A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Italiano is slim, Sicilian, of medium height. He’s not the dynamo Leo Colucci is, nor does he have the ability to dribble that Giuseppe Colucci has, but he’s good at the long ball and above all he has a fierce shot. This is one of his first full games after almost a year of injuries and operations, a year no doubt spent wondering whether he would ever make the first team again. Just three minutes after getting that yellow card, he collects the ball some way outside the box, looks up at the Inter players coming out a shade slowly after a Verona attack, sees his chance, hits the ball hard and low from twenty-five yards, scores. Again the Curva Sud erupts. Long starved of glory, at his first goal in Serie A, Italiano is drawn towards them. He raises his arms and rushes at the crowd like a moth to light. Fatally he leaves the field. Having shown Farinos a yellow card, the referee now ‘has to’ show one to Italiano. But Italiano already has a card. Second yellow card. Off. Verona two-one up, one man down. Turning point of the game. Half-time.

  What turbulent and wonderfully confused emotions! Elation, fear, anger. The following day’s press claims that the referee ran after Italiano, attempting to warn him. I don’t remember that. The player was only off the field perhaps twenty seconds. No doubt Rodomonti feels he acted in good faith. But there have been all kinds of ferocious behaviour on the Inter side that have gone quite unpunished, while Verona are now without their central midfielder, and the midfield was already weak with captain Leo Colucci out injured. The second half will be hell. All the more so because there’s another drama going on that no one on the terraces knows about.

  The players return. Inter have brought on the massive Christian Vieri, his debut after a long injury. He promptly elbows his defender, Apolloni, in the face. The referee sees it, sends Apolloni off to have the blood looked at, does not give a yellow card. Vieri then hits the bar from one of perhaps a score of crosses. Inter’s possession is endless, accompanied by some of the most deafening whistling I have ever heard. But for the moment Verona are hanging on. They even look organised. There are occasional rapid counter-attacks, to keep the Inter defence nervous. Twenty minutes from time, Recoba tries from twenty-five yards and Ferron makes a good save. ‘Incredibile!’ Massimo shrieks behind me. ‘Similaun man is still alive.’ Similaun man is the 5,000-year-old corpse found in the Alps on the Austrian border. ‘O fenomeno.’ Massimo stands up. ‘Similaun man, you’re doing fine!’ Ferron raises a hand. But not in salute. He seems to be in pain. The doctor comes on and escorts him off the pitch.

  No one can understand it. He didn’t seem to have taken a knock or fallen badly. Here we are, defending a two-one lead against Inter of all teams, teeth gritted, sweating blood on the field and in the stands, and all of a sudden our keeper is walking off. He’s not the world’s best keeper. But he is a keeper. ‘The mummy’s disintegrated.’ Massimo flops back in his seat. He looks worried. His girlfriend hugs herself to his arm.

  Tomorrow’s paper will tell us that Ferron had severe stomach pains before the game and vomited at half-time. Perotti was ready for the worst. And there’s something fantastic about this. Of course one knows that all kinds of things may be going on in each player’s life. Someone has just fallen in love. Someone has just been dropped by a childhood sweetheart. A cold, the clap, an argument with a friend, a sick parent. You expect this. But to think that a man the goalkeeper of all people – has been sent back on to the pitch after spending the interval retching is alarming. What’s our reserve keeper like? Does nobody trust him? ‘O Doardo,’ someone addresses the substitute later that evening on The Wall, ‘in thirty minutes you made me sweat the pains of hell.’ The mistake is revealing: in fact it was only fifteen minutes. But it seemed like eternity.

  Now I don’t want to be mean to this boy. The season is young, I’ve never seen him before, it was a hard moment to come on to the pitch, I hope I will be able to eat my words, but I do suspect that Domenico Doardo may be in the wrong job. Veronese by birth, he has come back to his home town after a season as reserve keeper at Genoa, in Serie B. ‘I’m tall, so high balls are my speciality,’ he told an interviewer on arrival on the fourteenth of July. No sooner is he between the posts on 5 November than he goes up for a high corner and misses it. In the wild scramble that follows the ball is somehow kept out of the net. No thanks to Doardo.

  The crowd are seized by an immense anxiety. Just as the handsome Frey always communicated confidence and security, even when he had let a goal in, now the equally handsome Doardo, truly a fine-looking young man with bright clean smile and shining teeth, radiates panic. He doesn’t want to be there. We can feel it. He doesn’t want the ball to come in his direction. But this is hard to arrange when there are only ten of you. The stadium is packed. The crowd are deafening. Inter are desperate. Doardo is terrified. We can feel him shaking. The communication is miraculously intense. ‘If he doesn’t shit himself,’ somebody is saying, ‘I think I will.’

  Eight minutes after Doardo comes on, a through ball gives the Turkish striker Hassan Sukhur a chance. He’s running into the area. He reaches the corner of the six-yard box with Laursen pounding behind him. Sukhur’s now in almost exactly the same position as Camoranesi was when he made that sweet pass to Bonazzoli an hour ago. Now is the moment that will decide everything. Too late to beat his man to the ball, too early to respond to the direction of the shot, Doardo gathers what nerve he has and rushes out knock-kneed. Sukhur mishits it. It goes through Doardo’s legs and trickles into the net.

  What a dangerous cocktail of injustice and bad luck! The hotheads are rushing to the side fences to shriek at the exulting Veronese Inter fans. The rest of us have our faces in our hands. Behind me I can hear. ‘O mongolo, O fenomeno. You’re not fit to drive the team bus.’ And there are still ten minutes to go. Inter want to win.

  I have often thought about the relation between competitive sports and aesthetics. You can become intensely engaged in the outcome of a play or opera; I still remember my adolescent horror when I realised that Cordelia was truly dead. Yet it is not like worrying about the result of a game. Visually the game offers aesthetic pleasures, and there is also the endless fascination of the interaction between personality and skill, the interlocking of the players within the team, their hostile confrontation without. All this is guaranteed to engross for at least ninety minutes. But when my own team is playing, the result becomes important, and tonight in particular the result could be bad, awful, and without any catharsis. Not that to lose is difficult, but to lose like this, with a man sent off for nothing, with their team constantly protected, with a sick goalkeeper and an incompetent reserve and a mishit ball that barely managed to roll into the net. Yes, I could actually leave this stadium, it occurs to me, feeling more appalled by Verona being beaten than by watching the representation of a young woman cut down in the prime of life. Or indeed any other narrative awfulness. Forget Silence of the Lambs, watch Hellas lose. And suddenly I’m telling myself: really it would be too too aesthetically awful if we lost now. It would be too ugly. It wouldn’t be right. For morality and aesthetics are twin sisters. Doardo goes up for another high cross and again fails to touch it. Again there’s a hopeless scrambling to get the thing away. Clearly this is not the moment for tackling philosophical conundrums.

  But, though it’s our goal under constant pressure, the last touch of irony (all at our expense) comes not from Doardo but from Frey. Three minutes from time, an exhausted Hellas launch a valiant counter-attack. Giuseppe Colucci dribbles into the area on the far left and sends a low cross to Mazzola arriving on the right. Suddenly, incredibly, we have a player absolutely free in front of Frey, perhaps four yards out. He takes the ball on the volley and hits a thundering shot. Upon which Frey reminds us what it is to have a serious goalkeeper. His body is quicksilver. The ball spins off for a corner. Unbelievable.

  ‘How can you spend fifty thousand to see something that you wish would be over as soon as possible!’ Such the comment of one of the guys sitting in front. He’s shaking his head. But it is at las
t over. Two–two. At least we didn’t lose. But we could have won! Or maybe it’s precisely because we didn’t win, and because that second half was such a nightmare, that we feel so close to the team as the final whistle blows. The players all come to toss their shirts into the crowd. In the car, I’m still trembling. ‘What do you think,’ one commentator is saying to the other as I turn the radio on. ‘Two points lost by Inter, I’d say.’ I turn it off. ‘Bastardi!’ Michele shouts. Though we get home late, I crack open a litre of beer and pour some for him and for perhaps fifteen minutes we both sit at the table shaking our heads, occasionally muttering ‘Bastardi.’

  ‘Applies the rules with Italiano,’ the Gazzetta tells us next morning. And adds: ‘Though the rules should be changed.’ The Arena says Italiano was infantile. Italiano says he was overcome by joy. He uses exactly the words Marsiglia used: ‘I lost my head.’ On The Wall, someone is furious:

  ‘It’s a sacred right of us fans to see the players celebrate with us beneath the curva when they score.’

  Sacred! I tend to agree.

  I Magnagati

  Camoranesi one of us.

  McDan

  I HAVE BEEN halted beneath a huge poster showing Silvio Berlusconi’s strange smile. This immensely powerful man, owner of a vast media empire and leader of the main opposition party, has something of the beaten dog about him. It’s an expression I have never figured out. The lips are lifted in a smile, but the eyes are pained, as though anticipating that you won’t trust him. I don’t. I always feel uneasy about posters of Berlusconi, though never so uneasy as when I realise we have a panicking keeper between the posts. Before this book is finished and more or less around the time that we will know whether Hellas Verona have escaped relegation or not, Berlusconi will probably become Italy’s next Prime Minister.

  We are being marched about two kilometres from station to stadium through Vicenza. There are about three thousand of us in a long snake, with the beautiful city centre to the left and the imposing sanctuary Monte Berico on the tall hill to the right. ‘Vicenza, Vicenza vaffanculo!’ we yell. Police in riot gear prevent anyone from breaking out on either side. Occasionally, as now, they order everybody to halt. In quotation marks beneath Berlusconi’s unhappy smile are the words: ‘Adozioni più facili. Ogni bambino ha diritto a una famiglia.’ (Easier adoptions. Every child has a right to a family.)

  Adoption is necessarily a major issue in a country that prizes local identity but has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. The population of Verona apparently remains stable at 280,000 only thanks to the virile contribution of its immigrant population. Meantime, and much to everybody’s relief, it has been announced that Italy has willingly adopted Mauro Camoranesi. Yes, Hellas’s young gaucho has been granted dual nationality because one of his grandfathers, it seems, hailed from the bel paese. This is important because only three extra-comunitari (citizens from outside the EC) can go on the field at the same time. Now the boy can be more easily sold on to one of the big teams who are full of extra-comunitari. Pastorello no doubt foresees a profit.

  Things have not gone so well for Lazio’s Argentinian Veron whose claim that his grandfather was Italian has been found to be based, like Marsiglia’s theology degree, on forged papers. The star player is under investigation for fraud while at the same time the police have declared that Mihajlovic is under investigation for inciting racial hatred. To complete the picture a Nigerian who plays for Reggiana (Reggio Emilia) has taken the Federcalcio, the footballing authorities, to court because when his team was relegated to Serie C he found himself without a job. No extra-comunitari are allowed to play in Serie C. The judge recognised that this state of affairs was contrary to the Italian Constitution. Immediately, the sports director of AC Milan, Galliani, demanded that the restriction to three extra-comunitari be removed from Serie A. Milan, it seems, could field a whole team of extra-comunitari. ‘Death to the alliance between blacks and big money!’ someone responds on The Wall. Blacks and big money! The more intense the mixing, the con-fusion, the more the heat given off and the greater the nostalgia for some simple local identity. But when did the long slide start? When did this infernal process begin? Who can say, but certainly the day that Hellas Verona made their first trip to Vicenza was an important turning point.

  Formed in 1903, Hellas was little more than a group of friends for the first few years. Who were they? Schoolboys at the Liceo classico Maffei, workplace of Luìs Marsiglia. The more I learn about the club the more the Maffei won’t go away. Unsure what to call themselves on their way to their first game, the boys accepted the suggestion of the Greek teacher: Hellas. The team would be their patria. One can only hope the man had his degree and his papers in order.

  All the same, the public weren’t interested at first. Matches were sporadic, interest fitful. Then in 1906 a game was arranged in the Arena, the Roman amphitheatre in the centre of town. The Gazzetta dello Sport, already a major publication, commented: ‘Most of the Veronese didn’t even know what football was about before this game: but the experiment carried out in front of three thousand people confirmed the impression already dominant in other countries: football will be the athletic game of the future.’

  Prophetic words. That was in February. Two months later Hellas were being invited to travel the forty long kilometres to close neighbours Vicenza for a small four-team tournament. They declined, complaining that the fifteen lira inscription fee was too high. Ninety-four years later, picking up my ticket for the game, I hear the guy in front of me complaining, ‘Is it possible these shitty cat-eaters want us to pay thirty-seven thousand lire to get into their miserable shitty stadium! It’s a scandal.’

  An old dialect saying runs:

  Venessiani gran signori

  Padovani gran dotori

  Vicentini magnagati

  Veronesi tuti mati.

  Venetians lords and earls

  Paduans learned scholars

  Vicentini gobble up cat

  Veronese are all quite mad.

  But in the end Hellas decided to pay and go, as today three thousand people have chosen to pay and come to Vicenza, though inexplicably Vicenza have made only 1,500 tickets available.

  In 1906 Verona lost two-one. They played a return match shortly afterwards in Verona and again lost two-one. At a similar tournament won by Vicenza in 1908, Hellas retired halfway through protesting exhaustion. Occasionally one still sees teams who might do well to exhume this option. It wasn’t until 1912 that Verona finally beat their oldest and nearest rivals. Reporting the crowd response, the local journalist was clearly witnessing for the first time a new way of expressing group-identity and antagonism.

  Hellas won! Nothing we could write to express our joy, if such a thing were possible; no declaration we could ever make as to the indisputable talent of each single player, none excluded, could be so eloquent as the powerful, almost savage yell of the crowd each time Hellas scored a point. The shouting slowly subsided to be replaced by a confused never repressed clamour rising and falling with the anxious and diligent inspection of every move on the field. Hellas won! A victory too long desired.

  In the 1960s the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran wrote: ‘The civilising passage from blows to insults was no doubt necessary, but the price was high. Words will never be enough. We will always be nostalgic for violence and blood.’

  It’s strange, it occurs to me, being escorted through the streets of Vicenza, as the boys yell insults at the blacks, at the Vicentini, at the police, as scuffles break out and a few stones are thrown and the crowd heaves this way and that confused by conflicting orders from various megaphones, strange that a Romanian of all people, a man from the country that bred Hagi and the adorable, impossible Mutu, would not have realised that football offers an ambiguous middle ground between words and blows.

  In his nineteenth-century Discourse on the Game of Florentine Football, Giovanni Maria de’ Bardi defined the sport thus: ‘Football is a public game of two groups of young men,
on foot and unarmed, who pleasingly compete to move a medium-sized inflated ball from one end of the piazza to the other, for the sake of honour.’

  ‘Unarmed’ is the crucial word here. That day in 1912 the Veronese crowd, unarmed, discovered a new way of expressing their antique rivalry with their neighbours. And for the first time they had the upper hand. For the first time they could take pleasure, unarmed, in their neighbours’ discomfort. They could taunt and gloat and be cruel. Football offers an arena for experiencing all the passions, positive and negative, and escaping unscathed. Hopefully. Perhaps five minutes after thinking these edifying thoughts, I was struck in the face by a whirling flagpole. Moments later the crowd broke around me and a policeman exploded into the empty space, truncheon raised above my head.

  You beat the neighbouring town at football and a collective dream is born: to impose yourself on all around, not in battle, where you couldn’t hope to prevail, not even commercially, where perhaps you couldn’t compete, but in this heraldic and athletic festival, for honour let’s say, which is an attractive word. In 1911 Verona joined the north-eastern region of the football league. Now they could beat Bologna and Venice as well.

  Yet the moment the dream is dreamed, the complications begin, the hard work, the contradictions. There are not enough good players in Verona to make Hellas great. Or if there is a good player, somebody invites him to go elsewhere, to Milan, Juventus, to Pro Vercelli. Today the best native-born Verona player, Damiano Tommasi, plays for Roma. So the team’s first manager immediately sent out scouts to ‘steal’ players from other provincial teams. In 1912 a Swiss boy stopped by at the club and claimed to be a good central defender. He had played for Young Boys, Zurich. So a foreigner was invited to bear the banner of Veronese honour. He could barely speak Italian, never mind dialect.

  In 1920 gunfire is heard during crowd violence in a game against another local side, Petrarca. Since football must hover at the brink of violence, but never fall into it, the game is suspended. In 1921 Verona is allowed into the Northern League, playing teams as far away as Turin and Genoa. In 1926 the league goes national and now Hellas can take on Rome and even Naples. Sitting opposite me in the train on the way to Vicenza, a wizened old man warns me of the dangers of away games down south. He has a small shrivelled face and an incongruous fuzz of Hendrix hair. ‘Those kids don’t fool around,’ he says in a dialect I can barely understand. ‘Our butei have their telefonini, the Neapolitans their guns.’