Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Roma’s great rivals, Lazio, were much closer to sporting glory. In 1971 the club had appointed a manager, Tommaso Maestrelli, who had taken them straight back into Serie A. With his salt-and-pepper hair and mild manners (he was nicknamed ‘tissue paper’), he seemed a father figure. He invited players to his house for meals. But tactically he was revolutionary. He was one of the first exponents of ‘total football’, persuading all his players – bar two central defenders and the goalkeeper – that they could be attackers. Dutch scouts working on similar tactics in the early 1970s asked to watch some of his training sessions. What was extraordinary about him was his taciturnity, which disguised profound values. In his first speech to the Lazio players, he apparently said: ‘I will speak little and that little will be seen to be a lot… We will love one another and avoid any misunderstanding. I consider loyalty the best gift given on this planet. We will grow together.’

  Those character traits had already brought Maestrelli much success. He had managed Reggina to promotion from Serie C to B in 1965 and, five years later, took lowly Foggia into Serie A. In the 1972–73 season, Lazio had come within two points of winning the scudetto. Like many great managers, Maestrelli managed to put together a team of players who had hitherto been mostly scorned or ignored: Mario Frustalupi was in his thirties, a reject from Inter who critics felt was over the hill. Luciano Re Cecconi was a blond midfielder who had played under Maestrelli in Foggia. Maestrelli also brought in Renzo Garlaschelli, an attacker who had only scored twelve goals in over a hundred games for small clubs. But the main man was a tall striker who had grown up in South Wales: Giorgio Chinaglia.

  Maestrelli’s exciting new brand of football caught the imagination of fans and, by the mid-1970s, there were various ultra groups following Lazio: the Tupamaros (named after the left-wing Uruguayan guerrilla group), Vigilantes, Aquile, Ultras, Folgore, Cast, Marines and, the largest group, Commandos Monteverde Lazio. Many ultras wore military fatigues, partly to exude an air of menace but also because in many stadiums, as in Italian brothels, there was a discount for soldiers.

  Weaponry was often paramilitary, too. One of the young fans from those days remembers how the ultras went to away games:

  … as if going on great military manoeuvres, with camouflaged clothing, parachutists’ helmets, military boots, dark glasses and handkerchiefs to cover the face. In the luggage of the coach, other than banners, were bags containing pick-axe handles, iron bars, chains, slingshots and iron ball-bearings. There were those who also brought flare-guns and someone who sometimes turned up with axes, knives and real pistols.

  In the hyper-politicized 1970s, territoriality wasn’t just a charming attachment to your own turf but a defence against real enemies: there were certain squares in the capital – Piazza Euclide or Piazzale delle Muse, in the heart of the Parioli district – that were known to ‘belong’ to the neo-fascists and, by extension, to the Laziali. Even your clothing was part of a political livery. The Lazio fans wore El Charro Camperos, the knee-high Tex-Mex cowboy boots, and either long green Austrian-style loden coats or bomber jackets. They called left-wingers (with longer hair, All Star trainers, check shirts, and kefiahs) zecche (‘ticks’). They listened to their own singers too. Lucio Battisti was a favourite of the Lazio fans, partly because his song, ‘La Collina dei Ciliegi’ (‘The hill of cherry trees’) spoke of ‘forests with straight arms’, a hint that his own political persuasion was the same as theirs.

  Every curva seemed to create and then cherish folkloric characters from those sporting Sunday afternoons. Lazio had Leonida, a man who dressed as a Roman emperor – with a white sheet and laurel wreath – and blessed the terraces. Luciano, meanwhile, was a character who shouted out the formations, adding sarcastic Latin – ‘ora pro nobis’ or ‘pray for us’ – after the names of opposition players. There was a tubby, abrasive man called Goffredo Lucarelli, better known as ‘er Tassinaro’ (the ‘Taxi-Driver’). He was unable to pronounce his ‘r’s and seemed a parody of a Roman yokel. He constantly played tricks on people, lighting firecrackers between the fingers of ultras asleep on the bus.

  Other groups were always on the look-out for him, hoping to give him a beating. Once, at Inter, he had to hide in the first-aid room and put on a nurse’s outfit to get out unharmed. His taxi licence was eventually rescinded because he argued with a Roma fan and then left him stranded halfway to the airport. So, he got work driving a hearse and deliberately lined up jobs which took him to the same parts of the country as Lazio. One time, taking a corpse to Siracusa, he parked his hearse outside Catania’s stadium to watch the game. Told that he would have to move, he refused: ‘It’s only for a couple of hours and this guy isn’t in a rush.’

  Having come so close to the title in 1972–73, there was a fear that the following season Lazio wouldn’t be able to regain such heights. But Maestrelli’s team was renowned for being everything he wasn’t. It was a rough, bullish, street fighter’s team with more than a hint of madness about it. Various players did parachute jumps from military planes. The defender Sergio Petrelli didn’t play cards but persuaded a few other players to join a firing range instead. Soon, half the team collected pistols, firing them off in the woods and in hotel car parks. There was even a story of two teammates lying in their hotel room, each trying to persuade the other to get out of bed to switch off the light. Neither would move, so in the end one got out his pistol and shot out the bulb.

  Giorgio Chinaglia was taller than everyone else on the pitch, and recognizable by his thick hair and sideburns. He was powerful but, more than just muscle, he was extraordinarily stubborn, determined that nothing was going to stop him putting the ball in the back of the net. He seemed to take his many penalties with the meanness of someone kicking over a kid’s sandcastle, more anger and speed to the kick than accuracy. He once scored a goal against Napoli as the shirt was being literally ripped off his back. That season there were plenty of goals scored by Chinaglia that seemed to owe more to willpower than anything else. In one game, the ball came into the crowded box and Chinaglia barged it in, leaving opposition players lying on the floor wondering what had hit them.

  And always the manager, Maestrelli, was holding everything together. In one home game, against Verona, Lazio were 2–1 down at half-time. Maestrelli stood in front of the changing room door, refusing to let anyone in. He sent the players back out onto the pitch, as if the shame and embarrassment of standing out there alone for the whole of half-time might make them buck up their ideas. The crowd were perplexed to begin with, not sure what was happening. But then they began to sing loudly and the players stood rigidly in their positions, staring angrily ahead. ‘We had blood in our eyes,’ one Lazio player remembered. They stood there, waiting for the opposition, desperate to put things right.

  Within four minutes of the restart, they had equalized. The next goal was the best – a midfielder running from the halfway to the goal-line and pulling it back to Chinaglia. Never one with the silkiest touch, Chinaglia tried to trap the ball but it rose above his waistline. So, he smacked it in with a high left boot. The image of those eleven players standing on the pitch during the interval became a sign of a team that refused to succumb.

  The footballing fates meant that Lazio had the chance to win the scudetto at home, in the penultimate game of the season, against Maestrelli and Re Ceccone’s former team, Foggia. It was the same day as the referendum on whether Italy’s 1970 divorce law should be repealed (59.3 per cent voted against repeal). It wasn’t a great game but Lazio won 1–0 thanks to yet another Chinaglia penalty thumped into the back of the net. As the crowd flooded onto the pitch, Maestrelli just put his head in his hands.

  It was an extraordinary scudetto because the team was made up of mavericks and rough diamonds who were often at each others’ throats. In contemporary football’s era of uber-professionalism, in which everything is made safe and predictable, fans look back on that swashbuckling team with profound warmth. The baggy and unsponsored cotton kits, the angled
plywood advertising boards, the long hair and the simplicity of goal celebrations (a brief hug between two or three players near the goal) make that season seem from another age, as do the tales of pistols, parachutes and all-night poker with litres of whisky.

  With the passing of the years, that scudetto became for Lazio’s ultras a source of great nostalgia. 1974 wasn’t seen as an age of innocence but perhaps the opposite: an era in which players could be reckless. The players seemed then as raucous and as impassioned as the ultras themselves. That rare affinity between the ultras and Lazio players was cemented by Chinaglia. They sung his name, rhyming it with battaglia (‘battle’) in a chant borrowed from the MSI’s youth movement. Chinaglia was nicknamed ‘Long John’, and the Taxi-Driver once said that ‘Long John was for Laziali like the giant Gulliver for the Lilliputians.’

  Present Day: Reggina v. Cosenza

  The squatted building, the Casa degli Ultrà, is still bare, so the excited singing reverberates. People are smacking flagpoles on the metal bars of the window, keeping time. Everyone is dressed up for tonight’s away game: hoodies, scarves, sweatshirts naming the town or suburb they’re from. It’s a riotous party, lots of drinking and smoking. Chill grabs the megaphone and puts on the siren so it sounds like the police are about to crash the gathering, which only serves to increase the exuberance.

  ‘Oh, pezzo di merda,’ someone shouts at the imaginary police charge. Drinks are being passed round: straw-bottomed flasks of wine, local brews, Silan liqueurs. All the usual crew are here. Elastic, as tense and well-sprung as ever. He looks you over, asks you a few questions to make sure you’re not a flake. Mouse, short and pugnacious, cracks jokes and seems livid at the same time. His anger is all part of the act, until he really starts steaming. Half-a-Kilo is in his usual shell suit, starting a new song whenever it goes quiet and teaching people new variations on the lyrics which make them laugh. One-Track is on the drum, getting a roll going like a breaker at the seaside, keeping everything frothy. Left-Behind is quietly watching everything, cradling his herbs in his palm. Skinny Monica, the lean lawyer, has her right fist in the air, keeping time to the song. She’s wearing a black T-shirt that says: ‘a woman in the stadium is like an away-goal: worth double’.

  People drift outside, getting ready to go. It’s now dusk and others are rolling up on foot, on scooters, in cars. Many are waving flags or scarves out of windows and making as much noise as possible. They pretend to crash into mates, braking at the last minute, and there’s more fake outrage and laughter. Half a dozen hired minibuses are parked in convoy by the river.

  Given the precarious position of the club, the high spirits are surprising. In the first six games of the league season, Cosenza has lost four times and drawn twice. Those results were bad enough, but it was the way they had lost which felt insulting. Cosenza had let in four goals against Siracusa. Attendances are dropping below two thousand.

  Before September was out, the club sacked the manager, Gaetano Fontana, and replaced him with a Tuscan called Piero Braglia. With his grey hair and measured tones, he seemed more like a teacher than a manager. Three days later, Cosenza lost at home to Catania 0–1. They seemed to have a bit more about them in that game but even so it was now October and the team still hadn’t won a game. Cosenza was second from bottom of Serie C, one of three third division tiers (Serie C is split into North, Centre and South).

  Tonight’s game is hardly likely to be a breeze. It’s away against Reggio Calabria, where Cosenza hasn’t won for fifty-eight years. To add to the gloom, many of the lads here know that – because of the fighting in Matera a month ago – they’re bound to be given a stadium ban and forced to sign in at the police station during all games. It’s like becoming a prisoner in your own city. So, this game might just be their last hurrah for many years.

  Everyone is playing tough. ‘Keep your scarves on tight,’ goes the command, because any filthy Reggiano might try to nick it, if not actually cut it off your neck. It’s a derby with a political edge. The Reggina ultras have sometimes toyed with fascistic slogans and paraded their racism. One year, the notoriously tolerant Cosenza ultras taunted their Reggina counterparts with a banner suggesting they had little cause to be upset by non-white people: ‘what an ugly joke nature played on you, you fascist with dark skin’.

  But whilst there’s a lot of tough talk about defending ourselves, no one is packing anything serious. There are huge lumps of cheese but no one has a knife, so it sits sweating in the evening sun. Occasionally, someone takes a bite as if it were an apple. Disorganization is part of the package: PinoNero screams at his brother Left-Behind for ripping up his ticket and rolling it into a roach. He had torn up the barcode that, in twenty-first-century football, produces the green arrow that clicks you through the turnstiles.

  ‘No, fuckwit, that’s last week’s ticket,’ shouts Left-Behind as smoke comes out between his teeth. ‘It says Reggio.’

  ‘That’s where we’re going tonight, you twat,’ PinoNero screams back.

  ‘We’re not playing Reggio.’ Left-Behind is in a bit of a haze now.

  ‘Of course we fucking are,’ shouts SkinnyMon.

  Everyone laughs, and once the spliff has been smoked they begin taping the ticket back together again.

  It’s almost 200 kilometres to Reggio, at the very end of the big toe of the Italian boot. Kick-off is only two hours away but people are milling around still, taking photos of each other. Nearby are the city’s unfinished projects: the wooden pedestrian footbridge over the river, which is boarded up and rotting, and just beyond it the Jolly Hotel, standing like a tombstone.

  Suddenly, everyone piles into cars and minibuses and the convoy is off, honking horns and waving flags and scarves out of windows as it snakes through the city towards the motorway. Men standing outside bars shake their fists in encouragement for the colours.

  Much of the motorway is on concrete stilts over canyons. The convoy careers along at top speed, the ska at full whack. Vindov is our racing driver. He’s arguing with the bloke in the middle seat next to him. To make his point he takes both hands off the wheel. Other times, as another minibus overtakes at 150 kph, Vindov swerves close to shout an insult out of the window. Boozy Suzy spills rum down her top. Everyone is singing and laughing.

  We get close to Reggio but as half the minibuses pull off at one exit, the others overshoot. They’re getting into the bowels of the suburbs now, which is not a good place to be out on their own. Vindov is speaking on the phone at the same time as driving and continuing his argument with Dino. Another ten minutes and the convoy is back together. It’s four minutes to kick-off and we’ve only now seen the floodlights. ‘Better that way,’ says Half-a-Kilo, pointing at rotating blue lights, ‘keeps this lot waiting.’

  And there, having waited since half-past six, are four police cars and two police vans. They go in front and behind our dozen minibuses, their sirens clearing the roads. Vindov keeps trying to overtake the escort, which only makes them go faster. And now it’s about being noisy. Telling this shit-hole city that you’re on their turf. A moped is coming up on the outside. Vindov swerves hard and blocks the moped driver, who brakes and honks, raising his hand in hatred for the Cosentini. Left-Behind puts our megaphone outside the window, its siren blasting to mock the escort.

  Outside the ground, it’s tense. The match has already kicked off and everyone wants to get inside. One-Track and Mouse are telling the riot police that one or two lads don’t have tickets. In truth, it’s much more than one or two, more like a dozen: Vindov, Egg and another ten or so. Those without a ticket say it’s a protest against the hated supporter’s card, the tessera, which, in theory, all travelling fans now have to acquire. Those refuseniks are respected by the group: they’ve taken a stand against an authoritarian state. They’ve refused to supply all their details, to get barcoded, to be filed and stamped as ‘trusted’ by a system they don’t trust themselves. But now there’s a stand-off. The riot police don’t want the un-ticketed 10 per
cent outside the stadium, roaming angry in a city that hates them. An agreement is reached and those purest, and most idealistic, of ticketless ultras slip into the stadium too.

  Barcodes, turnstiles, dust-downs. Getting into a stadium is a soulless exercise. You can feel the scorn as you’re kettled into the latest grim arena. There’s a plainclothes plod with a small camcorder, holding it a foot from everyone’s face. And this for a low-key game in one of the three third divisions. The battle with the authorities is partly a question of who can be more in your face without provoking a fight. The authorities tend to be keener to avoid a scuffle, so try to appear emollient. But this silent cop with the camcorder seems particularly wrong, provocatively putting the lens in Mouse’s face, who leers forwards and tries to butt it, screaming ‘oh’ at the cop dressed like a banker. Suddenly everyone is getting in on the action, screaming ‘oh’ at the police. There’s a bit of a surge and the police close ranks, pushing us all towards the steps to the curva. It’s play-acting, mostly, but feels like it could kick off into more serious aggression at any moment.

  The game is ten minutes in by the time we get into the stand, high up in one corner. The bright lights, the shaved grass, the shiny kit: it all feels so tidy and removed from us caged animals. Already inside are a few Cosenza fans standing together in twos and threes. The Reggiani chant ‘fuck off’. The Cosentini return the compliment. But the stadium is only about one-tenth full. After all the arguments, the pain, the danger and the disorientation of the journey, we’re here, in a concrete shit-hole of a stadium where the football is as exciting as a stale biscuit.

  A few look over at what’s happening on the grass but most are busily cable-tying all the banners on the metal rails or Sellotaping them onto Perspex screens. Flags are unfurled, drums twatted hard, and suddenly Elastic, on the megaphone, screams one syllable, arcing the sound across the heads of the hundred or so fans. ‘Co.’ The crowd shout it back to him: ‘Co.’ Then silence. ‘Se!’ he screams. ‘Se!’ repeated. Long silence. ‘Nza.’ Then: ‘Cosenza, Cosenza, Cosenza’ again and again.