five minutes. The following day, after all the obligatory rubbish about how moved he was to be playing before the Pope, the Romanian tells a journalist: ‘I wasn’t offside though. They should have allowed the goal. How marvellous it would have been. Then every time people thought of this day, they would have thought of me!’ That’s the spirit!
‘Butei, did you see?’ someone writes on The Wall. ‘Did you see El Pastor kissing Wojtyla’s hand! El Pastor with El Pap! We have saints in paradise!’
El Pastor, the shepherd, is Giambattista Pastorello, our supposedly niggardly president. ‘You can say what you like about his bow-tie, and his miserliness,’ someone else writes, ‘but in the end, I’d rather have a president with a head on his shoulders who knows about football and makes the right connections, than some hopeless freak with more money than sense. Perhaps the Virgin will give us a penalty in Bergamo.’
Alas no.
The next game was to be held on the following Wednesday, 1 November, the Day of the Dead and a public holiday. There is an ancient rivalry between Verona and Atalanta, the Bergamo team. Away games here have been the scene of serious crowd violence. I myself narrowly missed a shower of stones outside the stadium three years ago. But it was also in Bergamo, in the penultimate game of the season, that Verona finally made sure of winning the scudetto in 1985. So inevitably, just before this year’s game, The Wall is awash with nostalgia.
‘How I suffered in the barracks! I couldn’t go.’
‘I was there, I was fifteen.’
‘12 May 1985, I was there, eleven yean old, twelve the day after!!! Every time I see Elkjaer’s goal I cry like a baby and thank God (and papà) that I was there.’
‘I was serving this shitty country. In the army.’
Someone who signs himself ‘Can de la Scala’, greatest of the Scaligeri and protector of Dante, writes:
Tomorrow in Bergamo, the usual whirl of old emotions, I always remember that day, I was eighteen, the bus in Piazza San Zeno, heavy rain as we left, procession with orange staffs, and the Bergamaschi chased right back to the beginning of their curva. Then Elkjaer and … I’m crying. I thank God I was there. Can anybody ever understand what I feel?’
The answer is, yes.
Can de la Scala: I remember that day too. I too was eighteen. I do understand what you feel. I remember other great games. The opening game with Napoli, Maradona’s debut, we killed them, the time Elkjaer lost his boot but scored with his stockinged foot against Juve. MYTHICAL. And we were there! We didn’t just read about it. It’s different. FORZA HELLAS. Everybody to Bergamo tomorrow. Let’s kill them.
Forza nothing … Our documents checked and names studiously written down by the police, fifteen hundred of us squeezed into a tiny segment of a decrepit stadium to watch through grimy netting as Verona were thrashed three–nil. I will say nothing about this game. I don’t want to remember it. If we have saints in paradise then they were busy elsewhere that afternoon. My son had come along with me, and he immediately understood how aberrant his optimism had been after the Lazio victory. ‘I should never have hoped,’ he said. ‘I should have stayed at home.’ He stood in bitter silence.
Throughout the match a drunken adolescent leaned against me, shouting out of tune and complaining about the referee’s every decision. But the truth was there was nothing to complain about, and the crowd knew it. Why would the referee prefer one miserable provincial team to another? He was perfectly fair. We couldn’t even shout Vaffanculo Pastorello, because Atlanta’s team actually cost less than ours. There were even four or five home-grown kids in the group. They were fresh up from Serie B. They killed us. Still, we did have that hour after the match …
When your team lose on television, you are left in a state of extreme anxiety and disappointment. There is no sense of occasion to offer catharsis. You are on your own with no idea how to move back from these crushed hopes into a normal state of mind. I can imagine people doing serious damage to themselves and the furniture in such situations. I myself have been known to kick things, though never people or animals. At the stadium, on the other hand, there is the comfort of being part of the crowd, and after the away game there is the long forced wait in the alien stadium while the local thugs are dispersed to allow for your safe departure. This occasion was the perfect example of how disappointment can be turned into self-mockery and finally fun; how you can lose the game but still go home emotionally uplifted.
The light was almost gone. Behind the shabby stands rose a slender campanile, then the Alps. The terraces where we stood were steep so that at the bottom of the squalid corner segment they give to visiting supporters, a sort of theatre pit was formed. And as, in the stadium all around, the few remaining Atalanta fans were lighting bonfires of match programmes, while a dozen policemen and a few dogs kept watch from the pitch and took endless photographs in case of trouble, a chubby man – I hadn’t seen him down in Bari – climbed on a barrier and, held there by two others who gripped his ankles – one of them was Cain – led a singing session with a megaphone.
It was supremely good-humoured and in the worst possible taste. A carnival mockery hung in the air. Perhaps because today was the Day of the Dead, an important day in Italy, a cross was made out of plastic flagpoles and the crowd sang the hymn ‘Risorgeremo’, we shall rise again. Meaning Hellas of course. Then they taunted a fat policewoman, without pity. I was surprised to see the girls and women among the fans joining in with this. Not only joining in, relishing. ‘Let’s see your fat tits!’ they screamed at her. Fondo, who was prancing about at the front, exposed his torso to the icy air and tried to force his flesh into breasts.
The poor woman disappeared and it was back to singing. Everybody knew all the songs, like a congregation who have been together since birth. Perhaps on Sunday these same people will be in the congregation. Now there was certainly a religious fervour in their voices, but with a demonic inversion of sentiments. It was as if the Partita della fede had to be exorcised as soon as possible, together with our defeat. We bated the team of men cleaning the stadium, We bated the few Atalanta fans sitting by their rubbish fires, relishing their victory. We bated the police dogs till the poor animals had to be taken away. Then came the masterpiece of offence …
A few days before the game a helicopter of the carabinieri had crashed in the sea killing all those on board. The megaphone now invited us to sing the Fascist song:
Gira gira l’elica, ro
mba il motore,
Questa è la bella vita la bella vita dell’ aviator.
Turn propeller turn, out roars the motor,
This is the good life, the good life of the aviator.
With its jolly tune, the song celebrates the progress of a modern mechanised army. My father-in-law used to whistle it as he shaved. But the fans sang:
Gira gira l’elica, romba il motor,
L’elicottero dell’arma è tornato al creator.
The policemen copter’s gone back to its maker.
How can one laugh at such bad taste? Ten men had died. Everyone laughed. I even saw a carabiniere smile. It was the Day of the Dead and the Halloween twilight was strangely intense.
Later, as the wilder boys pushed their faces through the small open windows of the Zanzibar’s bus to shout the insults and blasphemies into the streets, the good people of Bergamo, housewives and grandmothers alike, waved to us laughing, as if to old friends, their beaten neighbours. I remember in particular one tiny old man hooking his walking stick over one arm to make a triumphantly rude gesture, showing, despite at least eighty years, a vitality Wojtyla will never know again. Perhaps they’re all doing each other good, I thought.
‘Enough crap’ is the first message to appear on The Wall after the game: ‘Honour to Atalanta, a great team. No bitterness when they were so obviously better than us.’
The thrill of the generous gesture, the hand extended to the better man, this too is part of the football fan’s repertoire.
Aborti
I didn’t choose to support Hellas. They attached the team to me at birth with my identity bracelet.
Pam@Yellow-blue-from-birth
ON SUNDAY 5 November a traffic policeman in Mantua saw the Madonna and prophesied a further and more public apparition for 8 December, the Immaculate Conception, two days before our away tie in Reggio Calabria. Putting the story among the main headlines of the national radio news, the journalists showed no surprise that the Virgin should thus respect the arbitrary Church calendar. As if Jesus had been born on 25 December after a three-week pregnancy. Will Hellas be in the relegation zone, I wonder, come the Annunciation? Will we be condemned to Serie B before Epiphany? The football calendar is tough for us now: Inter at home, Vicenza (arch rivals) away, Rome (league leaders) at home, Juve (political power incarnate) away. How many points can we hope for from that?
