by Bill Buford
Gurney and his crew had arrived in Turin by a large minibus that they had hired in London. The bus was called ‘Eddie’; the group was called Eddie and the Forty Thieves.
Forty Thieves?
They explained. Their adventures began in Calais. At the first bar they entered, the cashier was on a lunch break, and they popped open a cash register with an umbrella and came away with 4,000 francs. They carried on, travelling south and then along the French coast, robbing a succession of small shops on the way, never paying for petrol or food, entering and leaving restaurants en masse, always on the look-out ‘for a profit’. I noticed that each member of the Eddie-and-the-Forty-Thieves team was wearing sun-glasses—filched, I was told, from a French petrol station that had a sideline in tourist goods that, it would appear, also included brightly-coloured Marilyn Monroe T-shirts. All of them were wearing Rolex watches.
Most of the supporters on the square had not been on the plane. How had they got here?
They went through a list.
Daft Donald hadn’t made it. He had been arrested in Nice (stealing from a clothing shop), and, proving his nickname, was found to be in possession of one can of mace, eighteen Stanley knives (they fell out when he was searched) and a machete.
Robert the Sneak Thief had been delayed—his ferry had been turned back following a fight with Nottingham Forest fans—but he had got a flight to Nice and would be coming by taxi.
A taxi from Nice to Turin?
Robert, I was told, always had money (if you see what I mean), and, although I didn’t entirely (see what he meant), I didn’t have the chance to find out more because they were well down their list.
Sammy? (‘Not here but he won’t miss Juventus.’ ‘Sammy? Impossible.’)
Mad Harry? (‘Getting too old.’)
Teapot? (‘Been here since Friday.’)
Berlin Red? (‘Anybody seen Berlin Red?’)
Scotty? (‘Arrested last night.’)
Barmy Bernie? (‘Inside.’ ‘Barmy Bernie is inside again?’) Whereupon there followed the long, moving story of Barmy Bernie, who, with twenty-seven convictions, had such a bad record that he got six months for loitering. Everyone shook his head in commiseration for the sad, sad fate of Barmy Bernie.
Someone from another group appeared, showing me a map, with an inky blue line tracing its route to Turin. It began in Manchester, then continued through London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Lyon, Marseilles and finally stopped here. A great adventure, not unlike, I reflected, the Grand Tour that young men had made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it had cost them—all eleven of them—a total of seven pounds.
Seven pounds, I exclaimed, understanding the principle. What went wrong?
They assured me they would be in profit on the return.
Another lad showed me his rail ticket to Dunkirk. The ticket had been forged and had then, once in Dunkirk, been altered to include Turin and validated with a stolen British Rail stamp (obvious jibbing equipment). This was getting interesting: I had become the audience for a kind of show and tell. When the next one appeared—as though in a queue—he told me how he and his mates had got here by hitch-hiking to Belgium and then hopping on a train. Everything had gone well, until they realized they were on the wrong train (always a little tricky confirming the destination with the Hector). They ended up finally in Switzerland—acceptable, as it was on the way to Turin—but it was one-thirty in the morning, there were no more trains, it was early April in the Alps, there was no place to stay and no money if there had been, and so they slept, huddled together for warmth, in a phone booth.
The circle of supporters who now surrounded me had grown to a considerable size, with one or two regularly disappearing and returning with cans of lager. I had ceased to be the CIA. I was no longer the hack from the Express. I appeared to have ended my tenure as an undercover officer of the British Special Branch. And I was starting to be accepted. I would learn later that I had earned a new status; I had become a ‘good geezer’. Yes, that’s what I was: a good geezer. What a thing.
I was also someone to whom people needed to tell their stories. There was an implicit responsibility emerging. I was being asked to set the record straight. I was the ‘repoyta’. I was given instructions, imperatives, admonitions. I was told:
That they weren’t hooligans.
That it was a disgrace that there were so many obstacles keeping them from supporting their team properly.
That they weren’t hooligans.
That the management of Manchester United was a disgrace.
That they weren’t hooligans.
Until finally I was telling them, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know: you’re just here for the drink and the laugh and the football, and, for the first time, despite myself, I wanted to believe it. I was starting to like them, if only because they were starting to like me (the irrational mechanism of the group at work, and I was feeling grateful just to be accepted by it). And it was true that no one had been violent. People had been loud, grotesque, disgusting, rude, uncivilized, unpleasant to look at and, in some instances, explicitly repellent—but not violent. And it was possible that they wouldn’t be. I had met thieves, villains and drunkards, but I had also met people with real jobs with real responsibilities: an engineer for British Telecom, for instance; a trainee accountant; a bank clerk. Their stories were not about crowd violence but about football: how no one missed a match and about the unrelenting tedium of the weekdays (no football) and the terrible depression that sets in during the summer (no football). It didn’t suit my purposes that everyone here should be nothing more than a fanatical fan of the game, but it was conceivable that there really would be no violence, that this was simply how normal English males behaved. It was a terrifying notion, but not an impossible one. After all, the domain of the male spectator has always been characterized by its brutish masculine excesses. Maybe these people were just a bit more excessive than what I was used to.
I was hungry and followed one of the lads across the square to a bar under the arcades. A table had been placed before the entrance to deal with the English supporters, and three or four older women, dressed in black in the Italian way, were running back and forth to the rear of the bar to fetch drink. There must have been about a hundred supporters, pressing against the table, shouting for service. Only English was spoken—the notion that they might have spoken Italian now seems ludicrous—and the English was highly abusive. People were pushing and grabbing, and every now and then someone went off without paying. One supporter had unzipped his shorts and was urinating through the doors of the neighbouring café, splashing the floor, as uncomprehending Italians jumped out of their seats to avoid getting wet. Police were standing nearby, watching, but were uncertain and hesitant.
I returned to the square. I spotted Roy, who appeared to be ‘working’ the crowd. Things had become louder and uglier, and you could tell that the Italians had become less indulgent and were no longer so amused by their English visitors. They did not look so friendly, and more of their cars were circling the square than before. Roy appeared to be acting as a moderator, regulating everyone’s conduct. It was not the role I would have expected of him, but there he was: helping the police, directing traffic or pushing away supporters who were blocking the streets and reprimanding those who had broken bottles or were behaving in a disorderly fashion.
The light was changing and the match would begin soon, but there was no suggestion that it was time to leave. I didn’t know how to find the stadium and would, in any event, take my cue from the others, but they seemed to have forgotten about the game. The faces around me had changed their shapes. They had become drunken faces, red and bloated, as if their cheeks had been puffed full with air. Somebody standing next to me—a tall badly sunburnt man wearing very little clothing—was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t make it out. He repeated it. Something had engaged his passions, and he was trying to make his point by poking me in the chest with his finger. His
aim, though, was unreliable and he missed and was slow to recover and almost fell. His mate, who was also very tall, was swaying, shuffling his feet every now and then to keep his balance and looking fixedly at my left knee, as if for stability. He said nothing. He responded to nothing. He looked only at my knee. I was amused by the idea that if I turned and walked away he would fall. I stood there, my knee happy to keep him upright.
A young, brave Italian had walked to the centre of the square. Most Italians kept their distance and watched from across the street, but this one, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, had approached the group, intrigued by it, wanting to practise his English. He had three hesitant friends who remained about ten feet behind, while he tried to engage one of the supporters in his schoolbook conversation. He asked him if he was ‘Anglish’.
He wasn’t noticed, but then no one was noticing much of anything, until one lad turned and took him by the shoulder, not without affection. I couldn’t hear what was said—it was muttered softly but intensely, with the Italian boy’s face registering unease but not fear—when the supporter drew back his leg and slammed the Italian squarely in the crotch with his knee. The Italian boy buckled, swung round and curled up and was rescued by his friends who took him away, while looking back over their shoulders at the English supporter.
It was the first violence I had seen.
Somebody said that Robert had arrived and that his taxi had cost £250, and someone else asked if I knew anyone in England who was planning to record the match—Mick had just been arrested and was going to miss it. I couldn’t imagine Mick doing anything to get himself arrested—was it against the law to sleep on the pavement?—but I lost sight of my informant when I had to jump out of the way of a slap of brown liquid suddenly coming in my direction: the supporter who had been staring so fixedly at my knee had vomited.
The English songs were dying down—the supporters were strewn amid the cafés and bars and arcades—but the noise itself seemed to have increased. Most of it was now coming from the Italians. It might have been for no other reason than that the working day was over, and Juventus supporters—car horns blaring, their own chants beginning—felt compelled to drop by and see what the English looked like. And, by now, what they discovered was a sorry sight. Many supporters were still upright but wobbly and, like Mick when he was conscious (and before he was arrested), were singing to themselves. Many were also asleep, sprawled like some aged dead herd animal wherever they happen to fall. Several were bent double, in the familiar tortured posture—faces deep red, the muscles strongly delineated from the strain—of regurgitation. The water in the fountain was foully discoloured.
Someone walked by and casually mentioned that the buses would be leaving in a few minutes. So: there would be a football match after all. I wandered off in their direction, when I saw, standing alone in the arcade, the now very familiar figure of Mr Wicks, Acting British Consul. He was surveying the square, arms folded in front of his chest. Mr Wicks was no longer smiling. Mr Wicks seemed to have lost his sense of tolerance.
‘Has anybody,’ he said, angry, tense, ‘seen Mr Robert Boss?’
THE THING ABOUT reporting is that it is meant to be objective. It is meant to record and relay the truth of things, as if truth were out there, hanging around, waiting for the reporter to show up. Such is the premise of objective journalism. What this premise excludes, as any student of modern literature will tell you, is that slippery relative fact of the person doing the reporting, the modern notion that there is no such thing as the perceived without someone to do the perceiving, and that to exclude the circumstances surrounding the story is to tell an untruth. These circumstances might include the fact that you’ve rushed to an airplane, had too much to drink on it, arrived, realized that you are dressed for the tropics when in fact it is about to snow, that you have forgotten your socks, that you have only one contact lens, that you’re not going to get the interview anyway, and then, at four-thirty, that you’ve got to file your story, having had to make most of it up. It could be argued that the circumstances have more than a casual bearing on the truth reported.
I do not want to tell an untruth and feel compelled therefore to note that at this moment, shortly after coming across the very disappointed figure of Mr Wicks, the reporter was aware that the circumstances surrounding his story had become intrusive and significant and that, if unacknowledged, his account of the events that follow would be grossly incomplete. And his circumstances were these: the reporter was very, very drunk.
He could not, therefore, recall much about the bus ride apart from a dim, watery belief that there were fewer people in the bus this time and that, astonishingly, he had got the same bus driver. The other thing he remembers is that he arrived.
When the coaches of United supporters pulled up into the cool evening shadow cast by the Stadio Comunale, a large crowd was already there. The fact of the crowd—that it would be waiting for the English—was hard to take in at first.
It was especially hard for Harry. Harry was the supporter I found myself sitting next to. But then, Harry was having difficulty taking in much—of anything. Like so many others, Harry had enjoyed the long hot afternoon, and all about him there was that gamey smell that comes from perspiring without interruption for a very long, though interdeterminate, period of time. Harry had been drinking since five that morning and had, by his own estimate, five imperial gallons of lager in his stomach, which, every time he turned, rolled of their own accord. Harry had been busy. He had been one of those who had abused the bus driver on the ride into the city, and he had abused the bus driver on the ride to the ground. He had urinated on to a café table that had, in his inimitable phrasing, a number of ‘Eyetie cows’ sitting round it, and he had then proceeded to abuse the waiters. In fact he had spent most of the day abusing waiters—many, many waiters. Who could know how many? They all looked so much alike that they blurred into one indiscriminate shape (round and short). He had abused the Acting British Consul, the police, hotel managers, food vendors of every description and any onlooker who didn’t speak English—especially anybody who didn’t speak English. All in all, Harry had had a good day out, and then, in the full, bloated arrogance of the moment, he saw the following: thousands of Italian supporters converging on Harry’s coach. They had surrounded it and were pounding on its sides—jeering, ugly and angry. What right had they to be angry?
Do you see what they’re doing? Harry said to the bloke behind me, full of indignation. And then if there’s trouble, Harry said, they’ll blame the English, won’t they?
The fellow behind him agreed, but before he could say, ‘Fuckin’ Eyeties,’ the bus started to rock from side to side. The Italians were trying to push the bus, our bus—the bus that had me inside it—on to its side.
I had not appreciated the importance of the match that evening, the semi-finals for the Cup-Winners Cup. It had sold out the day the tickets—seventy thousand of them—had gone on sale, and at that moment all seventy thousand ticket-holders seemed to be in view. In my ignorance, I had also not expected to see the English supporters, who were meant to be the hooligans, confronted by Italians who, to my untutored eye, looked like hooligans: their conduct—rushing towards the coaches, brandishing flags—was so exaggerated that it was like a caricature of a nineteenth-century mob. Was this how they normally greeted the supporters of visiting teams?
We remained sitting inside the buses. The drivers weren’t opening their doors until more police arrived, and you could see the members of the carabinieri, just beyond the mob, pushing the Italian supporters out of the way until all four buses were encircled. They formed a cordon leading to the gate, and only then were we let out, escorted and then frisked by four different very young and very nervous policemen. All around us Italians were fighting to break through the cordon, shouting and gesticulating, their fingers forming the familiar upturned ‘V’. This was turning into a very peculiar experience.
It took a long time for the buses to empty and fill the a
rea set aside for us, enclosed by a chain-link fence. All along the fence were more Italians, their jeering insistent. One tried to go over the top and the police ran up to him, pulling him down by his trousers. As the last English supporter made his way into the enclosure, we were told something that I found hard to believe: that, inside, there were no seats.
I realized that I had never been given my match ticket and now I understood why: it didn’t exist. Was it possible that a package tour had been arranged without tickets in the confidence that the authorities, afraid of English supporters on the streets, would somehow find a way of getting them into the ground? Bobby Boss, true to character, was not to be found.