A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  So it is fixed. I feel relief and concern. At half-time everyone is festive. We’re going to do it. It’s OK. The results from the other stadiums look good. If things go well we’ll catch up with fourth-from-bottom. Then next week, if we can only beat Perugia … Twenty minutes into the second half, Parma equalised.

  There are no words for what follows. I’m so depressed. And ashamed too. You were happy it was fixed, Tim. You were happy that the game was set up. And now you’re appalled that it isn’t set up. And appalled that you should wish it was. Appalled that, once again, for the seventeenth, repeat seventeenth, time this season, you have made a long journey to see Verona fail to win away.

  The minutes ticked by. The crowds tried to sing. Behind me a pretty young girl with freckles stood anxiously beside her bellowing boyfriend. Directly in front, a huge fat bare-chested man with paunch and pony-tail began the monkey grunts. Ominously one or two others joined in. Immediately Mantice yelled through the megaphone to stop. ‘VE-RO-NA.’ I made an effort to join in. At least the players are giving it everything, I thought. The attacks were incessant now. In Parma’s goal, Buffon saves. And again. If it was fixed, surely he wouldn’t? Laursen goes down in the box. I’m barely ten yards away. I can see this is a penalty. Why doesn’t the ref give it, if the game’s fixed? It’s not fixed and we’re not going to win. Then Ferron saves. Twice. Why would Parma try to score, if it was fixed? Oh what’s wrong with these people! The fans are chanting constantly, admirably. But my voice falters. I feel sick. I need to sit down. I’m going to faint. In the last ten minutes Verona have three, four, five opportunities. Adailton misses from point-blank range. Perhaps it is fixed, but all the same somebody still has to stick the ball in the net. And we can’t even do that. We’re useless.

  Once again, the lumbering Cossato is wheeled on. Our only Veronese. He’s only there because Bonazzoli is out. Gilardino is out. I always feel Perotti has lost hope when he wheels on Cossato. And I remember that Cossato used to play for Chievo, till they passed him on to us last year, just as he turned thirty. That passage, I tell myself, of a striker past his best from the smaller team to the larger marked the transfer of power from Hellas to Chievo. They thought the man wasn’t good enough for Serie B. Inexplicably, we took him in A, and what has he done? Nothing. Just that one goal against Lazio when it was already too late to matter.

  Cossato charges madly into the fray and immediately misses a good chance. It’s too much. I have to crouch down for a moment. We’re finished. I’m really not well. It’s mathematical. At the eighty-seventh another cross comes curling low into the box. Cossato launches himself in a wild dive. He makes contact and crashes the ball past Buffon. Goal. Deprived of exhibitions of racism, the guy from the NYT must have taken splendid pictures of thousands and thousands of yellow-blue bodies falling over each other. Among whom myself shouting, shamelessly, ‘Cossato, Super-Mike, I love you!’

  Honi soit qui mal y pense. Shortly after the game, Napoli’s angry chairman offers a different version. ‘Thinking ill is a sin,’ Corbelli tells the TV cameras, ‘but all too often one gets it right.’ He promises he is going to demand an enquiry into the relations between Parma and Verona and the exact nature of the ownership of Hellas. Over the web comes the inevitable answer: ‘Corbelli vaffanculo. Hellas, campione d’Italia.’ On the coach back someone swears to me he saw Buffon wink as he retrieved the ball from the back of the net. I don’t believe it. Your Italian Harlequin is too professional for that kind of silliness. A week later, over a cappuccino, Martin Laursen earnestly assures me that the game wasn’t fixed. ‘It was a real, hard game, Tim.’ ‘Would they have told you if it was?’ I ask.

  Il Giorno del Giudizio

  In the week preceding Verona–Perugia, Perugia will be training on the beach, in the morning under the sunshades, in the afternoon strolling along Viale Dante, in the evening eating maccaroni and drinking Martinis till late.

  Ps. Free drinks for me afterwards in Piazza Bra.

  San Francesco (Perugia)

  I COME DOWNSTAIRS sevenish on the Sunday morning, feeling pretty rough, can’t sleep, turn on the radio. ‘Beep beep beep.’ The news. An ominous silence, then: ‘Oggi è il giorno del giudizio.’ It’s a solemn voice. Judgment Day! God, what’s happened? Palestine in flames? Only after about thirty seconds do I realise that today’s main headline has gone to football. It’s Judgment Day for Serie A. ‘Two points clear of Juventus,’ the voice goes on, ‘Roma must win against Parma to be sure of the scudetto. One point behind Juve, Lazio are still hoping in a miracle.’ And they begin to interview the big stars, the heavyweight coaches. I turn it off. Who cares about what’s going on at the top? The can of worms at the bottom is so much more interesting. An hour or so later, we head off as a family for our Sunday morning cappuccino. It’s a ritual. Entering the bar, Michele rushes to grab the Gazzetta. The main banner headline reads ‘IL GIORNO DEL GIUDIZIO’. Uncanny!

  But what kind of judgment is it going to be? Fast and fair as Saint Peter at the pearly gates? As far as the relegation scenario is concerned, the Gazzetta offers a bewildering series of tables, percentages and hypotheses. It’s almost as bad as the election results. Four teams must go down. Only Bari are mathematically out. Vicenza and Napoli are on 33 points. Lecce, Reggina and Verona are on 34. Of these five, three will be lost, two will be saved. ‘Given the rule of one point for a draw and three for a win, there are 243 possible combinations of results between the five interested teams,’ announces the Gazzetta, ‘with correspondingly numerous consequences.’ The paper goes on to list them. All 243. Spooning the foam off our coffees, Michele and I gaze and gaze at the names and the figures, while the women folk shake their heads.

  Essentially:

  Napoli (33 points) are away to Fiorentina. In normal circumstances they would lose and go down.

  Vicenza (33 points) are away to Udinese. In normal circumstances they would lose and go down.

  Reggina (34 points) have Milan at home. In normal circumstances they would lose, but perhaps stay up if all the others lose.

  Lecce (34 points) have Lazio at home. In normal circumstances they would lose, but again could stay up just the same.

  Verona (34 points) are at home to Perugia. In normal circumstances they would draw or win and stay up.

  ‘Fantastic,’ Michele concludes. ‘Easy.’

  ‘Look at the betting odds, Mick.’

  He looks. In each game the bookmakers are favouring the weaker side. Reggina will beat Milan, they predict; Lecce will beat Lazio. These aren’t normal circumstances.

  ‘May the best team win!’ announces my wife.

  ‘The hell with the best team,’ Michele tells her. ‘It’s got to be Hellas.’

  The day is furiously hot and sticky. Everybody’s in the ground unnecessarily early. ‘Trembling,’ Pietro says cheerfully as I take my place beside him. ‘Trembling.’

  Then all around us people start to remember that last year Perugia, miserable Perugia, took the scudetto away from Juve by beating them on the last game of the season under torrential rain. ‘Strange team,’ says the pessimist in the row in front, ‘strange tradition. I mean, they had nothing to gain by beating Juve. They were already safe. And everything to lose. Imagine having the power of Juve against you when something’s being debated in the Football Federation. Most teams would just have let them score. Like Parma with us.’

  ‘What’s going to happen in the other games?’ I ask Pietro.

  ‘They’ll all win,’ he says. ‘Reggina, Lecce, Napoli, Vicenza.’

  ‘But that’s scandalous,’ Michele bursts out. ‘They can’t all beat teams like Lazio and Milan.’

  ‘Something’ll go wrong somewhere,’ I hazard. ‘Someone will screw up the gift penalty, or someone on the other side will score by accident. Like Mboma.’

  ‘No.’ It’s the pessimist in front of me. ‘They’ll let them win. You’ll see.’

  ‘Our only hope’, Pietro concludes, ‘is if Roma don’t score early against
Parma. Or if Parma should actually take the lead. In that case, with the half-chance that Roma might actually lose and Juve maybe only draw, then Lazio will want to be winning at Lecce so as to catch up with the leaders for a play-off for the scudetto. Otherwise Lazio’ll give up and Lecce are safe.’

  It’s bewildering. The combinations, the psychology. Apparently nobody can just go out on the field and play their game. Only the ingenuous English could ever imagine or even desire such a thing. What a huge amount of mental energy, I tell myself, is going to be required in the ninety minutes ahead. The whole length of the bel paese will be frenetically tangled together in a back and forth of results as now this team now that slips into B, crawls back into A.

  The referee looks at his watch. It’s particularly important that the battles across the country be synchronised so that nobody has the advantage of knowing the final result from elsewhere while they’re still playing. The normal Saturday anticipi and Sunday posticipo have been cancelled. The whole of Serie A, all eighteen teams, are playing simultaneously. There! The whistle blows, the Day of Judgment. At least after ninety minutes, it’ll be over. I’m already exhausted.

  Perotti has made one of his bizarre decisions, preferring the aging wardrobe Mazzola to the peppier Italiano. The front page of this morning’s Arena carried two small colour photos. One of Roma’s coach Fabio Capello, one of Perotti. Capello was leaning forward, shaking his fist, jaws tense in a craggy face, a fierce frizz of hair, huge mouth wide open in a bellow of incitement. Attilio Perotti was leaning against the trainer’s bench looking vacantly into the sky, as if the world had ended some time ago and he couldn’t understand why he was still down here. ‘We never listen to a word he says,’ Laursen told me just a couple of days ago. ‘He’s hopeless.’

  All the same, Verona go on the attack. In Perugia’s goal Mazzantini makes a reflex save. After just ninety seconds the scoreboard begins to flash. Vicenza are already a goal up at Udine. They’ve overtaken us. Serie B. The crowd groans. Mazzantini saves again. After ten minutes Vicenza are two–nil up. Again Mazzantini saves. After twenty minutes it’s Udinese 0, Vicenza 3. ‘It’s an outrage,’ Michele is screaming. ‘It’s impossible. Vicenza can’t score three at Udine. They’re hopeless. It’s fixed.’

  Ten yards outside a crowded Perugia box, Anthony Seric looks up, shoots. It’s a futile piece of presumption. Seric is left-back. He’s feisty and fast, but he’s never scored. And Marco Mazzantini is on form today. A big burly caveman with straggly shoulder-length hair and a barrel chest, he has the unexpected agility of the giant. Seric shoots from thirty yards. Why do professional players waste promising situations like this? Why didn’t he look for a head and cross? Still, there’s something odd about this shot. It’s not that it takes a deflection, but, already low, it seems to be dipping and bobbing. Sure of himself, Mazzantini goes to gather it. As if radio-controlled, the ball drops very suddenly and passes through his legs.

  This was the turning point of the game. The thought that he would be accused of fixing the game by letting in the easiest of shots must have driven Mazzantini mad. Precisely because of the suspicions and paranoia that surround these end-of-season matches, it was now suddenly imperative for the keeper that Verona shouldn’t win. He was beside himself and he transmitted this fury to the whole of his team. At once the pitch was a battlefield. Again Apolloni was sent off. His fifth expulsion this year. A record in Serie A. With him went Liverani, one of Perugia’s stars. The atmosphere was electric. Then, on the stroke of half-time, the scoreboard announced that Lazio had gone one up against Lecce. Now Verona and Vicenza were both safe, the others doomed. No sooner had the crowd’s roar died down than the pessimist in front turns to say, ‘Bari, Napoli, Lecce, Reggina. There wouldn’t be a single club south of Rome in Serie A. They’ll never let that happen. You watch.’

  The interval drags by. What can one do during an interval but savour one’s anxiety? At last the teams reappear. Ten against ten. But the referee has to wait for a man on the touch-line with a radio to tell him that all the other games are ready to kick off. Reggio Calabria, Lecce, Florence, Rome, Udine. We must stay synchronised. The ref waits. One of the games must be late resuming. The man on the touch-line has the radio at his ear. It’s hilarious to watch the ostentatious mechanics of fairness when nobody believes for a moment that all these games are being fairly contested. The crowd wait. The referee is impassive. The players are wilting in the sunshine. Serie B or A in forty-five minutes. Hell never ends, I tell myself, but the football season finally does. This is it. Why won’t the referee blow? Blow, damn you! The players are sitting down. It isn’t football weather. The crowd are baying. Finally, he blows.

  Barely three minutes have passed before Napoli score away at Fiorentina. They’re just a point behind us. ‘Ecco!’ the pessimist says. One of the advantages of being a pessimist is that you find a kind of warped consolation when things go as badly as you predicted. Almost simultaneously, Lecce equalise against Lazio. ‘Ecco!’ ‘That’s because Roma are beating Parma,’ comments Pietro. ‘Lazio have given up.’ So Lecce are now only two points behind us. The whole thing’s so confusing, I’m as disorientated as Verona’s miserable defence when, only a couple of minutes later, Perugia send in a cross from the left and, all alone on the far post, a red-shirted striker is there to stretch a leg and score. One–all. Serie B.

  Mazzantini, now standing directly beneath the Curva Sud, goes wild with delight. His blunder is no longer determining. Now he can concentrate on making sure nobody believes the game was fixed. And he does. For the next half an hour the whole game is going to be atrociously focused on this one man and his extraordinary antics, which are not unrelated to the now-intense antagonism developing between himself and the crowd behind. These are things that TV will never capture.

  For Verona are now back in the only situation they really know how to play in: trying to climb out of a deep deep hole. As at Parma, the appropriate substitutions are made, the attacks begin, uninspired but effective: down the wing, cross, header, Mazzantini saves. Down the wing, cross, header, Mazzantini saves. As entertainment it’s nothing but pure nerves. Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. The curva are chanting every chant they know. It’s a way of keeping the pain in the back of the mind. You sing so as not to think. ‘Tu sei il Verona, il mio Verona,’ – this to the tune of ‘You are my sunshine’, – ‘mi fai feli-ce! Se segni un gol!’ You make me happy when you score.

  Mazzantini starts to waste time. It’s the goalkeeper’s prerogative. When the ball goes out he insists on walking to get it, ignoring the ball that the ball-boy tosses to him. The curva go wild. They begin to bait him. They’re giving him the monkey grunts. He makes an irritated gesture with his arm as if brushing aside a fly. ‘Mazzantini faccia da cul.’ He wastes even more time. He sets up the ball for a kick, retreats, decides it isn’t in quite the right place, sets it up again. The referee waves for him to speed up, but doesn’t show a yellow card. Mazzantini is enjoying it. He’s enjoying wasting this precious Serie A time. He made a stupid mistake in the first half, a mistake he knows will be shown again and again on TV, especially if Verona stay up because of it. They won’t show all his spectacular saves. It’s very important for Mazzantini, personally, that Verona go down. The man’s diabolical, a devil demanding our soul from Saint Peter at the gate. The goal is the gate. He won’t let us through.

  Another cross comes over. It has to be said that Verona are good at getting into a crossing position, even if they apparently know of no other way of approaching the goal. It must be the tenth or twentieth cross. I’m not impressed. Cossato dives for it. How many has he missed? This time he gets there. This time he sends the keeper the wrong way. Mazzantini is already in the air. You’ve gone the wrong way! But with an incredible contortion of the hips, this terrible man gets a leg to it. Or is it a tail? Saved. I can’t bear it. It’s too much. I’m actually watching through a crack between my fingers when Salvetti pops up among four defenders to pick up the loose ball and belt
it in. Serie A.

  Serie A. In the celebrations that follow even the pessimist seems to have been silenced. To confirm our success Milan at last break the ice at Reggina. The southern team are now three points adrift. Fiorentina equalise against Napoli. Likewise three points behind. Perhaps these games aren’t fixed, after all. We’ve done it.

  Not if Mazzantini can help it. There are fifteen minutes left. Now he takes a goal kick in less than two seconds. Now he starts advancing out of his area with the ball. Now he starts running up the field to try to score himself when Perugia win a corner. It’s obscene. Why is he so determined to bury us? Meantime, Lecce have scored again against Lazio. They’re winning. They’ve caught us up. A team who haven’t won in their last eleven games are beating Lazio. Who cares? We stay up with Lecce. All the others down. Everyone to Piazza Bra after the game. The ritual plunge in the fountain. Endless beers. What an end to my book. Impossible salvation.

  Amid the noise someone’s shaking my shoulder from behind. It’s Massimo. He who shouts ‘mongolo’. He has a radio. ‘Reggina have equalised,’ he says. Who cares? Who cares so long as they don’t win? Two minutes later, always precious seconds ahead of the scoreboard, he shakes my shoulder again. ‘Reggina have gone ahead.’ Reggina are beating Milan. It’s impossible! To complete the scandal, just as the final whistle blows at the Bentegodi, the news comes through that Edmundo has scored for Naples at Fiorentina. All five bottom teams have won. The bookies were right. In exemplary Christian fashion, none of the big teams were willing to bury the small ones. This is Italy. Blessed are the weak, when nothing’s at stake for the strong. After all, they might return the favour some day. Video will show how improbable those last-minute winners were. Forget the Parma–Verona fix. Watch Milan letting Reggina score two in four minutes. Watch the Fiorentina defence stand still as Edmundo runs round them all.