A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  To believe in something, knowing it can’t be so, that is the ultimate achievement and also, far beyond the incursion of black players in white teams, it is the ultimate mixing: the superimposition of two contradictory states of mind. I know we’re going to lose in Turin today, and I believe we’re going to win.

  ‘Stronzi! Merda! Ciao, Mamma.’ Would a frenzied devotee of primitive rituals ever have managed the mental shifting back and forth demanded by the interruption of the telefonino? What religion could survive a priest who answered the phone while officiating the sacraments? Yet in late November I read in the Arena of a football game where a referee did indeed answer the phone. His shiny black referee’s shorts began to trill – Pronto? – the man answered – Ciao! – and the players – it was a youth team – and the small crowd of vociferous parents (how vociferous those parents can get!) were jerked out of the mesmerism and passion of the game to stare amazed as the man resolved the problem of when to toss in the pasta, or where to meet for a drink. Then he blew his whistle and they began again. Only football can survive this kind of outrage, only something we believe in and don’t believe in, simultaneously.

  Leopardi concludes his poem by reflecting how hard it is to live in an age where all sense of nobility is gone.

  Admirable boy, how painful for you

  To outlive your unhappy country.

  You would have shone for her then

  When she glowed with the crown that –

  The fault is ours and fate’s –

  Is lost. A season past:

  No one boasts being Italian born now,

  But, for yourself, raise your mind

  To the sky. What’s life for?

  To be despised: blessed then when by danger

  Beset, of itself forgetful, not measuring

  The damage nor attentive to the flow

  Of slow and putrid hours

  Blessed when the foot

  Pushed even to the banks of Lethe

  Comes back the happier.

  Yes, he actually says that! Life is to be despised! So don’t think about it, young sportsman! Raise your mind to the sky! Do it for yourself (but for us too!). Push your antagonism to the banks of Lethe, yes, to the very brink of death; it’s the only way to chase off emptiness and boredom and come back the happier, with a sense at least that something extreme has happened.

  This is tough talk. Clearly the anodyne arabesques of the Pope’s misnamed Partita della fede will not do. Something more vigorous, more violent is required. Marathon was not a friendly. And perhaps the melancholy tone of the poem arises from the fact that the young Leopardi knew he could never thus participate. He himself would never push a game to extremes and be adored by the crowd. (‘Adesso fuori i coglioni,’ the brigate scream. ‘Show some balls, Dio boia!’) Leopardi was gobbo, hunchbacked, perhaps from too much reading and writing. He never played any sport at all. And the supporters of Juventus are known all over Italy as hunchbacks. For in popular folklore a hunchback is supposed to be lucky (how the unlucky Leopardi must have cringed every time this belief was mentioned). ‘Gobbi di merda,’ the Veronese will shout as soon as they are in the Stadio delle Alpi. ‘Torino in fiamme.’ These guys are dying for a chance to push their feet to the banks of Lethe.

  But despite my reading of Leopardi, I’m not thinking so negatively as I get off the train and pull on my yellow-blue cap. ‘We’re going to kill them,’ I assure Mirko. ‘Three–nil,’ he agrees. Is he laughing? Does he half-believe it? We have exchanged mobile numbers. I remember a few lines from Mallarmé:

  Yes, I know, we are nothing but vain forms of matter – yet sublime too when you think that we invented God and our own souls. So sublime, my friend! that I want to give myself this spectacle of a matter aware, yes, of what it is, but throwing itself madly into the Dream that it knows it is not, singing the Soul and all those divine impressions that gather in us from earliest childhood, and proclaiming, before the Nothingness that is the truth, those glorious falsehoods!

  ‘Alè Verona!’ comes a shout from further down the train. A blue and yellow flag appears. Then the song: ‘In Italia, Hellas, in Europa, Hellas, e ovunque Hellas, per sempre gialloblù, per sempre gialloblù!’ In Italy, Hellas, in Europe, Hellas, all over the world, Hellas, for ever gialloblù. With this glorious falsehood in mind, we set off for the stadium.

  Numbers

  Miserable Veronese, the only way you’ll get out of Turin is with a police escort.

  verona merda (Torino, Italia)

  Slave of Agnelli, shut up and screw the next bolt on that Cinquecento.

  Aiooogalapagos (Verona, Italia)

  ANOTHER WAY YOU can look at the game of football is as a series of numbers. If I said goodbye to Mirko on the platform of the station at Torino Porta Susa, it was because this match was to be different for me. No brigate today. In exchange for an article, my first ever piece of sports journalism, an editor at La Stampa, the Turin paper, has offered me a pass to the press gallery.

  So a quarter of an hour before kick-off, here I am, sitting at a numbered typing desk, high above the half-way line. To my right and left, along a long row of identical desks, are a score of grim, businesslike men in heavy winter jackets, smoking and tapping on their portables. But there are women too, equally grim, equally intent. Immediately beside me is a plain young creature who works for a frothy mid-week TV show called ‘Quelli che il calcio’ – The Football People. Laid on each desk, courtesy of the Juventus press office, is a folder containing three sheets of paper giving every possible statistic on Verona, Juventus and the referee. So I read that, born in Ravenna on 22 August 1960 (it’s always important to know where a ref is from), Danilo Nucini has presided over 62 games in Serie B and 7 in Serie A, blowing the final whistle on 33 home wins, 23 draws and 13 away wins. He has sent off 30 players, but only 3 in Serie A, conceded 35 penalties, but none in Serie A. ‘How can I know’, I ask Stefano, the journalist who’s accompanied me and is sitting on my other side, ‘if he’s biased in favour of Juventus or not?’

  Stefano laughs. ‘Aside from the fact that they’re all tendenzialmente biased towards Juventus,’ he says, ‘you have to check the bit that says how many times they’ve reffed each team and with what results.’ He points to the place at the bottom of the page: Verona 4 games: 1 victory, 1 draw, 2 defeats. Well, that sounds pretty much like our average performance over four games. No clue here. And Juventus … 0. The man has never refereed Juventus! It’s a first. ‘So you can’t know,’ Stefano tells me. And he explains that his speciality and passion is Formula One, not football. ‘There’s still some humour in Formula One,’ he tells me. ‘The drivers are capable of a joke or two. But football is death. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves.’ Again he laughs, as if to demonstrate that he is exempt from this sickness. Just beyond him, wearing black woollen gloves cut off at the fingertips, a colleague is hunched over his laptop, jaw clenched, typing furiously. He will not smile or laugh or exchange a relaxed word all afternoon.

  Stefano’s job, it turns out, is to cover the after-game interviews. He isn’t doing the match report. His paper sends four journalists, each tackling different angles, dividing the game up into different areas of experience in much the same way as the press release breaks down the encounter into a series of neatly drawn boxes filled with numbers and surrounded by the colourful logos of a dozen sponsors.

  It’s wonderful the illusion of understanding that all this hard information confers. I read attentively through the statistics of past matches from 1939 on, home and away, in league and cup, of encounters between the two trainers throughout the course of their careers, achievements and ignominies, goals conceded, goals scored, biggest victories, worst defeats, percentages of all the above, comparisons of performance with the same moments in previous seasons. ‘Without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers,’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘mankind could not live.’ Perhaps. But today I feel I could very easily live without the numbers. For the bottom line is that Ver
ona have never, but never, beaten Juve at Delle Alpi. Not even in the magical ’85. I can’t imagine that today will be the day.

  Dutifully, I study the team formations and check the numbers everybody’s going to be wearing on their backs in case, in my article, I need to mention them: Van der Saar 1, Birindelli 15, Montero 4, Iuliano 13, Conte (Captain) 8, Tacchinardi 20, Davids 26, Pessotto 7, Zidane 21, Inzaghi 9, Trezeguet 17. How much easier it was at school and college when we all wore one to eleven!

  But all of a sudden what’s annoying me is that Del Piero is among the reserves. He’s going to be on the bench, not on the field. It’s infuriating. Del Piero is a player I love to hate. I revel in his inability to come to terms with lost celebrity. I had been looking forward to leaping to my feet and shrieking with disgust when he tripped himself on a defender’s foot in the box and fell, rolling over into the now-notorious sitting position, both hands raised, palm upwards, demanding his penalty. Only now do I realise how much I had been looking forward to these emotions. What numbers could explain that?

  A sudden drop in the noise levels causes me to look up from the press release. The game has started. They’ve already kicked off and I hadn’t noticed! How is that possible? Is it me? Is it the press gallery? Or could it be this famous stadium?

  I had been looking forward to seeing Lo Stadio delle Alpi. Alongside Milan’s San Siro and Rome’s Olimpico it’s one of Italy’s big three. Certainly the view as you approach doesn’t disappoint. About twenty minutes north of the town centre, the stadium stands out like some sportsman’s Pompidou centre, wrapped in orange pipes and coloured girders. The snow-topped mountain backdrop and the motorway just a few hundred yards away increase the sense of visual drama. It was conceived to be an art object of epic proportions.

  Inside, too, the first impression is of elegance on a vast scale. The pitch is surrounded by a big athletics track and the curved slope of the terraces is broad and shallow so that the circumference of the whole structure, if circumference is the right word for an oval, is considerable indeed. It’s impressive. On TV, it looks fantastic. Way above my head, two great girders run across the pitch bristling with cameras and loudspeakers. And yet …

  A chill wind descends from those mountains. Despite the elegance of its form, the place is cold and alienating. You’re too far from the action. You look down from an impossible distance at players toiling on a field that, after all the money spent on the structure, is just a muddy bog with marsh grass to mark the boundaries. The Juve fans are all sitting comfortably and empty spaces are numerous. For all the team’s fame and national popularity, the stadium is far from full. Perhaps Verona are not considered an adversary worth losing a Sunday afternoon for.

  But what is most disconcerting of all is the PA system. Right up to the starting whistle an unbelievably powerful battery of speakers has been drowning the stadium in rock music. So this is the first game of the season where I have heard no pre-match warm-up of chants and insults. Nothing could be more soulless. The fans come to hear themselves. They want to join vocal battle. The players might be our representatives, but the real battle is between the two towns. Wasn’t this how football started: a ball pushed back and forth between one village and another in a parody of war? How humiliating, then, not only to be trapped in a cage of fences and Plexiglas, but to find that even when you yell your heart out your sentiments are crushed by deafening Euro-pop.

  Anyhow, it was this PA system, I think, that fooled me. I just couldn’t imagine that the game might be starting without some crowd excitement. Only a few moments after the kick-off, with the music turned off, did I finally pick up a remote chant of ‘Juve Juve vaffanculo.’ It was this that lifted my head. But the voices were muted; it was as if you were just catching a cry from a distantly drifting lifeboat of exhausted survivors. Sound evaporates in this shallow saucer; it floats up into the grey sky like a soul freed from its body.

  My eyes rove to find the brigate. Where are they? There! A knot of yellow and blue, edged by a sharp line of black. First there were only a handful, now, fifteen minutes into the game, a couple more busloads must have been let in. Surrounded by the police, they have been herded into a large empty paddock the other side of the stadium way over to the left. It’s so far away that I can’t make out any individuals, or even the banners they’ve brought. Yet again and again throughout the game I find myself turning to them. I know that if I were among them, the noise would be rousing, and the game, seen from the skew of that angle, would be more urgent and exciting. Every offside decision would be outrageously unfair. Every ball in the area would be a possible goal. I would be warmer, angrier. Only fifteen minutes into it, I’ve already decided that I shall never sit in the press gallery again. It’s as if the game were not really taking place. ‘Merda!’ I let out when the referee gives a foul against Laursen just outside the box. ‘Isn’t your language a little colourful?’ the lady journalist beside me enquires.

  To watch five minutes of a game like today’s Juventus–Verona is to appreciate why contemporary football squads have to be so much larger than in the past, why we see numbers like 30 or even 50 on a player’s back. It’s dangerous out there this afternoon. It’s brutal. Ten years ago, the difference between a big team and a provincial rag-bag like Verona, or Piacenza or Brescia, would have been one of talent. Elegant players like Baggio and Donadoni would invent previously unimagined trajectories in a complex pattern of feints and dummies and rapid changes of direction and speed. Under the spell of this skill, the opposing spectators would be somewhat anaesthetised and gradually resign themselves to the inevitable. Sometimes you might even feel a little ashamed of the way your own team’s sole resource was to break up the star players’ fluency with a weary repertoire of pushes, shoves and shirt-pulling.

  But this is no longer the case. Today the big celebrities are quite as ruthless as the no-name provincials. Talented no doubt, they are also monsters of athletic preparation and amoral determination. Above all they are willing, Leopardi-style, to push things to the limit, to stretch out the foot in a slide tackle that could take them, or more often their opponent, to the very banks of Lethe. So much is at stake. So much money has been paid for them. It’s as if, with the crowd violence that characterised the seventies and eighties now largely under control, that energy and urgency had migrated on to the field to be lived only vicariously by the fans.

  Everybody deplores this state of affairs. Everybody is appalled. In hospital in Modena, the Gazzetta constantly reminds us, Francesco Bertolotti is still in coma. Yet for all the breast-beating and anxiety, it’s hard not to feel that actually we are all getting exactly what we want. The game may be less attractive this way, but the drama is heightened. From the moment the player was allowed to turn professional, he became as much a gladiator as an entertainer (‘A gladiator without a helmet,’ says German player Marcus Babbel). His livelihood is at stake. Why else would he be so determined to win for us? Meantime, we amuse ourselves by following his ups and downs, enjoying his success or gloating over his failure. ‘Doardo: go sell soap powder!’

  But simultaneous with the warnings that the game is deteriorating, there is always a chorus of voices, often the same voices, insisting that the players aren’t trying hard enough because they’ve already been paid too much. ‘They should all be kicked in the arse,’ said Marcello Lippi of Inter’s all-star squad shortly before being fired. ‘Hellas must learn to be more ‘cattivo’ the Arena endlessly repeats. Exasperation is of the essence in football. If we’ve decided to invest emotion, and money, in these men, above all if we’ve allowed them to fill our heads and dreams, they’d better be willing to die for us. We want to see that foot pushed to the edge of Lethe, Dio can!

  And in the ordinary way it is. It’s not the occasional off-the-ball aggression that’s so surprising in your average Serie A game, but the sheer ferocity of the general engagement. Today is no exception. Juventus have started the season poorly. They are only fifth in the table behind such minor name
s as Atalanta and Udinese. Today they have to win to stay in touch with the top. Uninspired, but lightning quick and above all ruthless, they are trying to overwhelm Verona with sheer physical force. The midfield is a constant angry fizz. Zinedine Zidane in particular has a crazy bullish anger about him, a head-down tension and animal violence that no doubt goes far beyond football, reaches back to some profound personal quarrel this man has with the world, his days as a poor immigrant’s son in the white man’s France, perhaps.

  Likewise the black Dutchman Edgar Davids. Evidently Davids considers the centre circle his own personal property. Dreadlocks swinging behind, he runs round and round chasing others out. You can’t come in! This place is mine! Behind him the Uruguayan, Montero, is frightening. ‘Gilardino versus Montero = David against Goliath,’ tomorrow’s Gazzetta will say, ‘only yesterday the boy wonder didn’t get to use the sling.’ Again and again the striker goes down. Every tackle Montero makes will stop his man even if it doesn’t make contact with the ball. All in all, it’s a situation where players are simply bound to be lost. Bones will crack, muscles tear, tendons snap. Over the length of a season the team with the bigger squad of fitter, more talented, more violent players is going to have the edge. Especially if referees are selectively lenient with the yellow cards.

  In response to Juve’s fury, Verona look well-organised, but timid and lightweight. They’ve already lost Leo Colucci in that torrential rain against Udinese. He was our only bulldog. They lost Bonazzoli with a back injury against Roma, and Mutu, who was stretchered off during that match, only started training again yesterday. Now it seems they are more or less resigned to losing this game. At best they’re hoping against hope for nil–nil. It’s depressing. As Ferron saves a second time, then a third, everybody in the stadium is just waiting for Juventus to score. To make matters worse, they’ll deserve it. The Verona fans won’t even be able to feel they’ve been robbed when the ball goes in.