A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  For the truth is that whenever a provincial side come to Turin, they arrive expecting to be cheated. More than they would anywhere else. We’ll lose, they’re telling themselves, but at least in Turin we can enjoy the consolation that we lost because there is a conspiracy against us. Why is this so?

  Sit down at the computer, hook up to the net and type in www.antijuve.com. An extraordinary site appears giving information that will never appear on any Juventus press release. Going back to before the war, it lists all the occasions on which half of Italy is convinced that the Turin club bought their way to footballing fame with their owners’ – Fiat’s – money. You learn that Juve were the only club involved in the betting scandals of the eighties not to be seriously punished, the only club never to have agreed to random dope testing. As you get to more recent seasons, there are videos showing amazing refereeing decisions. A ball that clearly and for some two or three seconds crosses the line, is not given as a goal. The Juve keeper whips it out. Play proceeds. Or a ball does not cross the line, but a goal is given anyway. The ref blows his whistle. Juve have won!

  So the provincial team’s supporters arrive in Turin complacent in their contempt, braced for injustice. Yet today when Juve’s goal comes there is, alas, nothing to complain about. Martin Laursen, who has controlled everything in the air, suddenly slithers in deep mud around the penalty spot. He totters and, exactly as a cross comes over from the right, goes down on his butt. Unmarked for perhaps two seconds, Trezeguet has no difficulty jumping to head home. ‘Verona are a bunch of also-rans,’ comments the prim woman to my right. It is a terrible thing to watch a game with people who are not eager to create the same illusion you are. Like trying to worship God with an atheist. I am tempted to tell her to fuck off.

  After a dull cold half-time break during which the journalists redouble their writing efforts, the inevitable happens. Verona attack, Juve score. The tricky Inzaghi collides with Laursen and goes down. Zidane sends a wonderful place-kick just over the wall and curling into the net. We were now deep into the second half. Camoranesi, having irritated his man by dribbling him a couple of times, had been stretchered off after a determined tackle. At once I knew that we would not see him again for a long time. Another key player had gone. To console myself, I chose to keep my eye almost exclusively on Massimo Oddo, who was now the only exciting talent we seemed to have on the field.

  Hailing from my wife’s town of Pescara, on the Adriatic, twenty-four years old, cropped hair, clear eyes, bits of beard and moustache that seem to have been stuck on his young face in a Marsiglia-style montage, Massimo Oddo is in the curious position of doing his obligatory military service while at the same time earning a big salary in a major football team. So from Monday to Thursday this young man is in the barracks, cleaning guns and lavatories, generally doing what almost all Italian conscripts consider a complete waste of time and certainly the furthest thing imaginable from Leopardi’s (or anybody else’s) vision of military glory. Then on Friday he is allowed out to train with the club. On Sunday he plays, then on Monday it’s back to the barracks. Sometimes, late at night, my wife and I hear the heavy tramp of boots clumping up the hill past our window. It’s the soldiers on an overnight hike. If you go out on the balcony you can see them pass by, torches and maps in their hands, their faces blackened. I always pray that Massimo Oddo is not among them. How can he possibly play if he’s tramping about all night?

  Oddo was bought from Naples during the summer. Naples had just been promoted from Serie B and Oddo had never played in Serie A before. When the news broke that he would also be doing his military service and would have to spend most of the week in the barracks, the Arena suggested that Pastorello hadn’t known, he’d been tricked by those dastardly Neapolitans. Others thought the shrewd Pastorello knew all too well and got the player on the cheap, since no other club in Serie A would want the man.

  But whatever the truth of the matter, this was one decision Pastorello got absolutely right. Today, with every minute of the game that passes, Oddo is looking like the best defender and the best attacker Verona have on the pitch. Cooler than the tropical storm of Zidane and Davids, certainly less commanding, less physically threatening, you can nevertheless see the boy thinking and working and reacting incredibly fast. It’s always such a pleasure to see a player think, to see the man raise his eyes and, despite the pressure of feet and bodies hurtling toward him, place the ball in exactly the right space at the right speed for his companion. As the game wears on, the team begins to revolve around him. He’s lifting them. He’s communicating hope. And when Davids and Zidane start to tire, Oddo is suddenly in complete command of the right side of the field. He’s even dribbling defenders and pushing into Juve’s box. Juventus’s trainer sees the danger, takes off Davids and brings in another volcano of vigour, Gianluca Zambrotta. But it’s too late, the damage is done. It has occurred to the boys in yellow-blue that they might actually score. And at the ninetieth, they finally get there, a scrappy goal after a mess in the box. Two-one.

  There are three minutes left. Three minutes of injury time. They are the only exciting minutes of the whole game, the only moments, for me, of total engagement with what is happening on the field. All of a sudden the result, the only number that counts, is at stake. All of a sudden Juventus are a mess. They panic quite as badly as Verona do when they’re defending a result. They collapse. Desperate, the all-stars are kicking the ball high into the crowd. In the dying seconds Martino Melis, who’s replaced Camoranesi, sends in a scorching shot from just outside the box. In goal Van der Saar is beaten. Montero hasn’t even seen the ball, but it just brushes the top of his head and is deflected inches over the bar. Game over, a game that lasted, for me, exactly three minutes.

  After the final whistle I’m used to standing with the fans and waiting till the players come over to salute the curva. It seems a necessary gesture before returning to the humdrum life outside the stadium. But today, no sooner has the referee looked at his watch and raised his whistle than the desks around me are deserted. The journalists are racing to the press room. They plug their computers into phone sockets. They’re writing and smoking and muttering to each other from the sides of their mouths while high on the wall the TV runs through reports from all the various games. Some miserably dry sandwiches and flat soft drinks are brought. Pouncing on the trays, everybody begins to ask each other what mark they are planning to give which players. So tomorrow I will read:

  Birindelli 6.5, mixture of left-back and left-half, he ‘puts his signature’ on the cross that Trezeguet heads in.

  Camoranesi 6, hard to get the ball off him, excellent control, but filthy temper. If he kept calm he might be more useful to the team.

  Cvitanovic 5 (Verona’s Croatian left-back), neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.

  Zidane 7.5, Turin should erect a statue to him.

  How do the journalists do this? How can they watch twenty-two players all at once and reduce such a complex group experience to a series of numbers corresponding to individuals, as if a player’s performance wasn’t largely determined by those around him and against him? One answer, I discover in the press room, is consultation: ‘Do you think 6 is OK for Inzaghi?’ ‘Oh God, he missed a sitter again. He hasn’t scored for weeks.’ ‘5.5 then.’ ‘I’m giving him 5.’ ‘But he did get into a few good scoring positions.’ ‘What about 7 for the ref?’ ‘Too high. Those yellow cards for simulation were over the top.’ ‘6.5 then.’

  My children complain that when they get marks from one to ten for tests at school, the teachers never give any pupil less than five or more than eight, even when the subject is something as clear-cut as maths. The same is true of these sports journalists. They want to judge, to take control of the experience, to dress even the most elusive impressions and complex dynamics in the peremptory authority of numbers; but no one must be offended too greatly, nor praised too highly. For that would expose the judge to criticism.

  Stefano grins at my amazement. ‘The local
journalists always give their home team the highest marks’, he explains, ‘because they want the players to be friendly in interviews.’ On Monday night a TV programme will collect all the marks together from all the papers for all the matches of the day, and then all the days of the season. They take an average and set up a table. Who is the best striker? Batistuta 7.89, Totti 7.73. It reminds me of the way, at school, we used to give the girls we knew scores according to their various physical attributes. Character was not the obstacle it is in Miss World competitions. Monica: tits 5, arse 7. ‘Davids 6.53,’ the Monday night programme will tell us, ‘Italiano 5.85.’ It’s funny how little difference there appears to be between these two. Davids’s salary and transfer fee must be at least ten times Vincenzo Italiano’s.

  A door bangs open. ‘Zidane in the interview room!’ But it might be action stations on a battleship. The man claps his hands. ‘Zidane, signori, Zidane!’ Half the journalists stay glued to their computers, the other half rush for the door. I follow them. With rows of well-upholstered chairs, the place looks exactly like the conference hall where my students defend their dull theses before the degree commission. As it turns out, after-game interviews are even less interesting. Eager to be awed, I sit down beside Stefano, who has his laptop on his knee.

  Zinedine Zidane, European champion, World Cup champion, is wearing a heavy grey quilted hiking jacket, zipped to the neck, collar turned up. On his head, incongruously, given the warmth in the room, is a simple black woollen cap with the letters D&G on the front. Is it a sponsor? Pulled low on his forehead the thing serves to emphasise the bushy black arch of thick eyebrows and the aggressive forward thrust of the man. There’s almost a hunch to him as he leans forward over the desk up front, fingers knotted together. Hugely talented, hugely rich, he is ill at ease and impatient. When he speaks, he apes timidity and respect.

  ‘The pitch is a disgrace. It penalised us more than them.’

  His Italian is not perfect, but he has the commonplaces off pat. It’s very important for Italians that their foreign stars make an effort with the language. How much more endearing they are making mistakes than using an interpreter. Zidane says what he has no doubt said a thousand times before:

  ‘We are improving but we’re not there yet.’

  ‘We have to stay humble and do a lot of work.’

  ‘Yes, I’m glad I was declared man of the match, but it’s the team that counts.’

  Two or three older journalists in the front row give the impression of being serious sophisticates. They stand up while the others stay in their seats. One strokes a full grey beard, another holds an expensive pen poised in the air. They call the man by name, with a mixture of familiarity and fawning respect. ‘Zinedine, did the innesto [grafting in] of Zambrotta come too late in the game?’ ‘Is it Juve’s plan to occupy the centro nevralgico [the nerve centre] of the pitch as quickly as possible?’ ‘What made you decide to imporre quella traiettoria rientrante [impose that inswinging trajectory] to your free kick?’

  ‘Well,’ Zidane says. His smile is nervous. He thinks about it. Finally he decides: ‘We’ve still got a lot of work to do before we’re at our best. The pitch is a disgrace.’ And in the middle of the next question he gets up to leave. To my surprise, I see he has a small suitcase on wheels and hurries out, hunched forward, cap down over his ears, pulling his case after him, looking for all the world like one of the thousands of unemployed North Africans who haunt the railway stations of southern Europe.

  ‘You didn’t ask a question,’ I say to Stefano.

  ‘Would it have made any difference?’

  Then we are all called out to see something on TV. There has been crowd trouble in Reggio Calabria. The team was losing its sixth successive game. The score was three–nil to lowly Brescia. The fans invaded the pitch and the game had to be abandoned. Frankly, I’d feel like invading the pitch myself if Verona were to lose three–nil at home to Brescia. Now the screen is showing angry men hurling themselves against the transparent barrier between terraces and pitch, tossing their flagpoles over the top at the police, setting fire to their plastic seats. Clearly terrified, a father is trying to steer two small children through the worst of the crowd. The journalists shake their heads. Somebody still isn’t sure whether to give Oddo 7 or 7.5. And the curious thing is that even as we are able to watch, live, from almost a thousand miles away, this violence going on at the other end of Italy, in the very same structure where we are now standing, the departing Verona fans are being beaten up by the police. And no one knows, no cameras are watching.

  Monday’s Arena carries three pages of reports, interviews and statistics on the game, but only the smallest mention of any trouble afterwards. Six Verona fans were arrested and others claim to have been beaten by the police, it tells us. It is not until Wednesday, see here, one of those sections dedicated to the various godforsaken villages of the surrounding countryside, that we get a chance to learn any more. An interview appears with Marcellina Canazza, a forthright woman in stout middle age who runs a small supporters club of her own in the lowland town of Cerea, hiring a coach week by week for the games not too far away:

  ‘They made us leave from a single exit,’ she says, ‘a corridor with barriers on one side and a line of riot police on the other. We all had to go through and as we did they beat and kicked us. Everybody was hit over and over, even girls, even kids. I saw a little blonde girl with her head stained with blood.’

  Marcellina agrees there are hotheads at the stadium, but insists that none are ever allowed on her buses. ‘Sunday evening it was as if we were coming back from a war. More than half of us had to go to hospital for dressings. One was missing, presumed arrested.’ She has phoned the managing director of Hellas Verona and claims she is willing to bring charges against the policemen involved. A small article below speaks of the parents of the arrested boy who weren’t allowed to contact him for three days.

  There is something extraordinary about all this; not so much the event itself, but the way it is being reported. The front pages of the Arena – the local, proud and specifically Veronese paper – are full of stories of violence at the French frontier where Italian farmers are refusing to let French cows enter the country for fear of BSE contamination. By Saturday of this week the same pages will be showing scenes of even more serious violence as Italian left-wingers protesting against globalisation are refused entry to France to demonstrate outside the European leaders’ summit in Nice.

  But at the same time a large number of local Veronese citizens have been beaten up by the police. Six of them are still being held in Turin, and the paper doesn’t even send a journalist to find out what happened. It’s as if there were some radical uncertainty as to what is scandalous at a football match and what isn’t. Perhaps it is all right for the police to beat football supporters. In any event, the Arena clearly isn’t eager to take the side of fans against police. Respect for authority is even greater among journalists than it is among referees.

  At the next home game on Sunday, there will be a huge banner, perhaps thirty metres long, in the Curva Sud complaining about legalised beatings. Plus a new graffito has appeared over one of the main entrances: ‘Giustizia italiana, figli di puttana.’ But nothing is said in the club programme. A further two weeks later, at the next home game, the club programme does speak cautiously of a possible court case against the police at the stadium. Meantime, the Arena, now a good month after the event, has at last given some kind of account of what was happening while I and a score of other journalists were listening to the inanities of Zidane. Cautious as ever, the paper presents the story only in the form of a letter to the editor.

  I was in Turin for the Juventus–Verona game at which six Verona fans were arrested. There were about three hundred of us and everything was quiet right up to the end of the game when a few nutcases went wild and threw their plastic seats into the adjacent part of the stadium which was empty.

  Everybody had got up to go. It happened very quickly
. We saw the seats flying and at the same time, before we knew it, we were being charged by the police. We were beaten with tremendous violence. No one escaped. I saw girls falling under truncheons, children hit over the head. There were about twice as many police as fans.

  We were given some medication on the spot, but then we went to the casualty ward in Turin for the more serious wounds. I heard a policeman say: ‘They brought us in from Genoa because we’re the best when it comes to beatings.’ On the way back the bus looked like a hospital ward: people with ice on their heads and bloody bandages.

  There is no justification for this massacre. If we were treated like this without having done anything, you can imagine what the police did to the ones they arrested.

  Andrea Valentini, Verona

  And that’s it. Nothing more. No valuable journalistic time has been spent on the matter, after the oceans of space dedicated to the Marsiglia affair, to a man who claimed he was beaten up for racist motives, but in fact wasn’t. A friend of my son’s, who turns out to have been a student in Marsiglia’s classes at the Maffei, tells me, ‘The point about Marsiglia is that he was really charismatic, we really believed him, we did, right to the end, however incredible it seemed.’ Nobody, it seems, ever believes a football fan, even after the hospital has medicated a score of them.

  ‘Honour to the fallen of Turin,’ announces The Wall.

  ‘Honour to our comrades who were beaten.’

  How they love this solemn rhetoric. Inevitably, events are drawn into brigate folklore. Somebody called Franz, who supports Juventus, sneers: ‘Conigli [rabbits], you let yourselves be beaten up by a couple of sbirri [pigs, policemen].’ An interminable back and forth begins, with Franz maintaining that the Veronese are in fact racially Slavs, famous only for their Pandoro, a kind of panettone. The Veronese reply that they have sent a couple of Slavs to Turin with a truckload of poisoned Pandori. It is approaching Christmas after all. Meantime the front page of the paper learnedly discusses the expansion of the EU, our European home, and the complex new voting procedures that leave Germany firmly in the saddle after the Nice summit. As the mad cow battle continues at the French border, inside pages show an excavator digging a trench to prevent gypsies, Slavs and Albanians from using a piece of land destined for redevelopment, while the public prosecutor Papalia – that man again! – has spoken of his own personal concern with new and more sophisticated forms of racism.