A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  And the consequences? Despite their wins, Napoli and Vicenza on 36 points are down. But what about Lecce, Reggina and Verona on 37? Which one must leave the limelight and the cash? Is it Judgment Day, or isn’t it? A strange silence has settled over the torrid circle of the Bentegodi. The team are not coming to the curva to celebrate. It’s as if Saint Peter were mumbling in his beard. He won’t tell you whether you’re in or you’re out. Somehow this is even worse than the knowing the worst. Football, I’m thinking amid the general confusion, has never felt more like a punishment.

  Complications

  This week is never-ending … Come on, let’s play, I’m fed up of being so tense!!!!!

  Offab (Verona, Italia), boi@chimoll@

  I SAID THAT the Italians have a flare for making life complicated. What I didn’t say is that the more tense a situation is, the more is at stake, so the more complicated it will be. It’s a rising scale. On 30 May when Parliament was convened, its opening was immediately postponed. So complicated are the electoral rules between the majority and proportional systems that some seats in the lower house hadn’t yet been assigned. It was hard to work out who they belonged to. Needless to say, then, the rules governing that most traumatic of all dramas, relegation, are not simple. Here, more than anywhere else, life must appear to be fair. That is, complicated …

  Take that moment in the second half when Vicenza were winning against Udinese, Napoli losing against Fiorentina, Lecce had equalised against Lazio, Reggina were still nil–nil with Milan, and Perugia had just crashed their miserable goal into Verona’s unhappy net. At that point Vicenza had 36 points while Lecce, Reggina and Verona all had 35 and Napoli 34. Obviously Napoli go down with Bari way below. But why were Verona bound to go down too? Why was there such gloom on the terraces? The rule is that however many teams have the same points, there can only be one play-off. God knows why. In England they seem happy to play off between three or even four teams. In Italy no.

  So the first thing you do is to calculate how many points each of the tied teams has scored in the matches they played between each other, that is, in this case and to be perfectly clear, in six matches: Lecce–Reggina, Lecce–Verona, Reggina–Verona, home and away. Since Verona have scored the least in this little league table (only two points), they automatically go down, leaving Lecce and Reggina to play together to decide the last place, this regardless of the fact that Lecce have scored more points than Reggina.

  Isn’t this odd?

  But of course the afternoon didn’t finish with that scenario. On the contrary, all the teams won. Which means we have Lecce, Reggina and Verona all on 37 points, Vicenza on 36 and Napoli on 36. This is a quite different scenario. Vicenza and Napoli go down with Bari (our thanks to Bari here for offering at least one fixed point in all this discussion). Now, instead of two of the three tied teams having to go down, only one must take the plunge. Which? You look again at the points scored in games between the teams in question. Now you select the team that scored the most points, Lecce, and they are automatically safe while the other two have to play off, even though, in that little count, Reggina have three more points than Verona. So the silence and shock that settled over the Bentegodi towards five p.m. on the hot afternoon of 17 June was first the silence of thousands of minds rapidly making all kinds of complicated calculations, then the paralysing shock of realising that, far from being over, this exhausting season is going to run on for two more games in blistering June heat, one here in Verona and one a thousand kilometres away among the infernal Calabrians in Reggio.

  Italy, then, is a place where things tend to drag on because everything is complicated and fair. A court case goes through first level, appeal and counter-appeal, after which it frequently gets sent back to the beginning again. The deadline for paying your taxes is frequently extended. In the hope that more people will pay. Yet, paradoxically, Italy is also a place where everybody does the same thing at the same time. They eat at the same time, visit their grandmothers, dead or alive, at the same time and above all they go on holiday at the same time, or at least in well-defined waves. The first of which leaves immediately after the schools have closed. So on June the 18th I’m driving the family down to the sea in Pescara – the beach, the sunshades, the cold drinks and pizzette – knowing that on the Thursday the 21st I’m going to have to be watching Verona play Reggina (there is absolutely no question of my dropping out now. The more painful the whole thing is, the more hooked I’ve become).

  But where will that game be?

  In order to be fair, and to increase TV revenues, the play-off involves two games, home and away. Yet everybody knows that the team that has the second game at home has a distinct advantage. Especially if the whole thing goes to extra time. When the most basic circumstances of life – in this case the impossibility of playing in two places simultaneously – mean that a certain unfairness is inevitable, then the only fair thing is to draw lots. On Monday morning, in the presence of Pastorello and Lillo Foti, president of Reggina, the sequence will be decided.

  From the car, I phone Francesco Grigolino, the photographer whose pictures of our agonising last-minute come-backs most regularly fill the sports pages of the Arena.

  ‘Is it decided yet?’

  ‘No, but you can be sure the first leg will be in Verona.’

  ‘Why?’

  Francesco sighs. How could an Englishman ever understand? ‘Because they don’t want us to win, do they? They need another southern team in A. We’ve already got Chievo. Hellas is racist. The first game will be in Verona. And there’s supposed to be a big rock concert in the Bentegodi on Friday. Vasco Rossi. They’re already putting up the stage, which means we’ll have to play on a neutral ground. No home advantage.’

  I put the phone down, fascinated and disconcerted. How pessimism and paranoia go hand in hand. ‘Bet the first leg’ll be in Reggio,’ I tell my wife. An hour later the phone trills: ‘First leg in Verona. Or more likely Florence if the stadium’s not available.’

  I spend three days pretending to relax on the beach, throwing my children about in the sea, swimming beyond the breakwaters with my wife. At the same time I’m frenetically buying all the papers and sneaking back to my mother-in-law’s house to plug my laptop into the net and find what The Wall is saying: ‘I implore you, President Pastorello, on my knees I beg you, I beg you, not to let them move this match to Florence. Without the curva, we’re lost.’

  A fierce battle is raging between the club, the organisers of the rock concert and the town council which owns the Bentegodi. Vasco Rossi is Italy’s biggest popstar. The stadium has been sold out. A huge lights show was planned requiring at least forty-eight hours’ preparation.

  ‘Forza Vasco,’ writes a Chievo fan. ‘Hellas and all their Fascist bastards in B.’

  ‘I swear to God’, replies a certain Offab, ‘that if we have to play in Florence, on Friday I’ll come to the concert with a crowbar.’

  Yet this is nothing compared with the war likely to wage round the game itself. Reading Monday’s and Tuesday’s papers, any notion that football is a sport falls away. The nearer you get to relegation, the closer you are to Leopardi’s vision of the ballgame as war. The night before Lecce’s game with Lazio, it now emerges, local fans kept the Lazio players awake all night, smashing windows in their hotel, breaking through a half-hearted police cordon into the lobby. When Milan went one up in Reggio, their acting chairman, Adriano Galliani, was threatened, some say with a knife, others insist with a gun. In any event he left the ground in a hurry and did not see the local team equalise and. win. The touch-lines were thronged with threatening young men. Worse still, just across the water from Reggio, a Messina fan was hit by a so-called paper bomb, thrown by a Catania fan. He is presently in coma. Football is about to have its first fatality in years.

  ‘If it had been anyone but Reggina,’ Puliero tells me on the phone, ‘I’d be optimistic. Any other team but Reggina.’

  In the lazy hours after lunch, I turn on
public radio and hear an official announcer say: ‘After all, we mustn’t cancel the south from Serie A.’ Then Lillo Foti is saying the same thing: ‘Our team must stay up so that the south can be represented.’

  ‘Well then, let’s just have one team from every bloody region,’ rages Michele.

  Consummate politician that he is, Pastorello reaches a compromise with Vasco Rossi and his band. The stage can be set up in front of the Curva Nord, the visitors’ area. The few fans from Reggio will be put somewhere else. So on Thursday I leave the sparkling Adriatic behind me and board the train for the five hundred kilometres back to Verona. In the paper an article tells me that Serie A as a whole is about 500 million pounds in debt, ‘as a result of an over-heated spirit of competition,’ comments Corriere della Sera’s leader writer.

  The game is at eight p.m. The train arrives at six. I wait out the break in the Bar Bentegodi where a particularly ugly thug whom I have never seen before is drinking heavily. ‘Where are they hiding those five thousand filthy terroni?’ he demands. His pretty girlfriend hangs uncertainly on his arm. ‘Wait till I get my hands on them.’

  Standing right beside him, I remark, ‘Bet there won’t be more than a thousand.’

  At once he picks up my accent, but is too drunk to place it. ‘De che rassa sito?’ he demands in dialect. What race are you? It’s the urgent question that underlies the game, the season, everything. ‘De che rassa sito?’ he repeats, belligerent.

  ‘Do I look Calabrian?’ I ask.

  His girlfriend pulls him away. Already, shamefully, I’m hoping Reggina will not be fielding any blacks. Despite the ban on bottled drinks, I pick up two bottles of beer from the fridge.

  As the game kicks off, the evening is scorching, the sun still fierce and blindingly low. The sud is milling with flags, booming with noise. The ritual insults are exchanged with the Reggina fans, who apparently pulled the emergency cord on their train and tried to load their pockets with stones from between the sleepers. Someone has a banner, ‘DIO NON SALVI LA REGGINA.’ God, don’t save the Queen.

  The game? I lived through it in such a state of nervousness it would be folly to imagine I could offer reasonable comment. So here, instead, is part of a long letter from my faithful correspondent Matteo, he who is combining relegation battle with girlfriend break-up. Watching from the heart of the curva, Matteo picks up the game deep into the second half. It’s still nil–nil. Once again, the encounter is characterised by the brilliance and antics of the opposition’s keeper, this time the charismatic if inconsistent Massimo Taibi.

  When Seric is stretchered off I sense it’s the beginning of the end. I look for comfort from the friends around me. But Piero just keeps shaking his head and saying, ‘Third substitution. Now we can’t bring on Cossato,’ while Ernie is smoking one cigarette after another in silence. Reggina have done exactly what they came to do. After a thousand narrow escapes in the first half, they’ve finally put the game to sleep. Taibi turns from his goal towards the curva and looks at us mockingly. Everybody’s shouting, ‘Figlio di puttana!’ He deserves it. Standing there enormous, it seems he wants to take up the whole goal with those awful hands that pushed away such great shots from Mutu and Oddo. Teodorani takes Seric’s place. With his long neck and clumsy way of running he looks more like an insurance agent than a player. And now Reggina are even attacking. The floodlights come up to full power. It’s night. They make the field look longer, endless, especially if you just have to score at all costs. Now we’ve got a corner. Mutu to take it. The cross is sharp and hard. I see Laursen’s blond head climb up and up and up, right to the third floor. And still up. The impact is superb. He crashes the ball down. Taibi doesn’t even have the time to wonder where it’s going … Goal!!!

  The minutes blink by on the big display board. Huddled in the East Stand the Reggina fans have gone silent. Their drum is silent. Bang it now! Bang your fucking drum now, you bastards! Ferron snatches a possible equaliser from Dionigi’s feet. I smoke two, three, four cigarettes in a row. I can hardly breathe. The players are exhausted with the heat and the tension. Ferron saves again. The referee gives four minutes’ injury time. Four fucking minutes. But Reggina are finished. The game’s over.

  Afterwards, Ernie says, ‘One–nil. That’s OK, it’ll have to do.’ I’m thinking, it’s OK about Federica too. It’s the right thing, splitting up. Only with her there won’t be a return match, no more suffering, anxiety, pain. Piero is trying to work out how much it would cost to fly down to Reggio. At least three hundred thou. I haven’t got the cash. I have to be at work Monday. We go and drink at the Bar Bentegodi till the others have to go off to their women and I feel completely superfluous. It takes three beers to put me vaguely back in tune with the world, with the songs in the bar. ‘Campion, Campion, campion è uno solo.’ Then suddenly the place begins to fill with tear-gas, the police are on the rampage and I run off down Via Palladio back home where Dad’s already drunk and sticks a Heineken in my fist and a couple of cigarettes and it’s off to bed at three thinking tomorrow in the office will be awful.

  Matteo, having opted out of military service, works for the local archives of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage.

  Reggio

  If by ill chance there were to be any refereeing ‘errors’ in this game … if, that is, we were to plunge into Serie B … well then fuck it we’ve got to cause havoc … but real havoc this time. We’ve got to let people know we exist. Don’t let the team or the referee leave the stadium in one piece. Block the station and the airport. They’ll be talking about us for months!

  Fucking Furious Reggina Fan,

  There’ll-be-trouble@we’ll.smash.everything

  MATTEO’S IMPROBABLY NAMED friend, Ernie, was wrong about the prices of charter flights down to Reggio. It cost me half a million lire to get on the one plane that was making the journey: the team’s. Of course, I’d sworn I wouldn’t travel with the players again. Can you imagine how depressing the return flight will be if we lose: Serie Beaten, Bereaved, Bankrupt. But it’s the nature of life that when you swear you won’t do something again, very soon you find yourself doing it. In any event, it was easier this time. The team were accompanied by twenty or so journalists, including the local TV who were to produce an hour-long documentary on the trip. So there are more people to talk to and it’s easier to keep a low profile. All around me the chatter is intense. The team’s startling resurrection over these last four matches is allowing us to think of the season as epic, rather than merely depressing.

  You yourself thought it was all over a month ago, I reflect, as I take my seat on the plane. Opposite me are two big beefy boys with shaven heads and smart grey suits. Like a journalist writing an obituary before the electrocardiogram is quite flat, you had even started a dismal last chapter. And instead, here we are in late June with a perfectly poised play-off: after thirteen defeats in seventeen away games, Hellas go to Reggio Calabria to administer the one-goal lead for ninety minutes. ‘Impossible,’ Adailton smiled wanly in the airport lounge. ‘We’ve never gone ninety minutes away from home without conceding a goal.’ Then it’s north versus south, it’s what happens on the field versus what would be convenient for football politics nationwide; above all it’s sport wound to a tension far beyond that which galvanises any cup final. Here we’re fighting for the right to exist. It’s fang-and-claw Darwinism. At the end there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth on one side, wild rejoicing on the other.

  Rino Foschi walks up and down the aisle, all nerves, manner tense and blustering as ever. His arms swing unnecessarily, grabbing the backs of the seats, as if the plane were a boat in high seas. He stops briefly over me. ‘So, a prick and an arsehole check into a big suite in a luxury hotel, only they haven’t found the light switch yet. What does the arsehole say to the prick?’ He laughs. ‘Stick this in your book, come on. What does the arsehole say to the prick?’

  ‘No idea, Rino.’

  ‘Come on, Englishman. Stick this in your book.’ He leans to s
omebody in the seat behind. ‘What does the arsehole say to the prick? Prick and arsehole in a huge room. Haven’t found the light switch.’

  Nobody can guess.

  ‘How big is this place?’ Rino says.

  ‘Fair enough. And so?’

  Foschi leans right over me. I love the man. I love the way he makes his distraction strategies so obvious. ‘“How big is this place?” the arsehole asks? And the prick says, “Oh, big enough for at least four people.” And so what does the arsehole say?’

  ‘No idea. Tell me.’

  ‘Only if you’ll put it in your book.’

  ‘Rino, I promise I’ll put your joke in my book.’

  ‘The arsehole says, “Then why in God’s name are you pushing so hard.’”

  Foschi stumbles away roaring with laughter. The two shaven-headed boys opposite are smiling discreetly. Both of them wear threatening shades. Who are these people?

  Halfway through the flight, Pastorello also makes a trip up and down the aisle, but in a more dignified fashion. He’s playing padrone, cordially shaking hands with all his entourage. ‘You make me travel too much,’ I tell him.

  Last of all, Agnolin does the tour, inspects the troops. His face is that of the seriously worried man, the politician flying into a war zone perhaps. ‘Who would have expected there’d be this coda to the season.’ I offer him some small-talk. ‘Let’s hope it’s not in vain,’ he says grimly. Evidently he fears it will be. I’m reminded of an article in Rigore by the gaoled terrorist Adriano Soffri. ‘In prison, the football game at recreation is our one moment of emotional release. How it makes me laugh when I read in the paper about the big-name players suffering, the fans suffering. They should come to prison to find out what suffering is.’ Yet the pain on Agnolin’s face is real enough. He’s imprisoned in a tortuous psychological space. Serie A, or Serie B.