A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

Then at last he was able to train again. The club suggested he work out with Vincenzo Italiano who was also recovering from injury. Spending hours and hours alone with the same person, he began to pick up Italian. Perhaps his friend’s name was propitious. Cheered, he decided to go to a language school. He made progress. He met an Italo-Danish girl in a gym and fell in love. ‘Everything is so much easier when you can speak the language and you have someone.’

  Having missed out on most of the season, he made it back in the team just in time for the last games of Serie B with Verona leading the pack. ‘I was the best player on the field,’ he says. Next season he would be in Serie A. There was a possible deal for the future with the rich club Parma. A couple of months later he was playing in the Danish national side. The dream had come true.

  Martin Laursen really is such an attractive boy, so sensible, so handsome; yet as he speaks, I am bound once again to recognise that a player’s personal history and expert reflections are as nothing to the excitement of the game. He talks in detail about his reactions to the critics, his knee problems, his technical shortcomings trapping the ball. He admits that he checks his marks in all the newspapers the day after the game, that sometimes he even catches himself thinking of this or that critic when he makes a mistake on the pitch. ‘Perotti is a mediocre coach,’ he says. ‘We respected Prandelli so much.’ He wipes crumbs from his young lips and smiles. ‘Now what do you want to know?’

  ‘Have you ever watched a match from the curva?’

  ‘No.’ He is puzzled.

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never.’

  Martin Laursen has never watched a game from the curva. He has never stood in the pack and yelled behind the goal. I put it to this fine player that he perhaps doesn’t realise how exciting football is, when you’re impotent to do anything, when you can’t see the far goal properly, when you’re desperate to win. He smiles. ‘Some day I must go and watch from the curva.’ But recently the crowd’s racism has been bothering him. ‘You know, you think twice before going to wave under the curva these days.’

  ‘Will we stay up?’

  ‘I’m very worried,’ he admits. Suddenly, the young boy has the solemnity of a politician talking about the dangers of recession. Players never seem to realise how absurd it is that the rest of us take football seriously. ‘It’s so tense in the dressing room,’ he tells me, ‘when we’re in the relegation zone. It’s horrible.’

  But if it was tense back then in February, what must it be like now? Immediately after the Udinese game, Laursen amazed press, fans and colleagues alike by giving something more than the usual after-game interview: Hellas Verona, he announced, had played ‘scandalously’, they hadn’t tried. It was unforgivable. ‘There are those among my team-mates who seem to want to be playing in Crotone next year, not at San Siro.’

  ‘Oddo!’ the boys on The Wall decide. ‘It’s Oddo Laursen was talking about. He isn’t trying.’ Three months ago the player was their darling. Now, they hate him. Someone writes to say that Apolloni punched Oddo on the training field for not caring enough. Can this be true? In any event it’s clear that there’s mutiny in the dressing room.

  ‘Oh Hellas, please don’t give up’ is the last message I read before setting off for the airport and Rome, the game with Lazio. ‘Please, please, keep trying.’ We are third from bottom. Napoli have beaten Inter, an extraordinary result. Things are getting hard.

  And now I’m sitting on the parapet of the Ponte Duca D’Aosta drinking a beer under a grey sky and whiling away a little time before the game. I’ve just walked all the way up the Tiber from Trastevere, about an hour and a half’s march in soft drizzle, past St Peter’s, past the Castel Sant’Angelo, counting the dark cypresses against the ancient red brick. Now the rain has stopped and I’ve found a decent sandwich in a kiosk and am watching all the Lazio supporters in their pale-blue-and-white scarves flow over the bridge towards the Piazza Foro Italia and the huge structure of the Olympic stadium. I love to watch the home fans streaming to a game. I love the moment, perhaps half a mile from the ground, when the occasional passers-by are transformed into a purposeful crowd: the groups of lads holding their furled flags like swords, the fathers with their twelve-year-old sons. Everybody is hopeful and chattering. Everybody is marching to the stadium, entering the realm of compulsion.

  I drink my beer. Spread open on my knees, the Rome paper Il Messaggero has nothing to say about the explosive situation in Hellas Verona’s dressing room. Instead oceans of space are dedicated to another kind of dysfunctional family. In the small town of Novi Ligure north of Genoa sixteen-year-old Erika survives an attack in which her mother and younger brother are brutally slaughtered. She calls her boyfriend Omar. She explains to the police and her father that the attack was carried out by a gang of Albanians. It would not be the first such killing. Inevitably, the local Northern League organises a rally to protest against the level of illegal immigration.

  But the following morning the police announce that they are charging Erika and Omar with murder. Erika’s mother wasn’t happy with her daughter’s boyfriend. Erika was jealous of her younger brother. It’s a horrendous scenario: scores of knife wounds on a little boy in the bathtub. But: ‘She was an entirely normal, well-behaved girl,’ a neighbour says of Erika. ‘Omar was a completely normal kid,’ says a schoolteacher. It’s the refrain we hear after every atrocity. As if normality were a safe state of affairs. As if a normal human being wasn’t an extremely dangerous phenomenon. Fatuously, it occurs to me that if only Erika and Omar had been football fans, if only they had yelled insults at the stadium and spat on Juventus supporters from the windows of the Zanzibar bus, perhaps none of this would have happened.

  Then a voice said, ‘Alè!’

  I looked up from my paper. Since Verona are twinned with fellow-racists Lazio, I was fearlessly wearing my yellow-blue scarf and Hellas hat. A good-looking man in his early thirties asks, ‘Do you know where our section is?’ He too has a blue-and-yellow scarf, he too had come down to Rome on his own. ‘I have no idea,’ I said: ‘Want to go together?’

  Marco – let’s call him Marco – walked silently beside me. He looked hesitant, morose, in need somehow.

  ‘Bound to lose today,’ I tried. ‘So hardly worth worrying about it.’

  ‘Per carità!’ he said.

  ‘Best we can hope for is that Brescia and Vicenza lose too.’

  ‘Right.’ He wasn’t interested, but seemed glad of company.

  ‘And Chievo.’

  ‘Fuck Chievo.’

  We crossed the Lungotevere from east to west and passed the huge monolith raised to MUSSOLINI DUX. Beyond it, on each side of the pedestrian plaza that leads to the stadium, great white stones announce the successes of Fascism: ‘XXIII March, 1919, Mussolini founds the Italian combat groups.’ ‘IX May, The Duce proclaims the foundation of the Empire.’ No doubt if any such monuments were left in Verona, public television would have made sure to film them as proof of the city’s right-wing vocation. Here they are just one more exhibit in the great Roman museum of imperial gestures: the pillars, obelisks, memorial arches and mausoleums that give the city its dusty grandeur. Rome is the one town in Italy where you feel the arrogance of empire weighing down on you. Everything is on a grander scale. No chance for Hellas, I repeated to myself. Don’t hope.

  At the end of the first half it was two–nil. No need to say who to. Marco had hung on beside me but said very little. There was a fierce tension about the man. He was well-dressed, had a pleasant, open face, but seemed angry. We were all angry of course. With Perotti; with the players. But he seemed angry with himself. He wasn’t shouting. Despite our inevitable defeat, the spirit of the fans had been festive at first. We were enjoying being in this fantastically dramatic stadium, enjoying the warm welcome of the Lazio supporters, who roared out, ‘Vi salverete’ – you won’t go down – to console us after they had scored. Some of them even had Hellas flags. Then news came through that the bulk of the Loma Band had bee
n stopped on the autostrada by the police and turned back, apparently because the boys were drunk. To protest at this cruelty, the remaining leaders insisted that we all sit down, remove the banners from the railings and stop singing.

  ‘Merda, merda, merda,’ Marco said.

  As soon as we stopped singing, Hellas started performing. Moments into the second half, Camoranesi scored with a furious volley from the very corner of the box. Immediately, Lazio got another. But unexpectedly Verona seemed to be. taking over the game. Perotti must have at last convinced the players that they could do it. Or at least that they now had nothing to lose. Two remarks of his during the week had impressed me. ‘This is the most difficult moment of my life,’ he had announced simply and solemnly in the aftermath of Laursen’s accusations, ‘both as a coach and as a man.’ Of the team’s performance at Udine, he added, ‘It isn’t enough to play well, like good schoolboys who’ve learned a lesson. When you shoot for goal you have to put your soul in the ball.’

  Your soul!

  In any event, Verona were attacking. The referee was the famous, the infamous Collina, shaven-headed, fierce-featured emblem of total authority. To be true to his iron-grip image, something he clearly works hard at, regularly stabbing his index finger at the players’ chests and roaring at them to shut up, he suddenly and quite unexpectedly sent off the mild-mannered Martino Melis.

  Melis had been given a yellow card in the first half of the match for a foul from behind. Fair enough. Now Lazio had a free kick in midfield. They had not, as far as I could see, asked for the Veronese players to observe distance. They were taking it quickly. Melis was walking away from the ball. Collina blew his whistle and turned away to see where the kick would go. Melis, who had also half-turned, raised a leg. The ball struck him. Collina, who hadn’t seen how casual the whole thing was, immediately showed him a second yellow card for failing to observe distance, and sent him off. It was the most capricious expulsion I’ve ever seen.

  And at that Marco snapped out of his gloom. His whole attitude changed. He was beside himself, jumping to his feet, kicking the steps, yelling abuse. ‘They’re scared of us!’ he shrieked. This was improbable. All the same, down to ten men, Verona scored at once. The young Gilardino this time. Three–two.

  The fans were now fiercely torn between the need to protest about the police’s harassment of the Loma Band, with silence, and the desire to support the team. People kept jumping up and sitting down. Because it was carnival time, many wore synthetic blue and yellow wigs and there were moments that resembled something in a Spielberg toyshop. Lazio scored another. Apparently it was over. But Perotti brought on the big striker Michele Cossato, the only home-bred Veronese in the squad. Since this combative man hardly ever gets a game, he ran on to the pitch furious and snarling like a dog. In less than ten minutes, at thirty-one years old, he had scored his first goal in Serie A, a wonderful header from a long curling cross. Then five minutes from time, Oddo, having played atrociously in defence, struck a free kick that went sizzling over the defensive wall. Marchigiani just pushed it round the post. Oh we were so close to equalising! In the final seconds, Lazio got a bizarre fifth with a lucky sequence of rebounds among defenders and attackers.

  Throughout all this excitement, Marco had been quite wild, exactly the opposite of his behaviour in the first half. Now, when the police prevented us from going down the stairs to leave the stadium, he grew even wilder. What possible reason could there be for keeping us? he demanded. We were twinned with Lazio. There was no danger of any fighting. A fat, squat policeman, a caricature of Latin arrogance, with huge moustache and squat, fat cigar between his lips shook his head and refused to let us go. He got his men to form a cordon at the top of the stairs. Marco protested. He had a train to catch. He wanted to get home before midnight. The police put on their riot helmets and pulled out their truncheons. Two or three had tear-gas launchers. The fans sung. Some of them joked with the policemen; a tall, gaunt boy kept leaning down to re-light the fat cop’s cigar for him, ironically patting his smart uniform, brushing some ash off his chest. But despite this good humour, they kept us there an hour. When finally we got to the gates we were met by a mob of cheering Lazio boys, mainly in their early teens, eager only to swap scarves. ‘I’ve missed my fucking train,’ Marco groaned. I said, ‘My flight’s not till nine, why don’t we sit in a bar for an hour or so.’

  So I heard his story. Married with two children, Marco had half-planned to use the excuse of the away game in Rome to start an affair. He had met a woman at a conference recently. In any event, he’d booked into a hotel last night and asked her out to dinner. It seemed she too had a boyfriend, but had sold the man some excuse. They had had a very pleasant and intimate meal. They walked for a bit around Piazza di Spagna and so on. ‘But when it was time to invite her up to the hotel room, I didn’t somehow.’

  As a result he had spent half the night watching porn on the hotel’s many channels, then all of this morning simply furious with himself, imagining the wonderful sex he could have had, if only he’d made a move. He was sure she was on for it. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been more decisive. ‘Never used to have these problems. When I saw you on the bridge I was feeling like a complete fool.’

  But now he felt great.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know. The game. I thought they played pretty well in the second half, don’t you? I mean, you can’t expect to win at the Olimpico. Che bastardo, Collina! But just being there. Camoranesi’s goal. What a great stadium! When it ended, I just wanted to get home as soon as possible. Feel really glad now that I didn’t do anything. You know the mess you get into if you start something with a woman.’

  We finished our beer and I headed out to the airport where, since this was the only Rome–Verona flight of the evening, I inevitably came across Puliero and the whole of the team at the departure gate. Apolloni was talking to Pastorello’s wife, a small overdressed woman with leather pants and stiletto heels. No doubt she uses fixtures in Rome to get in a little high-class shopping. Foschi was grim. His complexion looks worse every time I see him. Perotti, as usual, had disappeared to Genoa. ‘I can’t deal with the bloke,’ Seric said in loud Australian. ‘He takes me off at the end of the first half, and only when the game’s over he says, “Because I thought you’d hurt your ankle.” Doesn’t even have the courage to tell me he thinks I was playing badly. If he thinks I’ve hurt my bloody ankle, he can bloody well ask me.’

  ‘Great goal from Camoranesi.’

  ‘Didn’t see it,’ Seric said. ‘I spent the second half in the shower.’

  If only these players knew, I thought, what a service they were performing for people like Marco, for all of us, for whole armies of married men, not to mention all the adolescents who are spared the business of killing their parents, then perhaps it would all be easier for them to bear.

  ‘At least Napoli lost,’ I told Puliero. ‘And Vicenza and Reggina.’

  ‘Chievo won again,’ Puliero said gravely. ‘Who’s going to listen to me next year with Chievo in A and us in B?’

  On the plane I sat alone and spoke to no one.

  Protests

  In case they haven’t taken a look at the league table, or maybe they can’t read, someone should remind those shitty mercenaries and their puppet coach that we are third from bottom!

  Lo Scaligero

  WHY DO ITALIAN players protest so much? No that’s not quite right. Why do players who play in Italy protest so much? For foreigners soon adapt. In an article in Rigore, Claudio Ranieri, Italian coach of Chelsea, makes the interesting remark that although his team sometimes only has one English national on the pitch, nevertheless they play like an English team: the fans, the atmosphere, the whole dynamic of the country demands that they play like Englishmen.

  Fabrizio Ravanelli, who has himself played in England but returned to Italy a year ago, confesses that he should have known better than to protest so much when, in Lazio’s Champions’ Cup game at Le
eds, he was brought down in the box. He was awarded a penalty, but nevertheless insisted that the referee send the Leeds defender off. The referee wouldn’t. Ravanelli waved his arms and shouted. The English crowd went wild and whistled every time he touched the ball for the rest of the match. Afterwards he confessed ruefully, ‘I’d forgotten the English don’t like you to protest about these things; but normally of course the Mister tells me it’s part of my job to protest to the referee.’

  In the Liverpool–Roma match for entry to the UEFA cup quarter finals, the Italian team had their captain, Damiano Tommasi, sent off for protesting after the Spanish referee appeared to give Roma a penalty, then changed his mind and gave a corner instead. Tommasi, a Veronese, is famous for being Italy’s most politically correct player. Involved in a variety of charities, he speaks endlessly of the need to clean up football. He was prominent at the Pope’s famous peace game. He never, it seems, uses foul language on the pitch. Yet here he was getting himself sent off for prolonged and vociferous protest. Why do they do it?

  Once again, it has to do, I suspect, with the society’s uneasy relationship with the rules it sets itself. An article in the Arena announces: ‘Cartelle pazze: to pay is to consent!’ The cartelle pazze or ‘crazy tax demands’ are a new invention of the cash-hungry bureaucracy. Using heaven knows what computerised methods, the tax office sends out hundreds of thousands of demands, telling you your declaration of three or four years ago was wrong and that you have a few hundred thousand lire to pay. Then the public radio service warns you that many of these demands may be wrong. But then of course they may not be. Perhaps the government’s calculation is that since most people he about their income anyway, they will be glad to have got away with a relatively small fine.

  The anecdote the article recounts is as follows. A man receives a demand. By the time the post brings him the bad news, the deadline for payment is no more than a few days away. So he pays at once. Then his accountant tells him that actually his declaration was OK. He goes to the tax office to reclaim the money but is told that the act of payment is officially considered an admission of guilt, and hence there is now no redress. The first thing one must do before paying any tax demand, is protest, whether or not you are in the wrong.