by Tim Parks
I try to chat to the men in the seat in front. ‘What’s your name?’ I ask one. He smiles strangely. ‘Oh, you know me, you’ve seen me plenty of times on the Zanzibar bus.’ I look at him. I feel I have seen him before. But he’s not one of the fans who stand in the curva. Why didn’t he tell me his name? And who are those two beefy boys who talk to nobody but each other, who are so discreet and elegant? ‘Who are these guys?’ I demand of the man behind me. It’s Francesco, the photographer. He leans forward:
‘Seems Galliani, after he was threatened, you know, at the game last Sunday, phoned Pastorello and told him not to go down to Reggio without at least two bodyguards.’
‘But if he was really threatened with a gun, why didn’t he make some public statement about it?’
The fat journalist next to Francesco sniggers. He’s a TV man. ‘Galliani is Milan, isn’t he? Milan is Berlusconi. New Prime Minister doesn’t want trouble with one of the cities where he hopes to build up support. Another reason for Milan losing …’
Can this be true? The fat journalist assures me that on the Monday morning he did everything to find out what really happened down there to Galliani. No one would say.
The plane lands towards nine p.m. and a half hour later we’re in Reggio. It’s Saturday evening. How fitting that the story should end here, in this one town in Serie A that we haven’t visited so far, playing the one team who seem most responsible for our risking relegation: that victory thrown away in the last seconds in neutral Catania; the three-nil humiliation at the Bentegodi, worst home result of the season. Pulling into their hotel, the players are met by a band of jeering locals.
I escape to a sea-front restaurant with a few of the journalists and a man they all refer to, behind his back, as the Unnameable, because convinced he brings bad luck. Whenever there’s a group in Italy there is always one person who’s supposed to bring bad luck. On the way we’re joined by a commentator for public TV. Small, dry and dapper, this man has no other conversation than to remind us from time to time that he is a commentator for public TV, a cut above us provincials that is. Dullest of conversationalists, he eats far more than his slim, dried-up figure would appear to need. The waiter, facetiously elegant in his white jacket, puts on the usual show of southern hospitality. A cool breeze is blowing in off the Strait of Messina. The lights are pricking out in Sicily on the further shore.
‘There is a wide variety of hors d’oeuvres,’ announces the waiter. ‘Let me bring you a selection.’ His step has a flounce that makes the jacket even more theatrical. ‘There is a wide variety of main dishes,’ he says. ‘Let me bring you a selection.’ His moustaches smile fondly as the bill piles up. The other guys are obviously on expenses. But even the fat journalist can’t keep up with the man from public TV who astounds the waiter by actually asking for seconds of one of the hors d’oeuvres. I’m already way over capacity, gasping.
Meantime, the conversation is a fierce battle as to whether Pastorello is a genius or an idiot. The Unnameable thinks he’s a genius. Another journalist thinks he’s an idiot. There’s no middle ground. But we all hate Chievo. By the time it comes to the ice-cream that follows the main course and the main dessert, I just have to say no. The dinner seems to be dragging out as unnecessarily as the football season. It’s as if I were being forced to fight against cramps through the last minutes of extra time. Then someone points across the restaurant – ‘Look guys!’ – and there, dragging out the evening with us, is tomorrow’s referee, Stefano Braschi. It’s one-thirty in the morning.
‘What’s his record with Verona?’ I ask. ‘No, I can’t eat this ice-cream,’ I tell the waiter.
‘Never kind to us,’ the fat journalist says, ‘or to Reggina for that matter. But known not to be a pushover for home crowds.’
‘That’s a relief. No, I’m sorry, I can’t.’
The waiter is still hovering. ‘Oh, you must try it. It’s a local speciality.’ The man never stops smiling.
‘To refuse a dish brings bad luck,’ the Unnameable says with a self-regarding smile.
The fat journalist nods solemnly. ‘It is bad luck not to accept food. Especially down south.’
‘Fuck fucking bad luck,’ I shout. And to the waiter: ‘If you bring it, I won’t eat it. Not even if it means Verona losing ten-nil.’
The others are taken aback. The tension must be getting to me. The waiter brings the ice-cream all the same. Briefly reminding us he’s from public TV, the small, dapper fellow generously eats it for me. By the door as we’re leaving, I find Braschi right beside me. He’s an imperious figure, head held high, Roman nose, strong chest, the perfect, cinematic referee. An elderly man gets up from a table and comes over to speak to us. There’s a whine in his voice. He knows Braschi is within earshot. ‘You’ve got to let us win tomorrow. Here in Reggio, our football team is all we’ve got. You have so much up north. You have work and opportunity. You have Chievo. We have nothing. Let us at least keep our team in Serie A.’ Brusquely, I reply, ‘I’ll be sure to tell the players they have to lose for your sake.’
Towards three in the morning there’s a dull explosion. Then the racket begins, chants, klaxons. It goes on for an hour and a half. The following morning a man from the Gazzetta dello Sport tells me he went down into the street and saw the police in obvious connivance grinning and even chatting with local fans determined to give Hellas a bad night. ‘The noise stopped’, he claimed, ‘when the man from the Verona Digos went down.’ The Digos is Italy’s most expert plain-clothes police branch. It seems the club has actually brought along not only a couple of bodyguards, but its own policemen. I remember that strange moment in the plane when the vaguely familiar face said: ‘You’ve seen me many times on the Zanzibar bus.’ The fans always say there are plain-clothes policemen among them. Nothing could be more emblematic of the divisions in Italy than a northern team’s need to bring its own policemen to a southern game. On the other hand, the fact that the lower-rank southern policemen responded to a senior officer from the north suggests there is a oneness at some level.
‘Why didn’t you take a hotel maybe fifty kilometres out of town?’ I ask Foschi in the foyer after breakfast. He explodes. ‘It would have been exactly the same. Exactly. You don’t understand anything. What’s a little lost sleep to a twenty-two-year-old? Nothing. Nothing. It’ll only wire them up. They need to be wired.’
Clearly the guy who’s most wired of all is Foschi.
Pastorello and Massimiliano, the press boy, have gone out to mass. Pointless to ask them what their prayers might be. I take a walk along the waterfront. Only a stone’s throw from the hotel, this must be one of the most beautiful waterfronts in the world, yet the players can’t come out to enjoy it, in case some idiot should throw a stone. They won’t see the giant palms, the generous medlar trees, the waves and sails and the sparkle across the water along the Sicilian shore. They will be imprisoned in the hotel all day till the evening’s six-o’clock kick-off.
Turning in from the sea, though, it’s a different story. The town climbs steeply into the makeshift and ugly, buildings piled haphazard on the barren rock. It’s Sunday. Everything’s closed. The whole town is waiting for the game. The last game at last.
‘Bastardi! Merda!’ Getting back to the hotel, it’s to find that five or six players have poked their noses outside the porch. Two police cars are parked in the road and on the opposite pavement a crowd are shouting insults. ‘Figli di puttana! Go home!’ The players watch calmly, savouring the atmosphere. A couple of them have even brought out seats so they can take it easy while they’re insulted. ‘This is Italy,’ announces the handsome, phlegmatic Mazzola.
Then I’m told that the building immediately behind the protestors is the city’s Museo Nazionale. I cross the road, skirt the demonstrators, pay my entrance fee. The museum houses the beautiful warrior bronzes of Riace, larger-than-life Greek sculptures salvaged from the sea thirty years ago. On the upper floors, rather less distinguished, is an anonymous eighteenth-cent
ury painting showing Cain slaying Abel, and a couple of those tedious scenes of cannon-fire over Napoleonic charges that you find in all museums. ‘Bastardi. Merda!!’ The voices rise from the street below. Cain brings down his club on Abel. The muskets rattle. The Greek warriors strike defiant poses. Looking out of the window, I see Perotti has appeared. Arms folded, gaze vacant, there is nothing Napoleonic about him.
‘Bastardi, merda,’ the crowd are shouting as I climb the stairs of the stadium. An hour before kick-off, the stands are already full, except, that is, for the small section reserved for ‘guests’. The Verona boys are just arriving. Less than a hundred I’d say, a poor showing, but then the journey is sixteen hours by train. The crowd greet them with monkey grunts, then a thunderous chant that’s new to me: ‘Uccidere, uccidere!!’ Kill. Kill.
It’s a quaint little stadium, housing perhaps twenty-five or thirty thousand. From the stairs, you can look out to the idyllic sea. ‘Kill, Kill!’ Since Reggina play in claret, there’s a disturbingly dark red look to the sea of bodies. ‘Kill, kill!’ The Brigate Gialloblù make their inevitable gestures in response. I can just make out Fondo and a couple of the others. They hang up their old banners. Then Pastorello appears with Foschi, Agnolin and the bodyguards. Immediately, the crowd responds with a shriek. ‘Fuori!’ they begin. Out! ‘Fuori, fuori!’ Then, ‘Ladro!’ Thief. Even the people in the VIP section are screaming and making gestures. Corrado Ferlaino, Vice-president of Napoli, has come along with his wife to support Reggina. They too are shouting, ‘Fuori. Fuori. Ladro!’ Betraying no emotion, Pastorello takes his seat. My respect for him rises enormously. The bodyguards are stationed one at each end of his row of seats.
This time I’m not with the club representatives. And I can’t join the brigate, because then I might never make it to the plane afterwards. So together with a boy called Stefano, who looks after the Hellas website, I’ve been given a place among the Reggina fans. Our seats aren’t together. Stefano is frightened. The closer it gets to kick-off, the clearer it becomes that things are going to get hot if people realise we’re not one of them. ‘You’re a scout from England,’ Stefano says. ‘We don’t speak a word of Italian.’ But I know it won’t wash. I know that it will be impossible for the person next to me not to sense that I want Verona to win. These are feelings you can’t hide. Eventually, we fight our way to the press section and persuade someone to let us climb the railing. At exactly six o’clock Braschi blows his whistle. In a couple of hours, or a little longer if we go to extra time, if we go to penalties, this game, this season, will be over. I will finally be free to think of something else.
Actually, it’s not nail-biting at all. Sitting in the front row of the press section, head pushed between two railings, I watch Verona perform admirably. Apart from the inexplicable selection, again, of Mazzola, Perotti seems to have got it right. He’s packed five in midfield, with four at the back and just one up front. It’s Gilardino, now recovered from his accident in the canal. The result is that Verona are making all the running. Overwhelmed by nerves, Reggina keep giving away the ball. What a mystery this Verona team is, I’m thinking. How strange that these talented boys, who now seem to have nerves of steel, should have to be here at a miserable play-off, and this in a year when the quality of football in Serie A has been at its worst for a decade.
‘The first place you’re relegated is inside your head,’ the experienced Ferron had said to one of the journalists before the game, ‘then only after that on the field. And in their heads these boys have never gone down.’ After about forty really rather pleasant minutes, I’m beginning to believe Ferron was right. This team are not going to go down. Until, in one of those terrible lapses that have characterised the season, Reggina are given a little space and striker Zanchetta is allowed to shoot. From outside the box he finds exactly the dream diagonal that will beat the wise Ferron and bounce in off the post. One in a million, I’m shaking my head. One in a million! The crowd have hardly stopped baying when Reggina score again. This time there’s an unforgivable defensive mix-up, a lucky rebound. The stadium explodes. Two–nil. Reggina in A. All round Pastorello people are giving the man the so-called ‘ombrello’. Ferlaino’s wife included. Stick that up your arse! She stands up and clenches her fist. ‘God plays in claret,’ someone’s shrieking.
At half-time I try to console myself with the thought that at least this way there will be no crowd trouble at the end. People will be nice to us and tell us not to be too upset. In their compound, the brigate are trying to chant, but it sounds feeble. Puliero comes to speak to me. Even in the radio box, he’s having to keep his voice down. He was hit on the head by a plastic water bottle. ‘Pessimistic.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s tough now.’
The second half is one of emotional paralysis. We’ve come all this way, through time, through space, for nothing. Prepare for defeat. Prepare to be quiet and respect people’s unhappiness on the plane home. Yet … there is the away-goals rule. Never have I felt more grateful for the away-goals rule. If we were to score now, I remember, unlikely as that may seem, at two-all on aggregate the away goal will count double. We can still do it.
After the game I heard from so many people what they were doing during these impossible minutes. Matteo is at his friend Ernie’s house, watching on pay TV, smoking endless cigarettes. Driving back from a brief holiday with wife and kid, Pietro keeps turning the radio on and off, on and off. It’s bad luck to listen to a whole game on the radio. The Più-mati are gathered round Beppe’s television. The gloom is deep. Cris-do-I-bother-anyone can’t bear it: on holiday, he’s left the hotel TV lounge and has gone to the beach to stare at the sea. My son Michele, meanwhile, is at his grandmother’s in Pescara lying on his bed, not afraid to hear every last sad detail on the radio. He doesn’t believe in bad luck. But he has lost hope. Absent fans in London, in New York even, are sending me SMS messages. ‘You must tell us at once if we score.’ The president of Chievo – I have it on good authority – is rubbing his hands with glee, thinking of all the extra ticket sales he will get when the middle-class fans at last abandon Hellas to join the boys from the dam.
‘Serie B, Serie B!’ The crowd are merciless. Perotti has taken off Mazzola, brought on Cossato. Now out goes the turkey-necked Teodorani, for Melis. It’s all attack, defence forgotten. As the tension rises, Braschi is being as fair as he can. He’s not whistling everything, but enough to keep things under control. And the extraordinary thing about football, I tell myself in a little surge of optimism, is that while it may be surrounded by the trappings of mortal combat, and while all kinds of money and politics are inevitably involved, still, on the field there are rules, and talent counts, and likewise the lucky bounce, the unexpected rebound. Go for it, Hellas. I’m shouting the words in my head. I mustn’t say anything aloud. Go for it till the final whistle.
But the best chances are falling to Reggina now. Three times they miss the clearest of opportunities on the break. Still, the heat is overwhelming and slowly they fall back. They sense they’ve done enough. Pack the box. Waste time. As in Naples, the ball-boys disappear. It takes for ever to restart after every interruption. As soon as a Verona player retrieves the ball, a ball-boy miraculously reappears and throws another ball on to the pitch. Now that has to be removed. And every time Verona move up the wings, plastic bottles rain down on the players from the stands. A linesman is struck and falls. He needs medication. More time is lost. There are places where it’s difficult to dribble the ball for all the bottles on the pitch. Cossato gallops and elbows about, but he’s too slow. He misses a header. As the noise-level rises beyond anything I’ve experienced before, scores of young men begin to appear on the touch-lines. Who are they? Why are they there? They don’t seem to be fans.
The men have now formed a solid wall right along the near touch-line. Braschi walks over to complain to a Reggina official. The men stay put, numerous, threatening. Taibi takes ages to set up a goal kick. Ten minutes to go. I sit perfectly still. The men each side o
f me are clearly not journalists, but Reggina fans. They’ve realised what side I’m on, for I keep muttering ‘Obscene!’ I can’t help it. The bottles rain. A second and even third ball is tossed on to the pitch. ‘Scandalous!’ Five minutes. Four. Then, as Reggina’s defenders clear their lines and move up for the offside trap, something happens. Giuseppe Colucci gathers the loose ball, lifts his head, sees the mistake. Scooping with his foot, he sends the most perfect lob over the advancing Reggina players to Cossato. Just onside, he already has Taibi charging out to him. With unexpected aplomb, Super-Mike doesn’t even let the ball bounce. He taps it up in the air over the keeper’s approaching hands, rushes round him and fights off two defenders to head home for perhaps the classiest strike of his career. 2–1. Verona winning on away goals.
Absolute silence. After the constant roar of the last forty minutes, there’s something surreal about it. Cossato doesn’t exult. He can’t believe it. He turns to the referee to check that the goal has been allowed. It has. He’s bewildered. Then, tiny, insignificant, tinkling, come the distant shouts of the brigate. There’s Fondo, shrieking, pumping his arms up and down in a gesture of derision. On the field, a mischievous Gilardino lifts his finger to his lips to shush the Reggina curva. They howl in pain. There’s a huge surge of rage. There are people lurching forwards against the fences. Pastorello jumps to his feet and heads for the dressing rooms with staff and bodyguards. The noise swells. A noise of agony. Of death throes. Discreetly, I also abandon my seat to watch the last minutes among people who haven’t had a chance to see I’m not one of them.
