A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  So quite often what the presidente may feel is good PR, or just generosity, the coach may interpret as a dangerous intrusion into the group psychology of the team. I had asked if I could interview a couple of players; I was told I could, but the coach would have to be consulted first. Officially, I was given the go-ahead, but then the players seemed unavailable. I was told I could travel to the game with Reggina, but at the last moment this offer was cancelled. There were logistical problems. Like anyone in Italy who is thwarted, I immediately suspected, wrongly as it turned out, that there was a plot against me.

  Then four days before the game in Lecce, first of the New Year, I found myself being invited once again to Hellas headquarters. ‘We need to get to know you, Signor Parks.’ We who? ‘I’ll come over at once.’

  I was shown into the office of the acting managing director, Luigi Agnolin. And here one has to explain a peculiarity of Verona football club. Until the end of last season, Pastorello dealt directly with his employees, the press, the fan clubs. He was the undisputed boss. But despite the fact that in just two years of ownership he had taken the club back into Serie A and then up to ninth position, the curva hated him. They hated his smart gentleman’s jackets, his superior air, the fact that he was from Vicenza, the fact, above all, that he was planning to make a living out of his job. Pastorello is not pouring money into the club from the car industry, from petrol refineries, from a media empire. He does not have a treasure chest in his pocket. On the contrary, he plans to get his own and everybody else’s salaries out of the club’s success. ‘Pastorello mercenario di merda!’ was the fans’ response. When it became clear, towards the end of last season, that he was in direct conflict with the beloved coach, Cesare Prandelli, then the opposition became hysterical, the chants of Pastorello vaffanculo interminable.

  Verona ended the season with the right to play off for a place in the UEFA cup. But Pastorello withdrew and put the club up for sale. He wanted out. His considerable vanity couldn’t bear these public insults. When no one would offer the cash he was asking, he decided to hang on, but to detach himself from the running of the show in a cocoon of wounded pride. He would own it, make money out of it, but have nothing to do with it. Hence he appointed Luigi Agnolin as his acting managing director.

  ‘Professor Agnolin,’ announces the company secretary, ‘this is Mr Tim Parks.’

  This man (professor?) is handsome, solid, thickly bearded, clear-eyed, cautious, in his early fifties I would guess. His voice has a pleasant gravelly sound to it. Very noticeably, he thinks before he speaks. Yes, about my coming to Lecce. ‘Hmm. Yes. Well, we are a little worried, to be frank, about what your plans are.’ He mentions an American writer who has written a book about a season with the Serie B team Castel di Sangro. ‘He lived free with them, all expenses paid for the whole season, then filled his book with unpleasant details about their private lives.’

  What can I say in reply? My own feeling is that in a world that considers everything but the impeccable scandalous, then thirsts for news from the gutter, I personally would never invite a writer to anything I was involved in. No biographies please. The very raison d’être of the contemporary writer is to expose, to give the impression that whatever is examined is outrageous and must change at once. I said, ‘All I really want, Professor Agnolin, is just this one chance to meet the team on one away game. Nothing else.’

  Such was the mixture of urgency and infantile pleading in my voice that Agnolin was disarmed. He handed me a typed schedule. Venezia, Roma, Brindisi, Lecce. ‘But there are certain rules,’ the professor warned me sternly. ‘Rules to which we cannot make exceptions. Most importantly, no outsiders can ever, ever travel in the team bus. You will have to get to Venice airport on your own.’

  I was still thanking him when a head was poked round the door. ‘Professor Agnolin, the president is here.’ What is he professor of, I wondered? Agnolin stood up and apologised that he would have to cut our meeting short. ‘The bishop is arriving to bless the club,’ he explained. ‘Let’s hope he blesses the boys well,’ I said. ‘We need the points.’ ‘Oh he blessed the players long ago,’ Agnolin replied. It’s the building he’s blessing now.’ As if to say: how could you imagine that we would leave the players unblessed so many matches into the season?

  Then going out I noticed the crucifix over the corporate door. Common as a door-handle or thermostat, crucifixes rarely catch my attention these days, whereas when I first arrived in Italy I felt overwhelmed by them. The miracle of Catholic Veneto, I told myself driving home – there was still an extravagant nativity scene in a side-street by the stadium – is its ability to combine a genuine desire to be upright and morally correct with the awareness that the world is an evil place and that all kinds of compromises are necessary if one is to keep one’s company afloat, one’s wife in furs and one’s team in Serie A. Il calcio a Verona, for example, is full of stories of games bought and sold, of corrupt officials, convenient nil–nil draws, bent referees, betting scandals. But Agnolin doesn’t want me to suppose that any of this is presently going on at Hellas. He doesn’t want an investigative journalist travelling with the team. Then I remember that of course for most of his career Luigi Agnolin had been a referee, an international referee. And who more than a referee knows that what has happened is what you decide has happened when you blow your whistle? When the referee doesn’t blow his whistle, nothing has happened at all, however many pages some tin-pot journalist may choose to write.

  The air was cold in Venice, the wind icy. My blue-and-yellow scarf and woolly, official-merchandising Hellas hat were appropriate, if unfashionable. Shivering, I kept them on in the departures lounge. I was an hour early. I took out the book I’d brought along. Acting on the principle that when one is thinking intensely about a subject it is sometimes better to read something altogether different, I was trying to get through Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher, which tells of a pianist destroyed by his all-consuming desire to be Glenn Gould. But I couldn’t concentrate. I kept looking up, anxious to see the players. ‘Wertheimer always wanted to be someone else,’ Bernhard’s narrator announces. I put the book down. Was my nervous excitement about meeting the team, I wondered, to do with my own desire, at least as a child, to be someone else? How I envied the better football players! Oppressed by choir practices and Sunday services and the need to be for ever on one’s best behaviour, I played football obsessively and was widely feared as one of the most aggressive of players. ‘The animal’, I remember being called. On the first occasion that a Cambridge college game was refereed by a woman I was sent off for reacting to a foul with a wild kick and a torrent of filthy language. Football, for fan as well as amateur player, combines the need to vent one’s anger with the vicarious dream of being someone else. ‘Giochiamo con voi!’ When Bonazzoli puts the ball in the net, so do I.

  And suddenly there he is, Italy’s under-twenty-one centre-forward: a tall hulking boy with straggly long hair, dressed in a dark blue tracksuit. They are all dressed in dark blue tracksuits. Hellas Verona! They have the magic badge with the ladder of the Scaligeri. And all their big blue bags have it too, the yellow-blue badge and the player’s name: Italiano, Mazzola, Salvetti. Hardly talking to each other, apparently preoccupied, even abstracted, they look quite unlike your normal group of young men on a trip. They are terribly sober. That is my first impression. Like so many Mormons. Having piled their bags up by the check-in, they spread out to empty seats and begin to fiddle with their telefonini. Where is Laursen, I ask myself. Where is Mutu?

  Eager to introduce myself, I accosted Attilio Perotti as he came out of the lavatory. He didn’t understand who I was. Fair enough. Then young Massimiliano, Guette’s assistant, took me to meet the assistant coach, Agostino Speggiorin. We were standing by the bar. Agnolin, Professor Agnolin that is, appeared in the background chatting to a couple of pretty air hostesses. He seemed charming and avuncular. I glimpsed Rino Foschi, the sports director. Massimiliano was saying how professional the player
s were, how seriously they took their commitments. Tall, a little austere, a little defensive, Speggiorin hesitantly agreed: Italian players were indeed better-behaved and regimented than those of other nations. Is it because I’m English that they’re saying this?

  Then on the plane I found I was sitting next to Perotti. Yes, the coach himself. My chance had come. I was at the heart of it. They had put me next to Perotti. I had an hour to talk to the coach, to understand the workings of top-class football.

  Attilio Perotti is a small, stocky man, with straining eyes behind metal-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a blazer with the club badge. I quickly took my place beside him. But no sooner had we settled than he pulled out a book. He folded back the hard coven and ran his finger down the crease of page one. Then he lowered his head. It was a deliberate statement of withdrawal. Shortly after take-off, I asked him, ‘What is it you’re reading?’ Reluctantly, he showed me the cover. Ken Follett: Il codice zero. ‘I need the diversion,’ the coach explained and returned determinedly to his reading. Everything in his manner suggested he would rather I hadn’t been invited.

  On my other side was Flavio Fiorini, a tall handsome white-haired fellow, in his late fifties or early sixties, smartly moustached, vain and cheerful. His job was accompagnatore. He carries everybody’s tickets and makes sure they are all present and correct. Once a footballer himself, now a rep for various industrial products, he does the job for free, he says, just to be in touch with football still. ‘Oh only Serie B and C,’ he explains. ‘Nothing big.’ He played for Reggina during the famous revolt of 1971. ‘You know, when the city rebelled against the decision to move the regional capital to Catanzaro.’ I didn’t know. I felt I should.

  After about half an hour, I turn to my right. ‘Can you really see what’s going on on the field from the bench?’ I demand of Perotti point-blank. It’s an old curiosity of mine. ‘I mean, you’re level with the pitch, can you see what’s going on at the other side of the field? Can you get a sense of the geometry of it?’

  Perotti blinks. He looks up. ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘You can’t?’

  ‘No.’ He reflects. ‘Actually, a little while back, watching a game, not Verona, from the stands, I was thinking just that, how much better I could see.’

  I’m concerned. ‘So how on earth do you give advice, how do you decide the substitutions?’

  ‘Well, you do your best. You get a sense of a situation that is static, or not in your favour, so you introduce a different player, someone with different characteristics, to see if that will shift things. It’s always a gamble. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes things get worse.’

  This isn’t reassuring.

  ‘Why don’t you, maybe, have someone in the stands, someone whose judgment you respect, connected by radio, so you can consult on how it looks from somewhere else.’

  ‘Nobody seems to do that,’ Perotti says vaguely, and he goes back to his book. I ask, ‘So what’s Ken on about this time?’ That cheers him up. He begins to describe Follett’s complicated plot. There’s a missile. A Londoner wakes up in a public toilet in Moscow without knowing how he got there. There’s a girl. I’m amazed to see he’s already read thirty pages.

  At Fiumicino, following the Connecting Flights sign, I find myself side by side with Rino Foschi. Here is a completely different man, bull-headed, Roman, in heavy dark overcoat, complexion scraped pale, hair unkempt and lank, the gait aggressive.

  ‘That was just a joke,’ he begins to explain.

  A few minutes before, as we stood crammed in the aisle of the plane waiting to get off, he had been proposing some complicated scam whereby a player, I can’t remember which, bought a car from him at one price and sold it back to him after a year at an even higher price. How this would work I have no idea.

  ‘You have to joke a lot to create a sense of camaraderie. You know. The group is all-important. I try to be with the team all the time. It’s all just fun.’

  I’m nodding my head in agreement. He begins to explain that in fact the hardest work is done in the pre-season retreat when the team train together for a couple of weeks up in the mountains above the Valpolicella.

  ‘It’s hard living together all the time, getting to know each other. Give and take. Becoming a team. Perhaps that’s the most important part of the year. Nice group of boys, don’t you think? Well behaved. The retreat is very important.’

  He speaks intensely. He has put his arm round my shoulder in the friendly way older Italians do. I like that. He does the same with the players.

  ‘Duro, durissimo,’ he insists. Very hard.

  I point out that when they were on their retreat, they still hadn’t bought their two star strikers, Gilardino and Bonazzoli. Or the keeper, Ferron.

  He shakes his head. ‘A team the size of Verona, you know, we can’t usually clinch a deal till the day the football market closes right as the season starts. Always the last minute. Question of portofolio.’ He taps his pocket. ‘Very hard for us to find the right people at the right price, drive the bargain, bring them home. You’ll see now, the market opens again as of Monday, closes the 31st of January. Let’s hope we can bring a couple of reinforcements into the team. But it’ll be the very last-minute. It’s hard.’

  ‘But exciting.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Durissimo.’

  ‘I mean, exciting because it’s hard. You wouldn’t want a job that was easy.’

  He looks at me as if I hadn’t understood. We’re walking through the airport. His eyes are intense and slightly glassy.

  ‘Durissimo!’ he repeats. His lips are large and pale, loose and mobile. ‘The point is, we must think of making money. We have to get the kind of player we can sell on at the end of a year or two. And that means you’ve got to reconstitute a group every year. And groups are hard, hard, hard.’

  ‘But you’ve done wonderfully well these last two years.’

  He nods. ‘It went well with Prandelli. Fourteen games without defeat. You know that?’

  This is now the third or fourth time I have heard someone praise last year’s coach. One begins to appreciate why Perotti buries his head in Ken Follett.

  I ask, ‘What is the club’s budget for salaries?’

  Surprisingly, he tells me. Twenty billion lire. About seven million pounds. I suspect he’s shooting low. But it’s the ostentatious frankness of the man that is so attractive. Foschi is full of nervous energy.

  ‘So why did Cesare Prandelli leave? We were all so disappointed. A question of money I suppose.’

  ‘No, no!’

  ‘I thought he’d done so well that everybody else was offering him more. And Pastorello insisting on his working out his contract. Rightly …’ I added. I didn’t want to seem to be criticising his boss.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that!’

  Then his phone rings. It’s someone calling from Spain. There’s some talk about an interesting player. I take a step or two back, not to seem indiscreet, but Foschi doesn’t lower his voice. He says a few forthright things. ‘Don’t take no for an answer!’ You can see at once how much he enjoys it all. He must be hell in a quarrel.

  ‘No.’ He takes me by the arm again. Agnolin is standing a few yards away. Is the professor worried about what I’m being told? What is he a professor of? PR?

  ‘No, it was a question of recognition, of who was responsible for the team’s success. Prandelli thought il presidente was trying to take all the credit. There had been an interview somewhere, Pastorello had said “my team” or “the team I built”. You know. He was getting all that stick from the curva. He wanted some credit. Well, Cesare thought he was trying to steal all the glory.’

  Unwisely, I object, ‘But that’s infantile. Everybody knows it’s a joint effort. They’d been together two years, it looked like the beginning of something fantastic.’

  Foschi shakes his head. ‘Great trainer, Prandelli. Really great. But vain. Needs the recognition. He’d failed in the job before you kn
ow. Been fired. So Pastorello is saying, it’s me gave you this chance. Without me you wouldn’t be in this position.’ Foschi sighs. ‘It’s hard keeping these people together. I did everything I could. Cesare was worried about the players Pastorello was selling. I said, Cesare, I’ll find you some new players. There are plenty of players out there. I got the two of them together at last for a reconciliation, I was there to mediate, and Cesare just comes out with a torrent of insults. You wouldn’t believe it.’

  Tall, bulky, head bent down over me from the top of his overcoat, Foschi shakes his head. ‘I’ve had the same problem too, you know. The presidente says something that gives people the impression you don’t exist maybe. Your work is irrelevant. You have to say, Presidente, this is our team. I did the work too. I built the team too. Presidente, I told him once, I could go to Juventus tomorrow. I could go to Inter tomorrow. So everybody has to feel they’re being recognised. It’s hard. People are vain. But we have to stay together.’

  ‘So why did Pastorello decide to sell?’

  ‘Oh, it was just a bad moment. The stick from the fans was upsetting. I went to talk to them. Leave off, I said, if you don’t want the team to fold completely. You see they’ve left off now?’

  Suddenly I remember Glass-eye’s curses that night in October waiting for the bus to Bari: ‘The boss says: OK ragazzi, explain yourselves! And nobody answered. Nobody answered.’ Was the boss perhaps Foschi?

  The sports director raises his head and looks around. Again his telephone rings. This time I think it must be a woman, he lowers his voice. Suddenly afraid that my moment of grace will run out, I’m desperately trying to think what I should ask. ‘Il presidente.’ He taps the phone. ‘Coming down tomorrow night. He’s watching the anticipo.’ Vicenza are playing Bari Saturday afternoon.