A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  How everything speeds up in the euphoria that follows! The black Enynnaya was substituted in a tumult of grunts and whistles. Mutu was celebrated again as he miraculously sneaked in Verona’s third. Moo-too! Moo-too! And in the dying moments of the game the Egyptian player, Said, dribbled past the whole Hellas defence to get one back for Bari and become the first Arab ever to score in Italy’s Serie A. Three–two. Five goals. Every scorer a foreigner. ‘Moo-too!’ the crowd insisted. The gypsy boy took his bow under the curva. What a day for racial tolerance! What a break for Attilio Perotti!

  Paranoia

  Welcome back, Leo, indomitable captain.

  Alex (Chieti, Italy)

  A TYPICAL SNIPPET of news in the magazine Rigore (from 9/3/2001) goes like this:

  Passports – Summons for Recoba Delayed

  It was ready a week ago! The summons for Recoba and Inter for false acquisition of an Italian passport was all set to be delivered. Then, in response to orders from above, everything was postponed till Monday. Why? Because on Sunday Inter were playing Roma and the powers-that-be didn’t want to give the impression they were destabilising the Milan team before their clash with the league leaders. They were afraid Juventus [in second place] would accuse them of favouring Rome.

  If it seems far-fetched to imagine that the judiciary would pay such careful attention to the football calendar, what about this, from 26/1/2001.

  Perugia – Why Gaucci is furious with La Signora

  [‘La Signora’ is one of the nicknames for Juventus]

  Luciano Gaucci [president of AC Perugia] believes that his two players Baiocco and Liverani were sent off in the game against Brescia so that they would not be available for the following week’s match against Juventus. It all began with a misunderstanding. During Perugia’s game at Brescia, Moggi [the chief executive at Juventus] called the TV journalist at the match to ask how it was going. Informed that two Perugia players had been sent off, Moggi joked: ‘Only two? We’d asked for more …’ When a press agency carried this comment, Gaucci was enraged and in a fit of anger accused referee Boriello of having favoured Juventus.

  There is no people more ready to imagine a conspiracy than the Italians. No people could be more constantly on their guard against the stab in the back, more willing to blame an unhappy turn of events on a diabolical plot against them. Why?

  You haven’t been long in this country, before you notice how people have a vocation for arranging themselves in groups and factions: families, clubs, unions, whatever. And the characteristic of all these groups, whether they have official status or not, is that one isn’t so much a publicly enrolled member – that will get you nowhere – as an initiate in an exclusive society whose actual powers and range of influence are never clarified or declared. How powerful exactly is Gianni Agnelli? Could the professor I am attached to at the university swing a national selection commission to make me a full professor? How much clout does Pastorello have in the Football Federation? Nothing is clear.

  Of course, none of this is peculiar to Italy. In any country there is a gap between formal boundaries and reality. But the peculiarity of Italy lies in the exact balance between rival versions of the world, the equal intensity of people’s emotional commitment to private loyalties and moral commitment to public justice. Everyone wants their team to win at all costs and everyone earnestly wishes the world to be fair. It’s not an easy state of mind of administrate.

  ‘Anybody with false papers should be expelled from the country at once!’ Pastorello leans across his desk to tell me. He’s furious. ‘It’s a fraud! It’s criminal!’

  But the Federation has decided that before the sports world can proceed to sanction the offenders ‘penal law must first take its course’. Which means we are talking about a decision in five or ten years’ time. At which point it will be meaningless to say: Verona wouldn’t have gone down if Inter, or Udine or Vicenza, had been docked ten points. Procrastination, it turns out, offers the easiest compromise between intense commitment to fair rules and an equal determination to fight one’s corner to the bitter end. The rules are always about to be reformed, in Italy. Things are about to be clarified, we promise, after the forthcoming event, which is of paramount importance to us. The cruel fight goes on.

  Over lunch with Saverio Guette, the Hellas marketing man remarked, ‘Martin Laursen always plays with total determination, even though he knows he is leaving us next year. This is part of his Danish Protestant upbringing. His whole personal integrity is at stake in his public behaviour on the field. Whereas your Italian, once he knows he is going elsewhere, is already thinking of new alliances, new masters, other prerogatives.’

  ‘Oddo vaffanculo!’ announces a voice on The Wall. ‘You never make any fucking effort. You don’t give a shit about the team.’

  It’s widely believed that Massimo Oddo already has an arrangement to play with AC Milan next year. He has completely lost the zest of the earlier games of the season. He picks up a pass on the wing and kicks it carelessly upfield. Caught on the break, he trots rather than races back. So suspect is his behaviour becoming that for the game against Udine he is replaced by the incompetent but willing Cassetti, who, since no one else wants him, is very much Verona’s property.

  Yet however paranoid some fans are about betrayals and suspect refereeing, this never prompts them to abandon the game. Rather, it intensifies their engagement, it makes them all the more eager to win against the odds. The more people are against us, the more players let us down, the sweeter the victory if we do scrape through.

  Conspiracies or no, then, the Zanzibar has organised its bus as usual for the away game at Udine. It’s 18 February, bright and cold. Since the Loma Band don’t have a bus this week, some of their boys are travelling with us. As we’re waiting to leave, Forza forbids them to taunt a couple of black girls approaching along the street. ‘At least not here in town,’ he complains. ‘The police are just waiting for any excuse.’ Already three hundred Verona fans have been banned from attending games this year. During the trip Forza tries to teach everybody how to sing the triumphal march from Aïda a little slower. ‘With more majesty, Dio boia,’ he insists. ‘You should go to the opera sometime. It’s slow. It’s powerful. And we clap in syncopation. Like this. Got it? OK.’

  Then this shaven-headed charismatic figure tries to persuade the boys from the rival group that this division of the curva into factions is a disaster. ‘We should form an alliance,’ he says seductively to two drunken teenagers. And I can almost hear the debates that are going on all over the country between scores and scores of different political parties on the right and on the left. ‘We should form an alliance, otherwise we’ll be wiped out.’

  ‘The point is,’ Forza says, ‘you Loma lot claim to be right-wing, OK, but in fact you’re behaving the same way the left does, whining, spoiling things. What does Rutelli do? He whines that Berlusconi has built up a TV empire. He complains. And what do you boys do, you tear down the leaflets we put up. You break up our chants. Why do you have to do that? We’re on the same side. People on the right build things up,’ Forza insists. ‘They work together. The left and the terroni tear things down and whine.’

  As we take our places in the stadium Forza tells us, ‘The first chant is the one that carries the most impact. It sets the tone.’ I find I’m right next to him, in the heart of the group. It’s a bright, beautiful day. The small stadium with its old-fashioned stands is quaint and colourful. Forza’s red scalp is gleaming in the sun against the green of the pitch below. He has an impish grin. ‘So,’ he says, ‘what insult can we use for the Udinesi?’

  It’s a tough question. None of the younger folks seem to know. Down south obviously, the opposition are all terroni di merda. In Bologna they are comunisti di merda. In Turin they are gobbi di merda, hunchbacks. But what can we say of these respectable northerners way out on a limb near the Slovenian border?

  ‘Come on,’ Forza challenges us.

  ‘Slavi di merda,’ someo
ne suggests.

  The big man shakes his head. ‘It has to be something that will drive them completely mad. Something that will get the afternoon off to a roaring start.’

  Nobody knows. We’ve no idea.

  ‘Terremotati!’ he declares.

  It’s obvious. A terremoto is an earthquake. Terremotati are the victims of an earthquake. In 1976 the region of Friuli–Venezia Giulia, of which Udine is the capital, was devastated by a severe earthquake that caused thousands of deaths. So, in stark defiance of the standard contemporary rhetoric of compassion, we are going to insult these people by reminding them that they have been profoundly unlucky, that they have suffered. Perhaps there are people here who lost fathers or mothers in that quake. For a moment I feel I might be back in one of Giovanni Verga’s rustic novels where the peasant community is always contemptuous of those who have been born poor or taken ill, or in some way fallen foul of that ultimate conspiracy of all, nature. If the final truth about the world is that it is a struggle for survival, maximum derision is reserved for the loser.

  ‘This’ll get them going,’ Forza laughs. He raises his red face, the blue wraparound sunglasses. He cups his hands round his strong lips. His voice is huge. The tune is the ever serviceable ‘Guantanamera’ Now!’ TER-RE-MO-TA-TI!’ he sings and shouts together. ‘Voi siete terremotati. Terremota-a-a-a-ti, voi siete terremotati.’

  Everybody joins in. There are only a couple of hundred of us, but half an hour before kick-off, the stadium had been fairly quiet. Until now. We have barely started a second round of the song before the place explodes with rage. ‘Merda siete, e merda resterete!’ Forza rubs his hands. ‘That’s set the ball rolling,’ he laughs. And I realise he’s actually done the Udinese fans a favour. They are feeling properly angry. The game will mean more.

  And so it did. It meant disaster for Hellas Verona who were certainly the unlucky ones today. This was the match when Leo Colucci finally made his comeback. He had gone out against Udinese in the second game of the season and he came back against them in the nineteenth. This lean dark southerner is not one of football’s great talents, but his determination is total. Meridionale or no, the brigate love him. He’s a constant presence, a volcano of energy. He wins ball after ball in midfield. He harries the classier Udinese players. He completely alters the psychology of the team. Oh if only we had had Leo all season, everybody is saying. Then just before half-time Udinese’s international star Fiore catches Doardo half-asleep (for Ferron is suspended of course) and it’s one-nil. Meantime Marco Cassetti has been stretchered off, writhing with pain in a way that made it clear we will not see him again this season. And so Oddo was back on the pitch again, playing miserably. Iella. It was iella. Then the Loma leaders arrived, obliging Forza to stand aside and sulk.

  The match finished two–one. For Udinese of course. The police stopped our coach on the return trip. We were forced to pull into a service station. Some of the wilder boys opened the windows to shout insults. Again Forza intervened. Again he explained that the police were looking for any excuse to ban people from the stadium. ‘Don’t get yourself banned for nothing.’ He himself had been banned twice, he confided to me. Once for insulting a policeman to his face. Another time for hitting a policeman, though the man had been in plain clothes and Forza had no way of knowing he was a policeman. ‘I just gave him a slap. He could have been anybody.’ ‘What did you say to the guy the other time, the time they banned you for insults?’ ‘Only pezzo di merda, something like that. Nothing really. They can ban you without any trial or anything. You have no way of proving you are innocent. Then for a whole year, every time I watched the game on TV, I’d be in tears, honestly, not because Verona were losing or anything, but I’m constantly thinking, I could be there, with the butei.’ Then he added, ‘Perhaps I’m getting old, but I feel like a father to them.’ Forza must be all of thirty.

  The police stood outside. We were trapped in the coach. Twenty minutes went by. They had radioed reinforcements. Two further vans appeared, perhaps fifteen men in all. Meantime, Forza had succeeded in getting everybody to sit down and keep calm. They had stopped us for no reason at all it seemed. Nobody was even particularly drunk. They were just waiting for something to happen. The frustration at being trapped there would cause someone to do something unreasonable. That was the logic of it. ‘Then they can beat us.’ ‘Keep your nerve,’ Forza warned. ‘Sit down. Don’t shout. No gestures.’

  It was like one of those movie scenes where the heroes have to restrain their legitimate anger, hide their true identity and wait patiently for the powerful enemy to lose interest. And it occurred to me that rather than a straightforward encounter between those who enforce the rules and those who have a habit of breaking them, this was just a stand-off between two factions with greater or lesser powers. It lasted forty minutes. We behaved. The police finally gave up. The moment their blue cars roared away, everybody broke out in a huge chorus of ‘Senza divisa, chi siete senza divisa?’ Without your uniforms, who are you without your uniforms? Nobodies. But the word divisa also means ‘the insignia that represents a society’, or again, as my dictionary says, ‘the colours of the insignia’. So it’s as if we were singing: you have no real community, no team, no group worthy of allegiance. Only that dumb police uniform. So why are you getting involved?

  Latin Lover

  Se non fosse per la mona, sempre Hellas Verona. (If it wasn’t for skirt, Verona always first.)

  Camelot@Hellas.it

  I FIRST MET Martin Laursen back in October at the Povegliano supporters club dinner. Povegliano is a nondescript village in the dreary Veronese plain south of the city, a place where agriculture somehow contrives to be as ugly as heavy industry. In a smoky, low-ceilinged restaurant, three tables were arranged in a horseshoe. Laursen sat in the centre of the central table beside the very young Marco Cassetti. They were there to represent the team and give people a chance to meet the real McCoy.

  In the event, the two players were as distant from the supporters as they are at the stadium. With the prettiest girls seated each side of them, they seemed tongue-tied and bored. The hundred or so club members and fans who had come to celebrate tucked into their food, a traditional mixture of pastas, meats and wines. The man beside me spent upwards of half an hour describing a recent holiday to the Red Sea where everyone, he said, was Italian. He was enthusiastic. ‘At the airport in Sharm-el-Sheikh all the flights were to Italian towns. All of them!’ His list of the destinations sounded very like the Serie A calendar. Turin, Naples, Bergamo. I suggested one might follow Verona’s away games using flights from Sharm-el-Sheikh. The irony was not appreciated. Towards the end of the meal, evidently bored, Laursen and Cassetti cut a garishly iced cake – yellow-and-blue may look good in the stadium, but not on your plate – then allowed themselves to be photographed beside the youngsters. The girls only had eyes for the handsome Dane, who wore a white turtle-necked sweater that made his eyes magically blue. He seemed unhappy with the cigarette smoke. Fresh from giving away that penalty down in Bari, Cassetti behaved as though at any moment an irate fan might step forward and insult him. His long black hair fell lank over his face, he stooped. Towards ten-thirty, the players made their excuses and escaped. Everybody knows an athlete needs to be in his bed early.

  How long ago that seems now! What an innocent time it was, just one drawn game into the season, when relegation was nothing more than the roar of a waterfall in some distant chasm. Now Cassetti is in a hospital bed – he will not play again this season – and Laursen is at the red-hot centre of controversy.

  I met the Danish player for a second time shortly after our last-minute victory against Napoli. If you want to talk to a player, the best time to do it is after his team has won. We had breakfast together in a bar behind the Arena a stone’s throw from his apartment. I have always wanted to live in the old centre of town but have never been able to afford to. Money is not a problem for Martin Laursen. We shook hands below the great Roman monument and hurried
into the nearest pasticceria. The wind was bitter. To my surprise, he was wearing glasses. It seems he wears contact lenses when he plays. He looked like a polite American college boy, shivering in a big ski-jacket. At the counter he helped himself to two pastries and as soon as he was seated announced, ‘It was always my dream to come to Italy.’

  There it is again, that word dream. The new student magazine at my university is to be called ¿Dreams? ‘The dream becomes reality’, announces a headline after another Chievo victory. Will they never be beaten? But Laursen’s first months in the bel paese, as he now explained, had been a nightmare. And it can’t be far from a nightmare that he’s going through now as I start this chapter.

  He grew up in Faarvang, he says, left home at sixteen for football college at Silkeborg, played for Silkeborg in the Danish Premier League, then woke up one morning to find himself in Verona. Pastorello had paid two and a half billion lire for him. ‘It all happened so quickly. The next day I got injured.’

  He had damaged his knee. He needed an operation. He couldn’t play or train, he had no friends and above all he couldn’t speak a word of Italian. Hellas’s management were kind to him, but seemed to have no idea, Laursen thinks, what it means to be alone in a foreign country. ‘They invited me to dinner, but I couldn’t understand a thing. I felt awful. They had paid so much money for me and I couldn’t show them what I could do.’ One day he decided to give up football; he had let everybody down. But on the phone his father insisted he stick it out. Even sinking into clinical depression, he was still making big money.