A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  And then came the business with the linesman.

  Verona scored after twenty-five minutes. They held on easily till half-time. Nor did they show any sign of collapsing at the beginning of the second. But a huge tension was building up in the stadium. Juventus were beating Brescia in Turin. If things remained as they were, Roma’s seven-point lead at the top would be cut to just four. The crowd howled at every decision against their team. The scene was set.

  There is offside and offside. There is the ball launched forward by the midfield while three strikers break for goal on the edge of a ragged line of four opposing defenders. Anybody can be forgiven for getting this wrong. But when the defence advances and a striker is left behind, static, alone, and then receives the ball over the heads of the tall centre-backs, then there is no excuse. So it was. Evidently offside, Totti receives the ball, passes across the face of the goal to the advancing Batistuta who shoots, poorly, against Apolloni, whose interception goes into his own net. The spell was broken. Ten minutes later the big team were three–one up. The Lupi Scaligeri were drowned by an ocean of red-and-yellow.

  Returning home late that night it was to find the Hellas website steaming with indignation and paranoia.

  ‘Offside, Totti??? What on earth are we talking about … I’m telling you, the linesman checked very carefully on his new Rolex and saw perfectly well that it was not the right moment to raise his flag …’

  It’s a reference to a scandal of a couple of years ago when Roma’s president, Franco Sensi, was found to have given Rolex watches to all the Serie A referees.

  More ominously, there was this: ‘Here we are complaining about Totti, but what do you think we’re going to get next week with i Gobbi [Juventus]? Reflect, folks, reflect. Davids will hack like a butcher, completely unpunished, Inzaghi will at last find an “understanding ear” – butei, I’m afraid the big yellow-blue heart won’t be enough against those old thieves.’

  It’s uncanny, coming back to my notes now more than a month after the event, to think that this man, tapping on his keyboard after another disappointing Sunday afternoon, could have got it so exactly right. It was as if he had already clicked on a link and seen next week’s game before it happened.

  Caporetto

  Blah blah blah, ‘NEVER AGAIN SERIE B’ … Blah blah blah, ‘NO TEAM OF MINE HAS EVER BEEN RELEGATED’ … Blah blah blah, ‘ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS WIN AGAINST OUR DIRECT RIVALS’ … Blah blah blah … DIE, PASTORELLO!

  Cinzia, solohell@scontrotutti

  IT’S 25 APRIL. This morning, three weeks after the trip to Rome, two weeks after the game with Juve, an e-mail popped up on my screen bearing the legend ‘Re. Caporetto’. It’s a familiar and unhappy name. In October 1917, after two and a half years of trench warfare on the frozen peaks of the Alps, the Italian army was overwhelmed at Caporetto, north-west of Trieste. In a matter of days, and despite the most courageous rearguard action, vast areas of the patria and six hundred thousand troops were lost. So when I see that e-mail appear, I know exactly what it is about. And I know that I have no desire to open it. I’m still in the denial phase.

  Now it’s Wednesday and I’m travelling in Germany with my laptop and my mobile phone. A brief reading tour. At a presentation last night a nice young woman asked me why my novels deal with such sad subjects. In response I fielded the idea that one of the vocations of fiction is to find some pleasurable way of talking about those terrible things we feel we need to talk about, because they’re so important to us, yet at the same time shy away from, because they’re so painful. ‘The novel seeks to cast a spell’, I romantically suggested, ‘that makes it possible to enjoy the contemplation, at least while we are reading the book, of all those things that are painful to us.’

  Then, retiring to my room after the obligatory celebratory dinner with booksellers, I found an SMS on my phone, from Andy, one of the Lupi Scaligeri. ‘I thought we’d touched bottom Sunday’, the message says, ‘but last night [Monday evening] Hellas surely plumbed new depths.’ New depths, I wondered. Was that possible? ‘I’m in Germany,’ I tap out my response. ‘Haven’t seen the papers. What’s up?’ The reply comes back. ‘Perotti to stay.’

  Perotti. The only scrap of silver lining, I had thought, Sunday afternoon, slouching out of the stadium with a funereal crowd, will be Perotti’s inevitable resignation. How could anyone stay after a performance like that? ‘Pastorello on tranquillisers,’ the Arena had announced before the game. And afterwards? Would psycho drugs be enough? I myself was awake into the early hours. And now Wednesday morning, in Cologne, while all of Italy celebrates the day the country was finally rid of German occupation – for 25 April is Liberation Day – I find this message ‘Caporetto’ in my e-mail. Caporetto, the unacceptable defeat, the final humiliation. How, I wonder, staring at my laptop, how could any writer cast the spell that will make all this misery a pleasure?

  Sometimes, in the midst of the flood, the mind grabs at the strange coincidence, clutches at an incongruous piece of flotsam in the waves, and so rides down safely over the rapids. Concentrating on the uncanny, you are spared from considering the rest. I can but try.

  Before the game with Juventus I had a long talk with Gigi Apolloni. On the trip to Lecce and again at the airport returning from the Rome game, I had found our centre-back severe and off-putting. His close-set eyes and protruding brow under dark copper hair give him an air of angry gloom. Yet he smiled warmly when we met in the foyer of the Hellas offices. He had his five-year-old daughter with him, another intensely coloured red-head. ‘My wife’s in hospital,’ he explained. ‘Food poisoning.’ A smaller child was with a babysitter but he had no one to look after Irene. The little girl held out her hand.

  I immediately offered to cancel the meeting. ‘Not at all.’ He was earnest. It was as if I had an important job to do and he was determined not to let me down. We went into the conference room and sat at a large polished table beneath a giant TV screen. This is where the team watch the videos of their defeats.

  ‘Sit down and be patient, Irene,’ he said.

  Having three children myself, I knew that this wasn’t going to work and went back to reception to find the little girl some paper and pens. Then what I wanted to ask this most experienced of our players, a man who has played for Italy and in European cup finals, was how the team, individually and together, dealt with extremes of stress protracted over such a long period of time, what did the players do when the press were heaping scorn on them, the fans whistling, their market value falling? How do you pass from the cauldron of the stadium to the breakfast table the following morning?

  Apolloni joined his hands together on the table, sat up straight in his club blazer and began to make a series of the most general remarks: the players grew up with this, they are used to a ferocious selection process. He paused. ‘Anyhow, the fortune of a football player is to have a partner who understands the state you’re in after a bad game, because the danger is that you might take it out on her, or on the kids. So in a way,’ he goes on, ‘it was maybe easier when I wasn’t married at all and went out a lot with the other players.’ He stops, perhaps wondering if he has contradicted himself. ‘Now I don’t go out very much.’ He adds, ‘Of course, you always have to remember, however bad things get, that you’re lucky and that this is probably the best job anyone could ever have, playing football all day.’

  At once I fear that, like Martin Laursen, Luigi Apolloni won’t tell me anything I hadn’t already imagined. ‘Shush Irene,’ he snaps. The man has a fine soft voice and a rich Roman accent, but he was being very abrupt with his little daughter. ‘Be quiet and sit still, I have to talk to this gentleman.’

  He begins to tell me the things he thinks I should know. A player is always learning even after a lifetime in the game. Every goal conceded is a lesson to be studied with humility. On the other hand, the racism in the stadium shouldn’t really be taken too seriously because it’s just part of a tradition of stadium insults. ‘Irene, basta!’ He hesita
tes, pondering a moment. ‘Group spirit is desperately important.’ He wanted to insist on this point. Was he trying to tell me that Verona don’t have any?

  ‘Sometimes you’re pretty violent,’ I tell him.

  As we speak, Irene has finished a picture of a little girl pushing a pram and tosses aside the paper.

  ‘Football’s incredibly tense. Sometimes you lose your head. Italians are very tense people. The game is more stressful in Italy.’

  As with so many conversations, it’s as if I had arrived in the country yesterday, or as if the difference between Brits and Italians was so great that it could never be overcome or even truly measured: like the difference between men and women, perhaps. But now Apolloni is telling me of a famous occasion when he elbowed a striker in the face causing some damage. ‘I was ashamed. I mean, I really wished I hadn’t done it. But you get nervous, you know, you’re working each other up all the time, and if he’s sharper than you on the day and you feel he’s going to score you get tense. Things are bound to happen.’

  ‘Does the coach or the club ever encourage the players to be violent or to cheat?’

  ‘It’s in your character,’ Apolloni casts about. ‘It’s how you were brought up and what you saw at home.’ Then, unprompted, he says something that any Englishman living in Italy would be shot for saying. ‘Basically, you know, the further south you go, the trickier people get and the more likely to cheat. It’s a Latin thing.’

  ‘Morfeo is tricky.’

  ‘Domenico really winds you up. And Adrian [Mutu] was an asshole, if you’ll excuse my language, to fall for it and get himself sent off at the end of that game with Atalanta. With respect,’ he adds.

  He starts to talk about Mutu. ‘He’s married recently, of course, that should calm him down. Though he’s very young to marry, isn’t he? Twenty-two.’ Again this big man knits his handsome brow. ‘Adrian comes from a culture, you know, the Eastern Orthodox, where marriage is very, very serious. You don’t bail out of it easily. So it’s a big risk marrying at twenty-two.’

  It’s as if Apolloni could already foresee some awful personal crisis in Mutu’s life that will undoubtedly damage the team’s performance.

  ‘Irene, please, it’s not polite and I have to talk to this gentle-man.’

  The girl was climbing over him.

  ‘Let’s call it a day.’

  ‘Not at all.’ But now he says that he doesn’t know how to deal with kids. He’s shaking his head at the girl as if she were an impossible conundrum. ‘I often wonder, why isn’t there a book or something that tells you how to bring up your children?’

  ‘There are millions of books.’

  ‘But they don’t tell you exactly what to do, do they, I mean, when it actually comes to it, when you’re in some situation, you don’t feel you’ve been told how to behave.’

  One of the Più-mati recently claimed, on the net, that he had seen Apolloni go up to Perotti in training and demand of him rather abruptly, ‘So Mister, why don’t you tell us exactly what we’re supposed to do?’

  ‘I mean,’ Gigi was saying now, ‘I’m always so worried she’s going to hurt herself, I don’t know, on the stairs, in the lift.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  He sighs and explains that it all started with his brother. ‘I had this younger brother, you know, who was accident-prone. You turned your back and he had fallen out of a tree. You started some game and the next thing you know he had broken his leg. We were always in the casualty ward. I was constantly nervous that he would be killed.’ He paused. ‘C’è sempre l’incidente in agguato.’ There’s always an accident/incident lying in wait.

  Only later, driving home, did I realise that these few casual remarks had been the core of the interview. They were the only thing Apolloni had really told me. Our big central defender is a man whose whole life is dedicated to accident-prevention and damage-limitation. And the most terrible damage of all is when the other side scores.

  Stopping at a traffic light, I recalled something I translated, years ago, about the sacred texts of ancient India. The greatest moral value, it said somewhere in this translation, was intense ‘wakefulness’. The accident is always someone’s fault. You must be hyperconscious, hypercautious. You mustn’t blink. It was the distinguishing feature of the gods that they never blinked. Watch, watch, watch and pray. How exhausting! No wonder Apolloni’s whole face is alive with nervous tension. ‘I’m getting older,’ he told me, just before we parted. ‘I don’t know if they’ll want me for another season.’

  How could I not remember all this when the following Sunday the accident happened, and happened above all thanks, no thanks, to Gigi Apolloni? Here is something uncanny to take us through the game with Juventus.

  It was the forty-eighth minute of the first half. The fourth man had indicated two minutes of injury time, but for some reason Juve’s keeper, Van der Saar, was being allowed to kick the ball upfield in the forty-eighth. Verona had just taken a corner. The ball sailed across the centre-line towards the Curva Sud. Laursen was not there to clear it. He had gone up for the corner. There was only Apolloni to watch over the tall, strong and immensely tricky Pippo Inzaghi. The ball bounced long. Could Apolloni have got a foot to it at this point and whacked it clear? Maybe. But his attention wavered. He blinked perhaps. In a flash Inzaghi had sprung between the defender and the ball. Apolloni saw the disaster now and began to push and grab. Inzaghi wouldn’t go down. Strong as an ox, he fought his way into the area. Apolloni had his arm round him. At that point Inzaghi decided it was time to fall. Penalty. Yellow card. One–nil.

  And so, despite a gutsy second half, the game ended. It’s an unhappy tale. But we’re still far from Caporetto. Losing one–nil on a penalty to Juve wouldn’t even be humiliating for Manchester United or Bayern Munich. Nor is our position in the league table irretrievable. Before going to Rome we were sixth from bottom. Before the game with Juve we were joint-fifth. Now we are joint-fourth and so back in the relegation zone. But we have two relatively easy fixtures to get ourselves back in the running: Brescia (third to bottom) away, then Reggina (second to bottom) at home.

  So the brigate were in pretty good spirits, cheerfully tipsy and optimistic, as we boarded the train to Brescia on 14 April. Tomorrow was Easter Sunday. We would rise again. Suddenly, pushing along a corridor, I found myself face to face with Albe, the man who made up so many songs on the bus to Bari. ‘Tim Parks!’ he said. He knew who I was now. ‘Where have you been?’ I asked. I hadn’t seen him since the game against Vicenza. I hadn’t seen Glass-eye at all. ‘Oh personal difficulties on my part,’ Albe chuckled, but he went on to explain that others had been given a stadium ban. He began to list various names. Cain’s was among them and many others I had met and lost sight of. It was for throwing seats in Turin; though they hadn’t, Albe insisted indignantly, thrown them at anyone.

  The Brescian landscape is distinctive. The town sits at the northern extreme of the Po plain beneath a barrier of steep and menacingly dark hills. Little more than four sheds round a pitch, the small, quaint stadium is hugely overshadowed by these hills, which, like Tolkien’s Mordor, seem always to be capped by a pall of black cloud. This afternoon the effect was made even more disturbing by a sharp spring sunshine that had the pitch glowing emerald-green while just beyond, sky and mountains seemed about to topple forwards. Far from rising again, we were about to be smothered in a great mass of gloom.

  We were delayed more than an hour by the police. Having rushed up the staircase and out on to the stands just as Collina blew his whistle, I found myself at a railing with a policeman on one side, intent on the game, and the young Alcohol – tall, chubby and gormless – on the other. For exactly two seconds, he stopped moaning to say hello to me. Then he began again. ‘Why why why? Deficiente! Idiot. Perotti’s a fool. Oh please. Please! But why does he always play this formation. Why can’t Mazzola stop the ball. Why is he playing. Useless. You’re useless. Where’s Italiano? Why does he change the team every fuckin
g game? Oh Christ, pass, pass, Dio boia, pass!’

  Immediately I arrived, Ferron saved brilliantly from Hubner who had broken through the defence and was running straight at him. Then the same again, an exact action-replay. Meantime, Alcohol’s litany went on and on. ‘But this is hopeless, hopeless, hopeless!’ Inevitably, about twenty minutes in, Baggio scored from a sweet free kick just outside the box. Upon which, I abandoned Alcohol and moved to the other side of the guest section. It was too much like babysitting a dying dog.

  The second half might as well not have happened. Perhaps bored by the sheer dullness of the game, Collina, who had refereed impeccably until ten minutes from time, suddenly sent Camoranesi off for what looked like no more than the usual shoulder to shoulder on the ball. Then, fatally, Laursen was given a yellow card for brushing with Baggio, around whose pony-tail and slightly camp kudos the referee was determined to preserve a demilitarised zone. Since Laursen has already collected three yellow cards in previous games that means he will now be suspended.

  Meantime, and these were the only exciting moments, Ferron continued to save instinctively, brilliantly, from the lanky Hubner who for the fourth, fifth and then, amazingly, sixth time found himself alone in front of Verona’s goal. But he couldn’t score, and as a result Verona, only one down, were forced to keep trying to equalise, though without ever getting near the goal. In the final seconds, Collina sent off Gonnella for swearing at him and the match was really over. Not only had Hellas lost the game, most deservedly, but three key players – Camoranesi, Laursen and Gonnella – were out for next week. It was another self-destruct job.

  Hellas were now third from bottom. Voices on The Wall announced that at the Tuesday training session we must launch a contestazione – a protest. Like so many things in Italy – a government crisis, a half-day metro strike – there is something highly ritualistic about the contestazione. It’s a sort of formal declaration of rupture between fans and players, who have to be reminded that we pay to see them. They must honour the team colours.