A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  ‘Perhaps Pastorello will learn to love Hellas.’

  We are in the upstairs room of a pizzeria in the outlying village of Quinzano. The waiter is black, something that would have been unthinkable when I myself lived in this village twenty years ago. The actors are jolly and friendly, but, like football players, less glamorous than one expects. They have little to say about acting or Goldoni. Roberto remarks that as theatre director he has often thought of himself as being like a coach, or rather a player–manager in the English tradition. He has to choose his team, get the right actor for the right part. Over ice-creams and limoncello, all the actors begin to talk football. They are well-informed; and everybody agrees: Bari, the first match of the second half of the season, will be make or break for Perotti, and make or break for the brigate. If we lose, if the stadium is disqualified, it’s all up.

  Moo-too Moo-too

  IF YOU INFERNAL FASCIST SHITHEADS GET THE STADIUM BANNED I’LL HAVE YOU ALL KILLED. BRAINLESS BASTARDS, LEARN TO KEEP YOUR MOUTHS SHUT FOR HELLAS.

  PREBEN ELKJAER

  hell@s.it

  A DULL, FLAT voice, neither masculine nor feminine, drained of any expression, bereft of communicative energy, reads out, over a metallic PA, an official announcement carefully phrased to generate the maximum indifference, if not contempt:

  Hellas Verona football club advises the sporting public that in accordance with regulations introduced by the Italian Football Federation every racial or territorial insult inside and also outside the stadium will be penalised with the application of fines of ever-increasing severity and eventually with the disqualification of the club’s home ground. We would therefore wish to appeal to the civic sense and collective responsibility of all fans, inviting them to behave in a correct fashion throughout the game.

  The announcement is met with a gale of whistles. The curva is packed, the weather gloomy. Hopefully more effective than the PA’s saccharin homily is the huge banner that announces, black on white:

  CIVIL VERONA SHOUTS ‘FORZA HELLAS’

  NO TO RACISM

  NO TO THE DEMONISATION OF OUR TEAM

  But this message is hung along the parapet of the expensive stands on the east side of the stadium, and the fans in the curva have no time for the polite and seated season ticket holders, who, of course, are never to be seen at away games. The moral capital of the brigate is built on the sacrifice of all those away games. Only three points in eight matches and thousands of kilometres, but they, and I, have been to all of them.

  More nervous than ever, my son and I take our places. Once when he was very young, I had to forbid Michele from joining in racist chants. Now he is their fiercest opponent. ‘I hope to God they shut up,’ he keeps saying. ‘I hope to God they don’t ruin everything.’

  The players stream out on to the pitch, all wearing yellow tops over their club colours. ‘FIDAS’, the shirts announce. It’s the name of the blood donors’ society. They always advertise at the stadium. Apparently many fans give blood. Perhaps they leave the stadium with their pressure unbearably high. The players line up for photographs. Beneath the name FIDAS is the message: ‘Blood has no colour. Love … say no to intolerance.’ That pious slogan, I’m sure, will be a red rag to a bull for the fans.

  As the players strip off their politically correct tops and prepare to do battle, I think of Pastorello, of my conversation with him yesterday, and marvel once again at the enormous gap that separates the administrators of football from its most determined disciples.

  ‘Just hang on while I take these drops,’ he had begun.

  Rather surprisingly, il presidente had agreed to talk to me the very day before this crucial game: Bari bottom and desperate, ourselves third from bottom and terrified, the race issue looming.

  ‘Sciatica,’ Pastorello explained. ‘It’s crippling. Though probably a win tomorrow would do more for it than any painkiller.’

  Was this a subtle hint that he somatises, that he really does suffer for the team? We sat down either side of his monumental desk and I asked him how much time he gave to this racist problem and these political issues.

  ‘Very little. We do what we can, which isn’t much. It’s the fans who have to change.’

  I suggest to him that the frequent talk about ‘defeating’ racism on the terraces is a mistake. The word ‘defeat’ only provokes the hardliners. They don’t come to the stadium to think of themselves as defeated.

  ‘Good point,’ Pastorello says earnestly. He’s elegant in sober suit and tie. ‘Words are important.’

  I know the comment will be promptly forgotten. I ask him, ‘Why do the fans hate you so much?’

  He takes this on the nose. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’ He gives me a brief history of his career. He grew up supporting Vicenza. He was sports director at Parma for many years but never had any trouble with their fans. They were always very well behaved. He even bought AC Siena a couple of years ago, took them from C into B, then sold them again. ‘It was just a favour I did for old friends.’ And at the same time he bought Hellas Verona.

  ‘Nobody welcomed me when I arrived,’ he remembers, more with puzzlement than complaint. ‘The club was going through a crisis and I stepped in. I had a good record. I assumed people would be pleased. But nothing. Around the third home game we lost five–two to Reggina, remember? and that’s when it started. PAS-TO-REL-LO VAF-FAN-CU-LO!’

  ‘And you’ve no idea why they do that?’

  ‘No.’ Pastorello leans forward over his desk. ‘But you know,’ he says, ‘the odd thing is, from the day I said I wanted to sell, from that day everybody started begging me to stay: “Presidente, you’re the only one who can save us,” they said – and at the same time the vaffanculos stopped. There hasn’t been a single one since I threatened to go.’

  Pastorello clearly feels that this turn of events is at once a deep mystery of human nature and a great vindication for himself. Whereas it seems fairly obvious that while the fans intensely dislike him for his apparent aloofness and his readiness to turn players into profits, they nevertheless know that this kind of modern market football is here to stay and that Pastorello is sharper at it than most.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I invite him, ‘about how you see the money side of the game. Why did you sell off all of our best players at the end of last year?’

  Rearranging the expensive ornaments on his desk, the man launches into a rapid and lucid explanation. ‘The Bosman ruling was a disaster for small clubs like ourselves,’ he begins. ‘From that point on, no contract could hold if a player wanted to break it. They became free agents. The richer teams, who are not interested in developing talent, were now in a better position to prey on our youngsters. The only way a club like Verona can now make money on a player they’ve discovered and trained is to get a fee for breach of contract. So contracts never run to the end of their term because then the player would be free to leave as and how he likes. In any event, as soon as a player feels he is worth more than he’s presently being paid, it becomes impossible to hold him.’

  ‘Give me some figures with a player I know.’

  ‘Cristian Brocchi,’ Pastorello says promptly (our midfield dynamo of last season). ‘I paid the boy 350,000 million lire a year [£110,000]. Inter offered him 1,500,000,000. [£450,000].’

  ‘Esagerato!’ I’m indignant. ‘It was the team that made Brocchi, not Brocchi the team.’

  Pastorello nods. ‘How can I keep someone who has been offered four times as much elsewhere, and at least three times as much as he is worth? The more successful a provincial team is, the more likely that it will have to break up at the end of the year. The seven sisters – you know, Juventus, Inter, etc. – each have an annual budget deficit of between thirty and one hundred and fifty billion lire a year [one to five million pounds]. They make it up with their private fortunes. I can’t compete.’

  I ask him if there isn’t a conflict of interest with his sons being the agents for many of his own players. After all, he has family membe
rs taking a commission when he buys or sells the player.

  ‘People who say that are just jealous.’ The man always has this smile which might be affable and might be the grin of someone pulling the wool over your eyes. ‘It’s very useful having my sons involved. We’d never have got Giuseppe Colucci if my son hadn’t been his agent. He just wouldn’t have come here. And of course when you’re dealing with a member of your own family they don’t insist on being paid forty million under the table every time you do a deal with them.’

  ‘Are you saying that there are illegal payments every time players change teams?’

  ‘Oh not at all!’ he laughs, spreading his arms. As at that lunch before the game in Lecce, I find myself liking Pastorello more than I meant to. He leans across the table, then confides, ‘I wept when we got the winner against Napoli.’

  ‘Signor Pastorello,’ I tell him, leaning forward myself now. ‘We all wept.’ And then I ask, ‘But this emotion never leads you to open your wallet a little wider.’

  ‘No.’ The answer is abrupt.

  ‘So why did you stay on last summer? You had the club up for sale. Why didn’t you go?’

  ‘It’s a challenge, isn’t it? I can’t resist it. I’d like to hang on here, what, at least five years and to have the Veronese say: there, Pastorello took the team from B to A and kept it there all this time.’

  Rising to go – for I’ve seen him look at his watch – I remark that I myself have been in Verona twenty years and have always been treated as if I were in transit: sooner or later, like every other foreigner, I would do the honest thing: go away and leave them alone again.

  ‘Oh the Veronese!’ Pastorello exclaims. He seems to appreciate this shared resentment of the town we have chosen to live in. All the same, he wants to show me that he has got further in local affections than I have. Along the corridor, he opens a door and invites me to look at a large poster on the wall: it shows himself wearing a warrior’s breastplate and yellow-plumed helmet on the great stone terraces of the Arena, the Roman amphitheatre. His beaming face and carefully clipped white beard look ludicrous in this costume. Presumably it was borrowed from a production of Aïda.

  ‘They took that during the celebrations when Verona won Serie B the year before last.’

  ‘The victorious gladiator!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  But didn’t the gladiators fight for money? I’m thinking as I drive home across town. Win one day, die the next? ‘Die, Pastorello!’ says a voice on The Wall that evening before the match. And now in the stadium at five to three on 11 February, my son is rocking back and forward on his seat and moaning and saying, ‘I’ll die, I’ll die if they start their monkey grunts.’

  The players have taken their positions. Tossed in the air, the confetti of torn programmes turns the curva white. The singing swells. We have to win. We have to win. The game kicks off. A long pass forward. A move on the right. Interrupted. Then Bari’s Nigerian striker, Enynnaya, touches the ball. As at the flick of a switch, the monkey grunts begin. ‘Oo! Oo! Oo!’ But immediately afterwards a storm of whistles smothers the grunts. It lasts for about thirty seconds, then dies away as the fans concentrate on the game. Verona are attacking, nervously. The players seem scared of the ball. This match is just too important. Again Bari intercept, again there is the long ball forward to the red-shirted Enynnaya. At once the grunts begin, at once the whistles rise to drown them out.

  This is new: the grunts, then the whistles. Oddly, they seem to be the same whistles that shortly before were drowning out the exhortations to avoid racist sentiments. To understand what’s going on we shall have to stop a moment and look at that new regulation on racist chants more carefully. For one invariable and distinguishing feature of all Italian regulations is that they are complicated. Often hellishly so. If the racist chants are ‘uncontested’, the regulation says, the club will be responsible and the stadium banned. But if the chants are contested and ‘covered’ by ‘normal’ fans, then there is no penalty.

  So how are we to judge whether a racist chant is covered or not? After all, somebody has to hear it before he can react to cover it. Enynnaya carries the ball a few yards. The die-hards begin their oo oos. The rest of the curva begins to whistle. The oos are drowned, but of course we know they are there; otherwise why would people be whistling so much? Is this what covered means?

  As soon as the fans have discovered this new game, it happens every time the Nigerian touches the ball. Oo oo, whistle whistle. And since all the noise comes from the heart of the curva, not the rest of the stadium, I begin to suspect a sly complicity between the two groups: they are having their cake and eating it: the grunts and the whistles. It’s pure theatre. Which is just as well, for the game so far is dire.

  Then exactly on the half hour, entirely against the run of play, Bari get a penalty. It’s mad. Gillet, their keeper, kicks upfield. The ball runs long. Gonnella is chasing back behind it, Ferron is hurrying to the edge of his area to meet it. The defender slows to leave the ball to the keeper, but suddenly both realise that it isn’t quite going to make it into the box before the arrival of Bari’s Osmanovski, the very man who won a penalty from us back in October. Ferron steps over his line. He can’t use his hands now. The ball has bounced high. The keeper raises a clumsy left leg. He connects, but the ball strikes Gonnella in the chest and, with the terrible precision of catastrophe, bounces neatly over Ferron directly towards the goal. Osmanovski, needless to say, is haring after it. Ferron turns and grabs the striker’s legs …

  So you spend all week training hard, hour after hour, preparing for every eventuality, and then you go and make a mistake that most schoolboys know how to avoid. And this in the absolute crunch game of the season after three losses in a row. Ferron looks up. The referee is pointing at the spot. He pulls the red card from his pocket. Off! Which means Doardo again. Please spare us from Doardo! And some other player will have to be taken off to let even this least reliable of reserve keepers on. Who? Perotti is calling in Gilardino. There’s a huge yell of protest from the curva. We absolutely have to win and the man takes off a striker! Doardo is putting his gloves on. Could he save the day? I imagine Puliero’s inevitable response if he does. ‘Miracolo! Miracolo di Doardo!’ The huge blond Andersson lumbers up, places the ball on the spot, gives the keeper one shrewd glance and crashes the ball into the net.

  The one burning question that I chose not to ask Pastorello the afternoon before the game was, ‘Will you fire Perotti if we lose?’ Two members of the staff had indiscreetly told me that il presidente was already in touch with possible replacements. But I knew it was pointless asking.

  ‘Perotti’s finished,’ Pietro agreed at half-time. ‘Why on earth is he playing Cassetti in a game like this? The team is lightweight. Why has he left Oddo on the bench? Why did he take off Gilardino? And where’s Mutu? What did we buy him for if he never plays?’

  To Pietro’s left, his swarthy friend says, ‘Perotti porta iella.’ Iella is something that goes beyond even the jinx. It’s unspeakable bad luck. Meantime, my son is refusing to speak. He refuses the offer of a Coke from the vendor working his way along the terraces. Despite the cold afternoon, he refuses the offer of a packet of biscuits. ‘They’re awful,’ he mutters. ‘Awful.’

  ‘Bring on lo zingaro,’ the pessimist in front of us keeps repeating. He’s beating two gloved hands together in a gesture that has nothing to do with keeping warm. ‘Bring on lo zingaro, dio povero!’

  Lo zingaro is ‘the gypsy’. Mutu.

  Time drags terribly at the interval. I try to think of Perotti. I think of his mild manners, his taciturn character, his modest man’s defensiveness. ‘Fire him!’ I whisper to myself. ‘Fire him, fire him, fire him!’ He’s ruining the team, he’s ruining my book! What can he be saying to the players? What can he say that he hasn’t had all week to say? The man has to go. Now!

  As it turned out, it was Pastorello, not the coach, who did all the talking in the dressing room at this criti
cal moment in the season. ‘I went to give the players a big shock,’ he explained to the Arena’s journalist after the game. This in itself must have been a pretty disturbing hint for Perotti. The coach’s later comment was, ‘Bari scored in the thirty-first minute. At that point I knew I would be coach until the ninety-fifth.’ He added, ‘I was also wondering what I could do to get the team out of the mess they were in.’

  What he did was to take out the midfield player, Italiano, and bring on lo zingaro. Rumour has it that the coach loathes the boy, but no doubt he felt it was a card worth playing. Or perhaps the plan was to make it Mutu’s fault as much as anyone else’s. Nobody could say he hadn’t fielded our star striker.

  The players had gone off to whistles. They reappeared to gloomily determined chants of Verona alè. Duty chants. Not five minutes had passed when a through ball put Bari striker Bellavista alone in front of Doardo and only about ten yards out. He struck hard, sure of scoring. Doardo threw himself wildly. ‘I just managed to get a hand to it,’ he would later tell the newspaper. The video shows that the shot struck him casually on the knee to balloon away only an inch or so over the bar. Fate. A few moments later Mutu took a cross in Bari’s area, fought off a storm of shoves and kicks from the defender behind, sent Gillet the wrong way and scored. It was a masterpiece. Reeeeteeee!

  And at that moment the curva discovered that to yell Mutu, Moo-too, sounds almost exactly like yelling oo oo. The chant didn’t even need to be covered by whistles. The fans were still at it – Moo-too! Moo-too! – in a triumph of mockery when five minutes later the Romanian jumped for a high cross beside Gillet. The keeper fumbled the ball, which kindly dropped right on to the feet of the hitherto invisible Camoranesi. He tapped it into the goal. We were ahead.