by Tim Parks
The game restarts. It’s one heart-attack after another. Fights, fouls, punches. Gilardino goes down. Someone stamps on him. Stamps again. Yellow cards, red. As always when in front, Verona lose their heads. Reggina create more chances in two or three minutes than in the previous ninety. Ferron produces two top-class saves, one from the closest possible range. I swear to God here and now that on the day Fabrizio Ferron is one of the finest goalkeepers of all time. I swear to God I shall never say an unkind word about him again. For five terrible minutes it seemed there was only Fabrizio Ferron between Verona and Serie B. Until at last Braschi blows the end. As the Verona players dash for the tunnel, those ambiguous figures on the touch-line converge.
Sport merges into war now. There’s no clear boundary, though only later can one piece together what actually happened. Anonymous as possible, I make my way back to our two coaches. Ominously, the police haven’t formed a cordon round them. A boy is standing on a car, a scarf wrapped round his head pirate fashion, brandishing a sabre. Bodies are rushing back and forth. Then I find the photographer, Francesco, crouched in the gutter, sobbing, shaking. He speaks of being hit by bottles, his camera banged against the wall. ‘This isn’t football,’ he’s weeping. I find the coach driver and get him to open the bus.
‘They were going to kill me. They were going to kill me. Just because I photographed the goal.’
‘It’s nothing,’ the obese driver reassures him in his southern drawl.
‘They destroyed my camera, they would have killed me.’
‘You should worry,’ the driver goes on. ‘My wife is a depressive. What’s a couple of punches beside a depressive wife? What’s Serie A or Serie B when your wife spends all day in her room crying?’
Francesco is trembling uncontrollably. The coaches are undefended. I slip back into the crowd. ‘Pastorello has been punched,’ someone says. They didn’t let him take his bodyguards into the dressing rooms. They got him in the corridor. He went down. He passed out. For two hours the team refuse to leave the changing rooms. They’ve all been kicked and punched. Not by the fans but by those men crowding the touch-line, stadium officials apparently. Crowds of Reggina fans are milling round the players’ exit, but still no police cordon has formed. The players are refusing to give the ritual after-game interviews. The Unnameable wanders around nervously. ‘Pastorello is a genius,’ he says. ‘He saved the team.’ In the street Reggina fans are in tears. Then they rush forward to try and get at Braschi as he’s driven away in a black Mercedes. ‘Assassino!’
At last Foschi emerges, waving his arms, yelling, beside himself. ‘I’ve resigned. That’s it. Agnolin can run this club, since he knows so much fucking better than I do how to deal with people. I was laid out, I was down and they were kicking me. Write that in your fucking newspapers if you dare.’
Foschi is distraught. Agnolin is deadly pale. It seems the professore is insisting that the club shouldn’t try to pursue the matter in the courts. It will do no good. Sport is one thing and courts are another. ‘Foti himself – Reggina’s owner – was kicking the Verona players as they went into the tunnel,’ Salvetti tells me as he climbs on to the players’ bus. There are police around us now. ‘I saw him clear as day, kicking people down the stairs.’ I move off with the journalists. ‘They were trying to force the dressing room door with a crowbar,’ Saverio Guette confirms. ‘We were all pushing against it, blocking them.’ The meek warehouse man has a seriously swollen ear. There are bruises and scratches.
For reasons I don’t understand, we aren’t flying back from Reggio. We have to go to the small airport of Lamezia Terme, eighty kilometres away. As our coach moves off, we’re told to pull all the blinds down and crouch in case of stones. None come. But about ten minutes out on the autostrada the coach loses power. It slows down. The obese driver shrugs and pulls up in a small parking bay with the night-time traffic racing by.
‘Sabotage!’ someone whispers. ‘We’ll be attacked.’ The bodyguards rush to the door. They insist on getting off first. No film-caster could ask for better than these two young men. They play the part so well. But it’s just an ordinary breakdown. Recovering from his ordeal, Pastorello gets off and now at last everyone’s shaking hands and hugging and congratulating each other in the dark with the headlights racing by. ‘Thousands and thousands of kilometres with the brigate and never a breakdown,’ I tell the president. He smiles. ‘We did it!’ The fat journalist is dancing in the dark among the smells of piss and the used condoms. ‘We did it!’
Then in the general excitement an ancient taboo is broken. The players’ coach is brought back and we are loaded on. I get to travel on the players’ bus. Not a bad moment for it. They’re euphoric. Italiano is mocking Gilardino for letting himself be thumped so much in the tunnel. ‘When you’re attacked,’ he explains, ‘you either run away, or you hit back. You don’t stand still and take it.’ He himself floored two of them, he boasts. The coach races through the dark as the events of the evening are turned into myth. For years the collective imagination will go back to this moment. Everybody has his mobile in his hand. They are calling and being called, there’s an endless trilling and talking to each other and passing around of phones. It’s as if this bus were now the communications centre of the world. ‘We’re in Piazza Bra,’ Stefano phones to tell me. ‘People are bathing in the fountains. When should we come to the airport?’
At Lamezia, at midnight, they’re trying to close the bar. But I haven’t had anything to drink for ten hot hours. ‘I’ll buy,’ Laursen tells me.’ ‘Not to worry, Martin, I’m going to pick up six beers for a few people.’ ‘But I just won a hundred million,’ he laughs. A hundred million was their bonus for staying in Serie A. ‘OK, you buy.’
I take a beer to Perotti. He’s wandering about all alone. Nobody wants to talk to him in victory, just as no one wanted to listen to him in defeat. ‘Thanks.’ He accepts the beer. I feel a little sorry for him, a little guilty for believing he was absolutely the wrong man for the job.
‘So, another away defeat, Attilio …’
‘But …’
Then he realises I’m joking. ‘We had a pizzico di fortuna,’ he says. ‘It was what we needed.’
‘And did you really never give up hope, not even after Napoli?’
He shrugs. In the end he’s a nice man, a genuinely modest man, who knows what he knows, which is no doubt a great deal more than I do. ‘After Napoli? I kept doing my sums, you know. I thought, well, we might still do it. So we’ve got to try.’
On the plane I sit beside Puliero who is already beginning to withdraw from the general triumphalism. ‘They’re exaggerating this talk about the assault,’ he comments wryly. ‘No one’s seriously hurt. They’re turning the game into a magnificent victory, when actually it was the narrowest of escapes.’ Behind us, beer in hand, Anthony Seric is making a pass at a pretty air hostess. He winks at me. ‘Seize the day!’
At Villafranca, Verona’s airport, two officials try to whisk us away on a bus. It’s three in the morning. But the players are having nothing of it. They cross the tarmac to embrace those who have loved and loathed them all year. The police are trying to hold back a huge crowd. They can’t do it. The supporters surge through, Stefano is there and Scopa and Glass-eye and so many other familiar faces. The deputy mayor. Pam. Penn. Paruca. They push past the customs and passports barriers, into the baggage collection lounge. It’s a huge ritual mixing. It’s the community. ‘Hellas, la mia unica fede!’ they’re singing. Cossato is raised on their shoulders. He’s lost his shirt, he’s lost his shorts. Even Pastorello is raised aloft. It seems impossible to me after all those angry banners that the fans should forgive the man so much. And vice vena. But it’s happening. ‘Pastorello, portaci in Europa,’ they’re singing. Take us into Europe. A girl shrills, ‘Martino Melis, rape me. I’m healthy!’ Finally the players are lined up, bare-chested now, for cameras and TV. They stand arms linked, sixteen or seventeen men, surprised to be friends, amazed to be heroes. Cossato,
who fought so hard to find a niche in the team, is now the centre of the group, the saviour of the patria. With a fantastic sense of release they all belt out, ‘Reggina, Reggina, VAFFANCULO!!!’
It’s four-thirty when I drive home. The immigrants are already forming their queue outside the police station. We’re still in Serie A, I tell myself. I know I haven’t taken it in yet. I race through the lights, out of town. The season starts again in just two months. So many players to buy and sell. Seems I’m the only car on the road. A new trainer to find. I drive up the hill towards our village. Just two months to disintoxicate myself. Two months and it all starts over again, this sick sick football business. But what a weekend, it’s been! What a year! Bari to Reggio. So sick and so exciting. Squealing to a stop, I fling open the door of my filthy Citroën Visa and step out at last under the cool stars.
On 25 August 2001, the black Colombian player Johnnier Estainer Montano made his debut for Hellas Verona at the Bentegodi.
He was warmly welcomed by the Curva Sud.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Hellas Verona football club for their generosity and help, and in particular to Saverio Guette for his exemplary kindness. Alvise Lunardi, Matteo Fontana, Eugenio Ciuccietti and Massimo Bocchiola all gave invaluable advice and input, for which I am immensely grateful. Other thanks must go to Penn, Pam, Dany, Paruca, McDan, la Maestrina, Camelot, Cris and all the Più-mati, the world’s oddest fan club. Last but not least, I must not forget actor and radio commentator Roberto Puliero, whose extraordinary voice first drew me to the Bentegodi stadium.
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Published by Vintage 2003
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Copyright © Tim Parks 2002
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ISBN 9780099422679