Match 20 - Genoa

In the 60’s, an American sociologist called Orrin Klapp, considered what he saw as modern America’s sudden restlessness and search for identity as stemming from the simple question: Who am I?

“ [Identity] includes all things a person may legitimately and reliably say about himself; his status; his name; his personality; and his past life, but if his social context is unreliable, it follows that he cannot say anything legitimately and reliably about himself.” 

Klapp goes on to contend that in this absence of identification people turn to shallow materialism or protests. Eric Simons takes this on and argues that fans everywhere fight with questions of identity and self-concept:

“Teams can offer one source of identity while confirming another, like the way that Tottenham fans link themselves to the North London Jewish community or Latin American teams link themselves to universities. Fans can connect with political traditions - conservative Real Madrid and independent Barcelona. Or artistic expression - Johan Cruyff and the aspirations and aesthetics of unshackled sixties liberalism”.

He concludes, “the more opportunities the team gives you to establish an identity for yourself, the more firmly you anchor your support in it, the easier it is to answer the question: Who am I?”

Personally, I have more than one answer. Living in a foreign country, no one here knew me when I arrived, so I could have invented a new self. You can airbrush out the parts of your past that you’d rather people didn’t know, and project a different version of yourself. I wouldn’t say that I did that, although my reputedly extensive knowledge in the fields of fly fishing, Krav Maga and glass blowing (at times all performed simultaneously) are yet to be put to the test here. Living in another country does allow you a bit of leeway with how you want others to see you, but ultimately no matter how hard you try to fool other people into believing that you’re some kind of effortlessly cool and witty cat, you’ll trip yourself up and reveal your true self (perhaps by using ‘cat’ to signify ‘person’ in the twenty-first century). 

That doesn’t bring me any closer to the answer though. Who am I? It’s a question that has (snoop doggy) dogged humanity’s mightiest thinkers for millennia, from Socrates to Calvin Broadus. These two don’t help me with their input (“man, know thyself”, and “the n**** with the biggest nuts, and guess what? He is I and I am him, slim with the tilted brim”, respectively), but if you’ll pardon the cod psychology, Dr Seuss was closest to the mark with: “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind”. 

It’s an admirable position to take: it doesn’t matter what people think of you, so be what you feel. Now, I’m a Scot, a son, a brother, a TEFL teacher and many other things, while in the future I’d not be averse to being a father and a gazillionaire. These aren’t particularly clear adjectives to define ourselves by though. Genghis Khan fathered numerous children. Thomas Hamilton was Scottish. I’ve met a few deplorable TEFL teachers. If, as it’s been said, our body chemistry changes every seven years, our identities must be fluid too. Who am I, therefore, is a question with no fixed answer. I hope I’m good. That’s all. Football helps us label ourselves, though. And so thanks to that, I can say that I'm genoano.

.....

Match 19 - Cagliari

After landing in Cagliari and getting dropped off at my replacement hotel (not so much a long story as a brief pain in the arse, but you'll have to read the book to find out why), I had to make it to the stadium, and to try and find a ticket for the match. Normally I just buy a ticket online in the days leading up to the game (long ago having learned that approaching clubs and asking for a complimentary ticket leads nowhere, slowly), but with Cagliari I wasn’t able to do this. The only places I could buy a ticket in advance were in Sardinia, and those of you paying attention will know that I wasn’t in Sardinia before the match day. Luckily, there was a wee ticket cabin open when I arrived at the stadium, so I took a ticket for the only part left, the Tribuna. We’ll come onto the stadium in a moment, but first, its surroundings: Apartment blocks from the 60’s that looked long-since forgotten about, amid huge expanses of graffiti-covered crumbling concrete set against a backdrop of hills and blue sky. If you’ve ever seen images of Beirut or any other war-torn city, you’ll get an idea of what the area surrounding the Sant’Elia looks like. Except there hasn’t been a war there. 

And then there’s the stadium. What can I tell you about the stadium?

It is a dump. Built in 1970, just after Cagliari had won their one and only Scudetto, it still looks to this day like it was built in the 1970’s and hasn’t been touched since. In it’s pomp, it could hold around 70,000 people if they all breathed in, and was where England played their three group matches in the 1990 World Cup, before their customary exit at German hands/feet.

For the match I went to see, and indeed for all of the season, there were more crowd-control barriers than crowd, as the capacity had been reduced down to five thousand people split between the away fans’ perspex box, the Tribuna, and the Curva Nord. This last stand was however not part of the original structure - it was made of scaffolding sitting on the running track behind the goal, and so perched in front of the original terracing. The rest of the stadium was closed and condemned by the council, and looked like a building site. It was, all told, quite a bizarre sight, but perfectly in keeping with the surrounding area. 

There had been a bit of a kerfuffle in the last few years between the council and the (soon to become former-) owner, Massimo Cellino, over the stadium. In 2012, after the Sant’Elia was closed for public safety reasons, the Sardinian team played in Trieste. For those of you who aren’t currently looking at an Italian map, Trieste is on the other side of the country near the border with Slovenia, which is over eight hundred and ten kilometres from Cagliari as the crow flies. So any away fans who went would almost certainly have an easier journey than the home fans. Cellino, having scored the first points in what seems to have basically been a giant pissing contest, moved the team back to Cagliari the next season to another pre-fab and scaffolding-made stadium, the IS Arena. While being easier for locals to get to see matches, it proved a little more difficult for the owner, the local Mayor and another official from the council, who were arrested for embezzlement and misrepresentation with regards to the work at the team’s new temporary home.

.......

Match 18 - Inter

Many moons ago, some friends and I went to Amsterdam for a wee holiday. On the way to the Van Gogh Museum our seventeen-year-old selves got lost and ended up walking down a canal where a bouncer encouraged us to enter his salubrious establishment with the romance-drenched line “it’s so close to your face you can smell it”. His patter probably wouldn’t have stuck in my head had he not looked a lot like Sieb Dijkstra, the Motherwell and Dundee Utd ‘keeper of the nineties. Then again, any similarity might just have come from the fact that we were in the Netherlands and that he was a moustachioed Dutchman. 

What’s this ramble down memory canal got to do with anything, though? The end, that’s what. In a fit of ambitious planning, I’d decided that my last two trips out of Genoa would be sandwiched into one weekend - Inter on the Saturday, then a flight to Sardinia to catch Cagliari on the Sunday. So Sieb Dijkstra’s doppelgänger came to mind when I was thinking about the end - now it was so close to my face that I could smell it. And it smelled like the Cuban cigar and bottle of Hendrick’s I’d promised myself would be enjoyed on my balcony when I finished writing everything. 

But before that happy day, I had to pay another trip to Milan, this time to see Inter. Founded in 1908 by a breakaway group of members of Milan Cricket and Football Club (which would come to be called AC Milan), they wanted a club less-dominated by Italians and struck on the self-explanatory name of Internazionale after their first meeting, saying: "This wonderful night will give us the colours for our crest: black and blue against a backdrop of gold stars. It will be called Internazionale, because we are brothers of the world.”

All very artistic and lovey-dovey, that, and while historically AC Milan were considered the proletarian club in the city, Inter were seen as being more for the bourgeoisie. Nowadays of course, these lines of demarcation are nonsense, and while Italy couldn’t be described as a bourgeois paradise, Inter can boast being the third-most supported team according to research by Demos. Their poll was conducted in 2011 and then again in 2012. In 2011, 18.6% of people asked declared their undying love for Inter. Then, one year later that number had shrunk to 14.5%. Now, based on these figures I’m going to suggest something outlandish here, so if you’re standing up, please do sit down. 

Ready? Ok. 

Fans are fickle. In 2010, Jose Mourinho’s side had won the Scudetto, Coppa Italia and Champions’ League, then in 2011 they finished second. Moods were good, and people who had been celebrating the historic tripletta one year earlier were presumably still full of the pride that this reflected glory brought them. Another year on, in 2012, they finished a poor sixth, and the number of people who would proudly bang the Inter drum had contracted by a smidgeon over four percent. The ‘fans’ who had abandoned ship as soon as the seas got rough obviously hadn’t been paying attention to the official anthem of ‘their’ team: 

  “No, non puoi cambiare la bandiera “No, you can’t change the flag
E la maglia nerazzurra     And the nerazzurra strip
        Dei campioni del passato           Of past champions
              Che poi è la stessa   That’s the same now as then
            Di quelli del presente       I want their pride
         Io da loro voglio orgoglio     For the team from Milan
          Per la squadra di Milano   Because there’s only Inter”
           Perché c'è solo l’Inter”

Match 16 - Milan

“Money, it's a gas

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

New car, caviar, four star daydream 

Think I'll buy me a football team.”

(Pink Floyd, ‘Money’)

“The San Siro is my dearest memory, hand in hand with my father…                     

[at the turnstiles] I made myself tiny

 to be able to let the two of us use just the one ticket.”

So said the ladies’ man, Silvio Berlusconi in his obsequious biography, reminiscing about the good old days. Ah, the good old days. But where have they gone?This was one of the big questions surrounding the club when I made my trip to see Milan, but before we get to all that, we have to confront the elephant in the room, as glaring and unavoidable as a friend who has sprouted a second head overnight. That elephant is of course, Il Cavaliere.

In the early 1980’s, Milan were having a fairly torrid time of it. After winning their tenth Scudetto in 1978-79, not even a youthful Franco Baresi could halt the club’s slide into mediocrity, and they were subsequently relegated in 1980 for their part in the Calcioscommese scandal. They popped straight back up to Serie A but it was a fleeting moment and they went back down again immediately. After winning promotion the following season they were faced with a new challenge - they were skint. 

But then, riding in on his white horse was a youthful (and from photographs you wouldn’t think that he’s aged since then), Silvio. Since becoming owner in 1986, Milan have enjoyed an extended stay in the sunny climes of the upper reaches of Serie A and European football, winning a grand total of twenty-eight trophies. In his early years, the Dutch triumvirate of Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard ruled supreme alongside homebred players of the pedigree of Maldini and Baresi. In charge of this stable of stars was Arrigo Sacchi, who shunned the concept of catenaccio and instead preferred a free-form total attack. This was to prove to be revolutionary in the Italian game, as the previously held conventional wisdom was that the catenaccio system was the best, whose strongest proponent, Craig Levein in his spell as Scotland coach Annibale Frossi, claimed that the perfect game was “the artistic and philosophical equivalent of a blank canvas: a nil-nil draw.”

For years, Milan were a fixture at the top of the tree, doing battle with Europe’s finest for glory, most memorably against Liverpool in the epic Champions’ League final of 2005. This went down as one of the all-time classic finals, however despite watching it, I can’t say I remember it all that well. In a pub in the centre of Edinburgh to celebrate the end of the University term, I had one ear open to what my classmates were saying, but both eyes fixed on the TV. At half-time, seeing Liverpool losing 3-0 and a group of Italians toasting their inevitable victory, I took the only logical course of action at the time and got drunk. Therefore, not for the first, and certainly not for the last time, I erased the part of my brain that should have held sweet memories; the second half comeback to 3-3 and resulting penalty kick drama and glory for the men from Anfield. Instead I have only flashes of the match and the evening as a whole.

They had their revenge two years later while I watched on from a bar in Atlanta, and given that it was (a) boiling, (b) just after lunch, and (c) I wanted to be in a state to remember the match, being careful about my alcohol intake wasn’t too much of a struggle as I watched the rossoneri win 2-1.

Match 14 - Juventus

My Juve supporting contact had told me that getting my grubby hands on a ticket would prove tough. I didn’t really imagine it’d be as difficult as he was making out, and my schedule was pretty fully-booked, as obviously with so many games to watch and with a desire to have some semblance of a life, I’d made my own mini-calendar to keep me right and make sure that come the 18th May I hadn’t forgotten anyone. The game I’d plumped for Juventus was against Fiorentina. It’s an important match, and so I figured that it’d be popular, but that getting my hands on a ticket wouldn’t be too much of a Herculean task. As it came to be, I ended up as disappointed as an Alien fan who’d had high hopes for Prometheus.

And so it was, that having checked for the date that tickets would go on general sale online, I was sat at my computer at 9.55 the Monday morning before the match, coffee in one hand and victory cigarette rolled and stowed behind my ear. Such is my intoxicatingly paradoxical blend of dedication and lack of accuracy, I’d actually been at the computer since 8.55 because I made a mistake over the time of them going on sale. Still, better to be early rather than late, as Italians never say. 

To get you in the mood, and given that Italians often tell stories in the present tense, let’s inject some drama:

As the clock ticks down to zero hour, I waggle my fingers in preparation for some nimble clicking and field-filling in. A thin bead of sweat trickles down my temple, as outside a dog barks in the early morning haze before doing a shit in my street that will again go unscooped by its owner. Somewhere else everyone else is spending their time in a more constructive way than me.

My eyes flick towards the clock on my computer.

Go time.

I figuratively leap into action (the coffee’s still in my hand, so it’s really more of a lean). 

Having selected the section I want to sit in, I put in my personal details - Name: check. Date of birth: check. Place of birth: check. Wait a second for the next page to load. But it doesn’t, it won’t - the page has crashed. 

Repeat the process. Same result.

De la Soul rapped that three’s the magic number, but rather than actually believing it, I think they just wanted to stress that there were three of them and they were good.

Unfortunately, third time’s neither lucky nor magical for me here. After going through the above process again, I’m met with the message ‘No tickets remaining’. 

A lone scream pierces the morning air when I realise that in my distracted state I’d lit the cigarette before stowing it behind my ear. Far from it being a glorious cigarette of victory, it morphs into a sad cigarette of defeat.

Ticketless, to boot. Monday, Monday, so good to me, my arse.

Match 17 - Udinese

The following is what I remember of watching the match between Udinese and Napoli:

Actually, I tell a lie, I remember two things: there was a punch up in the stand down to my left, and someone hugged me (which, using my keen journalistic skills of deduction, suggests that I was present for Udinese scoring). Unfortunately, the need to rely on deducing this was due to my usual journalistic rigour getting abandoned pre-match in a car park near the stadium while paying tribute to Dionysus.

So, apart from those two gems, I’m afraid that all my brain can offer is an unsettling black spot.

The why, we’ll come to in a moment, but first, we need to talk about my drinking feelings of embarrassment and shame. These strike me down more and more frequently the older I get, which is entirely unwelcome. They’re not particularly Scottish traits, but I do have a couple of Irish friends and I live in catholicism-central, so rather than delve too far inwards, I’ll blame these outside influences. Although most commonly triggered by a night on the sauce, they also crop up if I spend money spuriously (so they’ve been haunting me since the first match watching Torino), or make an excuse to not see friends (tip: writing a book is an ideal ‘get out of speaking to people’ card).As I say, in recent years these unwelcome guests have been popping into my head more and more often. Not that I was some kind of abstinent, parsimonious monk beforehand. 
And nor is it the case that I’ve become a solitary, heavy-drinking lush. Rather, after a night out, instead of a hangover I get horribly embarrassed. I know that I wouldn’t have done anything while being under the influence, because I’m quite a relaxed drunk and, as I hope will have become abundantly clear by now, I don’t like confrontation. Nor I’m told, do I typically show any obvious signs of being three sheets to the wind. I just know that I was, and that’s enough to make me cringe. 

Now, I don’t think it’s to do with having a pre-historic idea of manliness and being able to drink - most men take their dad as a role model, and in this I’m no different, but my dad’s flying after three pints. And it’s not that my reaction to alcohol has changed over the years - in my youth I’d drink and not remember stuff the next day either. So, I don’t think it’s to do with the debilitating effects of age, notions of being less masculine, getting in trouble, or fearing that I might have pissed myself while standing on a stool with my pants on my head. Being a quiet drunk makes me something of a stealth drunk, but it’s just the occasional fear that people can hear my thoughts - I’m aware that I’m drunk, and would hate that other people know that I know.

Rather, and whisper it now, I think I might just be growing up. Eesh, what an idea. It’s not becoming of a gentleman to be drunk in public (lock your binging up at home!), and while I don’t have a monocle and bowler hat, to get in that state in public, particularly in front of people I don’t know, makes me feel less like a member of civilised society.

So, it came to pass that as people were filing into churches on Easter Sunday under a drizzly sky, I was hauling my carcass across Udine to get the interminably long train back home. It had been a good weekend away from home, and in terms of the book, I was well and truly on the home-straight. Unfortunately, on the walk back to the train station while I was trying to figure out what I’d done when I got back to my hotel the evening previous, I got lost and very nearly missed the first train of the day. 

But first, let’s rewind 36 hours. 

Udine is so far away from Genoa that going to watch Udinese play would take three days, two of which I’d have the pleasure of spending large portions of on trains. Serie A doesn’t play any matches on Easter Sunday, instead moving the matches forward 24 hours. So, on Good Friday I set off for my first time to the north-east corner of Italy in search of wee zebras. 

It’d have been a hell of a long journey for me to make and not find good people to interview, so in the days beforehand I did my usual signing up to forums to try and meet folk who’d help. On one of these a group of guys (I’m assuming they’re men) replied telling me to make my way to the car park of the North stand. There I should look for a dark Volkswagen Passat with a Belgian licence plate. The owner of said car would be a chap called Renzo, and that’s who they were all going to meet for a barbecue and a drink before the match.

On the day of the match, I woke up, went for breakfast and a stroll round the centre of Udine, then set off for the stadium. Feeling pretty refreshed and in a good mood, in contrast to the depressing grey clouds overhead, I found the stadium without that much difficulty. After a quick fag break so that I could check online what kind of car a Passat was (I’m not one for car models) I did a round of the car park, thinking that it’d be a doddle. Fortunately, when I arrived there weren’t that many people there, so it didn’t take me long to, unfortunately, not find the car in question. After a brief repose with a beer from a burger van, I walked back round the car park, this time taking care to look for Belgian licence plates. While doing this, I was also casting lingering glances at the groups of people who had already congregated, in the hope that they might twig that it was I that they’d spoken to online. After about five minutes of looking carefully at car licence plates, then at the people hanging about, it dawned on me that maybe I looked like a policeman. This wasn’t the impression I was going for, and still having not found the mythical Renzo, I started approaching groups and asking if they knew him or anyone from the forum that I’d been on. Given that the forum’s name was in dialect, I couldn’t pronounce it properly, so was met with blank looks, and a blank in my Renzo search. 

But lo, what was that over there? Pretty far away from all the other cars was a group of people who had hung a Guinness flag on a tree. My kind of people. As I got closer to them and the wretched feeling I’d have the following day, I could tell that none of their cars looked like the picture of a Passat that I’d found on Google. Upon asking, they didn't know any of the people who I was looking for either. They did, however, insist that I sit down and have a beer. Like I say - my kind of people. 

They were all very friendly and inclusive, and seemed pretty interested in what the hell I was doing in Udine on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Obligingly, I told them my story, at the end of which I was given another beer. We chatted some more, and then, “would I like some wine?” Being the perfect guest, I graciously accepted, and on we went. More wine and beer later, they offered me some of their barbecue, which being almost exclusively pork-based (which I don’t eat) eliminated pretty much everything that was on the menu. I was feeling fine though, so continued with chatting and drinking, and somewhere down the line fell into the familiar trap of drinking a skinful on an empty stomach. 

.......

Match 15 - Catania

“The air filling the baroque styled streets surrounding Catania’s Stadio Angelo Massimino is thick with the fumes of tear gas and smoke. Palermo’s David Di Michele has earned a famous victory in the Derby di Sicilia, much to the chagrin of the Catania Ultras. But while the battle on the field is lost, the war on the streets has just begun. The Catania fans vent their fury at the police. Homemade bombs, flares, firecrackers, pipes, rocks, pieces of sink and even a scooter rain down on the authorities. The cacophony of explosions, helicopters, and yells almost drown out the approaching ambulance sirens. Amidst the maelstrom a policemen lies fatally injured. Allegedly struck by a broken sink and a missile which exploded in his vicinity, he would later die from his injuries in hospital. The officer’s name was Filippo Raciti and the events of February 2nd 2007 remain one of the most ignominious in Il Calcio’s history. Life on the Curve would never be the same again.”

So goes Richard Hall and Luca Hodges-Ramon’s introduction to Catania’s Ultras’ groups on the Gentleman Ultra’s blog. So nothing for me to worry about then. 

Good stuff. 

Danger could theoretically be my middle name, were it not already Thomas (although anything could theoretically be my middle name, if my parents hadn’t played it safe). However, rather than laughing in the face of peril, I wilt faster than a basil leaf in the oven. On the odd occasion I’ve done a ‘Portuguese’ (taking the bus without a ticket), I spent the entire time nervously staring at bus stops for fear an inspector might be lurking, ready to pounce.

So, just in case you haven’t got the idea yet, I’m not all that big on thrills and spills. A few people had told me that those are exactly what I could expect when venturing down to Sicily to watch Catania play, but I was more worried about flying near an active volcano rather than the people I’d find on the ground near it.

That said, I was quite looking forward to this trip, as apart from the tedious travelling, it’d be nice to visit Catania and get a bit of a change of scenery for a few days. Not to mention stuffing my face with cannoli, arancini and granite.

Apart from eating, of course my main goal was to watch Catania and speak to some locals. One notable local, but who’s not got much chat about him, is u Liotru, a statue of an elephant in the centre of town. He (for it is a he - he has stone testicles) is the symbol of the town, which may not be the most obvious animal to associate with Sicily, but there you go. Dwarf elephants were natives during the Paleolithic period, and have even been credited with being the origin of the Cyclops’ myth, due to the large hole in their skulls, which most likely freaked out the early Greek settlers who dug them up.

The football club’s badge is an old-fashioned leather football, a shield and a wee elephant popping out from behind it, which as far as badges go, is pretty cool in my book. And you’re reading my book, so trust me, it’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, by the time May comes round, it looks like Catania will be packing their trunks and saying goodbye to the Serie A circus, as at the time of my visit (and I’m groping desperately for a positive spin, here) the only way was up, bottom of the table as they were.

.................

Meglio tardi che mai

Ciao a tutti

Mi dispiace se siete venuti per trovare qualcosa sulle vostre squadre nel ultimo periodo.... Avevo perso la voglia di scrivere un po, ma ero andato avanti con la 'ricerca' (partite).

Ora sono quasi finito la scrittura, e spero di essere a posto entro il fine di giugno. Quindi, tra oggi e luglio metterò online estratti degli altri capitoli.

Spero che siano in grado!

Grazie
Michael

Match 13 - Chievo

The third match of a busy month, and my thirteenth away day of the season, saw me going back to Verona. Back to the Bentegodi, this time to see Chievo, who in the words of Tim Parks, author of ‘A Season with Verona’ are: 

“ [A team from] a miserable working-class suburb overflowing into declining semi-industrialised fenland. On a generous count there are a mere 3,000 souls; pigeons, water rats and stray dogs included”.

If you get the idea that Mr Parks perhaps isn’t overly enamoured with Chievo, you’d be right. He seems insulted by their very presence (as limited as that may be), and their exposure in the media. Unhappy that the previously discussed reputation of the Veronese isn’t applied to Chievo fans, but only to those who follow Hellas, he said: 

“Chievo are popular because they don't represent everything that other Italians want to quarrel with when they think of Verona. That job is left to Hellas. They steal our colours but 

decline our enemies.”

I wondered what a Chievo fan’s impression of Parks would be, so I spoke to Michele, a member of the Mussi Volanti group: 

“To be honest, I’m not 100% about what he’s said about us, but if I remember right, it was something along the lines of us being “a by-product of modern football”. For me, sporting merit’s more important than money. Chievo weren't promoted to Serie A because we paid someone, we got here by playing, and when we went down in 2007 we bounced right back up again with a points record that equaled Juventus’ [and subsequently, Sassuolo’s]. I don’t know why there’s a need to justify the ‘Chievo phenomenon’ - we’re talking about sport! Win the games? Cool, stay in Serie A. Lose them? Ok, down you go like our cousins from Hellas who were in the lower leagues for twelve years.”

They might want to be friends with everyone, but I guess some digs are just too easy to let pass by.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that bless their synthetic cotton socks but barring their miraculous early years in the league, Chievo just aren’t very good nowadays. They’ve had a few decent players, along the lines of Simone Perotta, Michael Bradley and current star striker, Sergio Pellissier. He’s a bit of a fox in the box is old Sergio, and I’m not being unnecessarily ageist either - he is getting on a bit. Give him half a sniff of goal and he’ll pop the ball in the net though - those instincts don’t go with age. The rest of the team is generally made up of journeymen pro’s and decent-enough younger guys, and as bland as that cliché may be, so is Chievo’s squad.

One player who I feel would be of note in Chievo’s history is Luciano. Or should that be Eriberto? A Brazilian midfielder, he played in the Brazil Under-20 team along with Ronaldinho, Julio César, and Matuzalém that took bronze at the Coppa America in 1999. By this stage the name on the back of his shirt read Eriberto, as three years earlier, due to a lack of interest in him on account of his age, he bought a fake identity from a fixer. Thus, Eriberto-nee- Luciano was signed by Palmeiras in his home country before coming over to Italy, first to Bologna, then to Chievo which is where he would play the majority of his career. In his time with Chievo he played more than three hundred matches, and was part of the team that came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Chievo’. 

In later years he would say that he had adopted his new name and age because he was poor and hungry; the name that he would subsequently publicly reveal was not his. When he came clean about it all, he said that it was because of an identity crisis and so that his son could take the real family name. This kind of deception wasn’t tolerated, and although he risked going to prison, in the end he was banned for six months and given a fine.

After his ‘big reveal’, Luciano-nee-Eriberto-nee-Luciano’s team mates were reported to have taken the mick out of him, saying that he didn’t look his age. The suspicion that a player may not be as old (or young, as the case may be) as he claims to be resurfaced around the time of my trip to the Veneto, with the Lazio youth team player, and former ‘hardest-paper-round-in-the-world’ record holder, Joseph Minala. 

After he was promoted to the first team, quotes by him (that were swiftly rubbished) surfaced suggesting that he was actually 41. Minala is officially seventeen, and after a few days of tittering in the papers, Lazio lost patience with people suggesting that not everything was above board, and subsequently threatened legal action against anyone who questioned the young lad’s age. And I can sympathise with him. After all, he’s been putting up with allegations like this for decades. ...................

Match 12 - Fiorentina

My ongoing odyssey of Italian football took me down to Florence in February to catch Fiorentina. Here's a bit of what I've scribbled down about it all.

Football’s origins are vague, but a somewhat primitive form of the game was played in Florence as early as the fifteenth century. Thought to be a take on the Roman game of Harpastum, this calcio storico fiorentino was played by the aristocracy, and it’s said that even Popes took part. In that savage time, before gyms and football stadiums arrived to allow men (for it was always just for men) let off some steam, this game, with rules that allowed head-butts, punches and chokes let people’s inner demons escape without turning into a disorganised riot. Rucking in a sandpit in a piazza, referees watched over what was in essence organised civil disorder between teams that represented different neighbourhoods of the city fighting for bragging rights. 

What seems to be a more violent mix of rugby and the footballs both regular and Gaelic, is still played every year in June. While the rules are unchanged and players from the teams wear their respective colours, their strips now bear sponsorship, or at least do so for as long as the players keep them on - playing such a physical game in June means it gets pretty hot so the shirts are often quickly discarded. 

Thankfully, we tell ourselves that we’re much more civilised nowadays, what with playing on grass and commentators always sounding disappointed when there’s a bit of handbags between players (even though I’m sure some of them must be yearning for a proper scuffle to break out), so I guess we must be more enlightened. Plus, of course, football players aren’t allowed to take their strips off, no matter how hot it gets, for fear that the sponsors might be deprived of exposure. That’s progress, of a sort.

While calcio fiorentino can be traced back centuries, this match’s focus, Associazione Calcio Fiorentina, were founded in 1926. From my early days of watching Serie A on Channel 4, I always found Fiorentina an intriguing team. A combination of the striking purple strips, the goals of Gabriel Batistuta and the unusual back-story of Moreno Torricelli (not to mention the club’s fantastically exotic-sounding name to my teenage ears) meant that Fiorentina always stuck out for me. Of course, being one of the sette sorelle (seven sisters - the seven dominant clubs of the 90’s) they’ve also done reasonably well, trinkets-wise. That said, despite often having a relatively strong team, they’ve won Serie A just the twice, the last time being in 1969. They’ve had more luck in the cups, having won the Coppa Italia six times. They’ve also won the Italian equivalent of the Charity Shield and the Cup Winners’ Cup. 

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Match 11: Napoli

Fabrizio: 

“Napoli isn’t only a football team. It’s a part of me, my family and my culture. It’s a way for me to communicate with my dad and to make me feel connected to my roots and my city, which can be both terrible and fantastic at the same time. I’m Neapolitan because I support Napoli. I’m proud because, despite not having won much in our history, for ninety years we’ve always been an important club, capable of stirring up emotions and giving drama to everyone, not only to our fans. Napoli isn’t a team like any other, because Naples isn’t a city like any other.”

Valentina: 

“When Napoli play the city stops. It’s like the night before New Year’s Eve - the calm before the storm. It’s a countdown. You check your watch as the minutes pass and you wait for the rumble of a goal.”

Luigi:

“Something that I always tell my partner is that in my priorities, Napoli is first, my mum is second, and that third place is open for her to fight for!”Naples is at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the dormant volcano which famously destroyed the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It last erupted in 1944, and these days 600,000 people live in the city’s red zone (i.e. the area most at risk in case of eruption). Presumably living in the shadow of what is basically a massively ticking time bomb must have an effect on the population’s psychology: 

Nicola: 

“Sure, living in the shadow of Vesuvius isn’t easy and you know you can’t relax, but it’s a part of us, of being Neapolitan. From one moment to the next our lives could end just like that, but if you stop and think about all those negative things then you won’t live…. So our reaction is to take one day at a time, thinking about all of the good in our lives. Then, when we admire Vesuvius looking down on us from up there, we just see a beautiful landscape or a postcard to send to the rest of the world. And we think our city’s the most beautiful in the world thanks to it!”

Annachiara: 

“I don’t think it does [affect our daily mentality]. In my opinion, we think of it just like we do the sea - it’s an element of the landscape that characterises our city and makes us famous. Of course, if you think about it rationally then you know it could be lethal, but during the day you don’t stop to think of it that way. You think of its enormity and power, but it’s always there and doesn’t change your day. Or maybe it’s so subconscious that we don’t notice anymore.

“I think the way we Neapolitans enjoy our lives comes more from our history and from the countless foreign powers that have taken turns to rule the city. Every one who has held power here has left us something, whether it’s in our language, cuisine or way of being. These rulers eventually moved on, but the city was always there, and poverty and hunger forced us to get by every day. Stressing out about [Vesuvius] is a waste of time because everything else is temporary but Naples is permanent.”
Over the centuries, Naples has been under the control of Greeks, Romans, Spanish and French, to name but a few. Two of Italy’s stereotypes hail from Naples, as both pizzas and mandolins originate from that part of the country. Meanwhile, for any history trivia buffs out there, the first railway line in Italy was built in Napoli, despite the Catholic church’s fear “that dark tunnels could pose a threat to morality”. 

Regarding what Annachiara said about those foreign powers’ influences on the city, the language really stuck out for me. Dialects are quite common in Italy, and I can usually understand a wee bit of them just by listening out for any Italian words that sneak into them. Case in point: when I went to see Hellas Verona, while standing outside the pub, Davide, my interviewee there, asked his friend: “che ora qualcosa qualcosa?” (“what time blah blah?”) Checking my watch, I told him, at which he asked me incredulously if I spoke Veronese. No, of course I don’t, but if you start a question with ‘what time’, it’s likely to end with ‘is it?’. But Neapolitan is no longer technically a dialect - UNESCO now recognises it as a bona fide language. Their accent is quite unlike that which I hear on a day-to-day basis up in Genoa, and I’m afraid that if you wanted a taste of Neapolitan, I could only reply: “nu sacc caggia di pe fa n’esempio” (“I don’t know what example to give”).

Neapolitan was so common in the past that it was used in court papers, while in 1799, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a poet and journalist who was destined for the gallows, called for it to be used in speeches: “to spread civic instruction to that section of the population which has no other language”. Through a combination of the strong accents and the use of Neapolitan, everyone around me might as well have been talking in Japanese for all I could understand. A most unusual sensation.

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Match 10: Lazio

Lazio’s home stand is the Curva Nord of the Olimpico, and according to research by the newspaper, La Repubblica, they are the sixth-most supported team in the country. Their most famous Ultras group is gli irriducibili Lazio, and so as is normal, in the weeks before the match I set out to find myself some fans to interview. Going about this in my normal way, a quick Google search found me some forums to join. Joining them, however, was not as easy as liberating confectionary from infants as it 

normally is. Now, normally, in order to sign up for a forum you need to fill in an online form with your details, before the final step in which you need to write a randomly-generated code that pops up on screen. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. The Lazio forums, I guess, get trolled quite frequently and/or they’re deeply paranoid. This manifests itself in requiring aspiring forum members to answer a very specifically Lazio-themed test as the final step, rather than the typing-of-the-random-code norm.

So, on one of the forums, after filling in my username etc, I was presented with the statement:

Giorgio Chinaglia è: ………..

(Giorgio Chinaglia is: ………..)

Who he was exactly, we’ll come to soon, but in reality, he is only one thing: dead. Without wanting to be a pedant (but really, I spent days trying to find out the answer, so I’m going to be a bloody a pedant about this), there is only one possible and correct answer. But the computer refused to accept that ‘dead’ was it. Philosophically speaking, at least for me, all that we are ceases to be when we shuffle off to wherever and whatever’s next. Unless, in an effort to psychologically shield themselves, the Lazio fans deny the reality of Giorgio Chinaglia’s death. Either that or they’ve interred him somewhere in a Schrodinger’s Cat-style experiment (which, as they arranged his corpse into the box, I imagine would still have hammered home the fact of his passing), but nonetheless, the correct answer to the question remains: dead.

After a few days of repeatedly trying various adjectives, nicknames and things of that nature, all that I was able to achieve was to get myself locked out of the site for exceeding the number of permissible incorrect answers in single sessions. I was almost at the point of investigating all of the various idioms in Italian for ‘dead’, à la the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, when a friend came through for me with the answer! Eureka! (There’s that Greek-influence again). I won’t tell you what it is so as to preserve their much-valued privacy, but needless to say, it was something that only a laziale would know. And it had bugger all to do with death.

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Match 9: Livorno

The Italian word for ‘twin’ is gemello. Most teams have other clubs with whom their fans are friendly, and these relationships are known as gemellagi (twinships, like there are with towns). For me, with my Scottish brain, I can’t quite get my head around having any feelings for opposing teams and their fans other than dislike and a strong hope they get humped on match days, but hey, maybe I’m in the minority. It always helps when the other team isn’t in your league or even country, so that then you don’t have to see their fans’ gurning faces twisted in joy as they score another goal against you. Livorno’s fans are in luck then, because thanks to their political leanings they have an international network of supporters, from France through Greece to Turkey, with gemellagi with Olympic Marseille and AEK Athens, among others. One of the most prominent of their foreign-based supporters’ groups is based in Germany, where its members don’t seem to check or reply to their emails, but no matter. I checked out their website which all seems very earnest and well-minded, so they get ten points for effort, but less so for their mastery of the English language.

As you might imagine, Livorno’s fans aren’t bosom buddies with teams whose supporters are more right-minded, so supporters of Inter and Verona can expect a spicy welcome. Lazio too, and famed peacemaker and level-headed chap, Paolo Di Canio, once made a fascist salute during a game between the two teams. 

Away from football and politics, the city rivalry between Livorno and Pisa is famed for its strength. This manifests itself in numerous examples of graffiti around Livorno of: “PISA MERDA” (“FUCK PISA” - their capitals, not mine). There are a couple of expressions they use to bicker amongst themselves with: “Meglio un morto ’n casa che un pisano all’uscio” (better a death at home than a Pisan at the door) snapped back with: “Le parole le porta via il vento, le biciclette i livornesi” (words are whisked off by the wind, and bikes by the Livornese). 

Now, without wanting to offend citizens of either of the cities, neither one of them is anything to really write home about, and yes, I’ve seen the Leaning Tower and the hundreds of tourists all pretending to either prop it up or push it over while grinning for a photo.

This rivalry is classic campanilismo. This is something that if you’ve ever read about Italy before you’ll surely have already come across, but for the uninitiated, campanile means bell tower or steeple. If you’ve been here you will no doubt have noticed just how many churches there are, and so campanilismo is a love of or pride in your local area (i.e. the area in which you can hear your church bell tolling). In a country where many people are born and live most of their lives in the same house or street (certainly in previous generations, although the current financial crisis and high-youth employment is forcing some younger people to venture further afield for work), and often with family members next door or in the building round the corner, the idea of ‘home, sweet home’ runs deep. And one thing that people love more than home comforts is someone or something to mistrust. How could you go wrong if your enemy was an entire town just down the road? Nothing like a common villain to build town unity and identity. And I certainly wouldn’t encourage the people of Pisa and Livorno to unite, hold hands and sing songs, because life would be boring without a bit of a grudge and bile, no? Plus of course, the resulting burglaries and bicycle thefts would overstretch the respective police departments to breaking point.

Match 8: Atalanta

Atalanta supporters have a reputation for being a little, let’s say, prickly. They had one of the most respected Ultras groups in Italy called the Brigate Neroazzurre (BNA), which itself branched off from another organised fan-group, the Atalanta Commandos. The BNA wasn’t averse to clashes with rival teams’ supporters, which found a great deal of popularity with the younger members of the group, but which also caused friction between themselves and other groups in the Curva. This mentality led to confrontations with supporters’ groups of Genoa, Torino and both the Milanese teams, and over the years their reputation as being somewhat calda was exacerbated and spread across the nation. 

Not content with the way things were going, in the eighties another group splintered off from the BNA: Wild Kaos. This new group’s reasoning was much the same as the BNA’s reason for separating from the Commandos: troppo poco casino (not enough trouble).

Most football teams and/or their fans bear a grudge against one or two other teams, but check this out for a roll call of enmity: Brescia, Juventus, Milan, Inter, Napoli, Roma, Genoa, Lazio, Fiorentina, Perugia, Torino, Verona, Reggina, Como and Vicenza can all expect a feisty reception at the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia. Of these, one episode well worth noting happened in the summer of 2013. During a celebration for the club in the centre of town organised by the fans’ groups, a player, Giulio Migliaccio, rode a tank over two cars, crushing them; one in the colours of Brescia, and the other in Roma’s. Pow! Take that! A tank! A bloody tank! Those guys know how to effectively get across their message, as long as it doesn’t require any subtlety.

I got first hand experience of their supporters’ prickishness prickliness in the days before this match when I was trying to get in contact with people for interviews. Using my normal method of signing up for their forums and then writing a wee introductory note explaining who I was and what I was doing, I got almost nothing but abuse in return. I’d written my little message, then settled down to watch a film, and barely fifteen minutes in, my phone pinged to tell me that someone had replied. Excited by their efficiency, imagine my disappointment when said message instructed me where to go and what to do to myself in somewhat colourful language. There followed a string of other messages questioning whether I was genuine or a troll, with most people apparently deciding that I was the latter despite my protestations that I don’t now and indeed have never lived under a bridge. That evening, the discussion topic I’d started was taken down, and the next day my membership was deleted. Thanks! 

There are only two reasons that I can think of that would explain why this happened: 

1. Someone said something really inappropriate and against the rules in the discussion, but as that wouldn’t affect my membership, what I reckon is more likely was that: 
2. Someone reported me as being a ne’er-do-well and I was booted out. As I said, I had replied to someone who’d accused me of the same thing in order to deny it, but they didn’t believe me for the most laughable of reasons: they said my Italian was too good. Almost suspiciously good. 

Ladies and Gentlemen of the court, I’d like to counter this point in two parts: First, I have been living here for more than five years, but thanks, that’s kind of you to say that my Italian is good, however with particular regard to my written Italian which certainly isn’t the best, please don’t piss in my pocket and tell me it’s raining. 

Secondly, what?! Only Italians are allowed to learn the language?! They say that there isn’t  a wall that a Bergamascan can’t build (they’re famed for their building skills), however this particular muppet seemingly found the language barrier too great an obstacle, thinking as he/she did that a foreigner couldn’t learn their language to a passable level. 

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Match 7: Roma

I had expected the town to be mobbed as the game fell on the 8th December, which is quite a big deal for Catholics, being as it was the date of the Immaculate Conception. With a celebration for the conception of a child seventeen days before his birth, it seemed quite apt that I was off to see la maggica. In the end, Rome seemed to be as busy as it normally would be, which is nice as I’m really not a fan of massed throngs milling around. At least in a football stadium the accumulated hordes have a purpose and a sense of direction, even if this is often more figurative than literal.

When I arrived at the shop, I asked for a ticket for the Distinti Sud, as I’d been recommended to try for there due to its proximity to the Curva Sud (the main home-fan stand, which I hadn’t been able to get a ticket for). Much to my chagrin, there were no tickets left, leaving me with a split-second decision: would I not bother with the match, or would I spend €75 for the Tribuna Tevere? I’d come that far by then, both literally and figuratively (see the personal development crowed about two paragraphs ago), but €75? Really?

In the end, I made the only decision I could, and just bought the stupid bloody thing. Still though, it was getting ridiculous: spending €75 on a ticket to watch a team that isn’t even mine, even if it was for what would hopefully end up being a worthy cause, was galling. While I was handing over the money I got the sweats as I often do when spending money spuriously, and felt like they were pulling my pants down, I truly did. I think it would have been the least they could have done, to be fair. So, feeling robbed, I headed off for the stadium hoping for a happy ending to the whole affair.

To get to the Stadio Olimpico from the centre of Rome, however, is not all that quick or easy. My best friend, Google Maps, suggested that I take a bus, and ever happy to act on its advice, I dutifully waited for one. I’d looked around for a kiosk that’d sell bus tickets, but alas there were none open, so figured that seeing as I’d been buying bus tickets in Genoa for years, this once ‘being Portuguese’ wouldn’t hurt. Just call me Miguel. Despite having lived here for a good few years, the fundamental difference between right (following rules) and wrong (not doing so) is in my DNA, and no amount of gesticulating wildly while speaking to friends on the phone will entirely dilute it. Knowing that what I was doing was against the rules made me a bit nervous, so I kept my eyes peeled for inspectors lurking in bus stops. My unease was well-founded, as nary three stops after I’d got on, I had to very quickly get off when inspectors boarded. Damn those crafty buggers doing their job, and on a Sunday to boot! Is nothing sacred anymore?!

When I checked the map again, it rather disappointingly told me that I was about five kilometres from the stadium. We didn’t speak for some time after that, but thankfully once again I only had to go along very long straight roads until I saw some likely-looking sorts and follow them as slavishly as Berlusconi does to his own self-interest.

Given the distance, the fact that I was fairly marching, and my unnecessarily thick woollen  jumper, by the time I got to the stadium I was puggled. With three minutes to get to my seat before kick off, I hoisted myself up the steps as quickly as possible, and arrived just in time to blow a fug of smoke into a child’s face as the ref tooted his whistle. As they say, ‘when in Rome…’.

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Match 6: Sassuolo

How can a company that doesn’t check if you pay for its service survive? Who or what is a ‘Sassuolo’, precisely? And when will Trenitalia force me to snap, à la Michael Douglas in ‘Falling Down’? These were just some of the questions running through my mind on the train to Reggio Emilia, where Sassuolo play, but not where they’re from. It seemed vaguely apt that I was on the way to see a team that’s spent the last few years nomading their way round leagues and stadia. I wouldn’t claim to be an intrepid explorer or particularly unique, but I live in a country that isn’t my own, and over the course of the last five years have lived in six different apartments, almost always with a feeling of being lost. Only now do I feel like I’m getting to grips with life, but there’s always the nagging doubt that I’m kidding myself and everyone around me. That’s partly the reason I undertook this whole book: to give myself a reason to stay in Italy. 

But first, to one of those original questions. Sassuolo are a team from Emilia Romagna, and to be more precise, Sassuolo, if such a thing could be believed! In the week before this game I told some students my plans for the weekend, namely watching Sassuolo play Atalanta, to which I was generally greeted with two responses: 

1) bemused faces and “Sassuolo have a team / are in Serie A?”

and

2) “It’s a good place to buy tiles - there are a lot of tile warehouses there”.

Always good to know, that. I guess it’s nice to be famous for something and those lucky folk of Sassuolo now have their town’s name on the map for two reasons: tiles and fitba’. Of course it was already on the map if you looked closely enough, but, well, you understand what I mean.

Some fun facts about US Sassuolo Calcio: it’s not a lesser-known spaceship from Star Trek, but it is one of only a select few teams in Italy to have played in Serie A that don’t come from their provincial capital. What’s a provincial capital, you ask? Well, basically it’s a bonus level of officialdom to ensure more people have safe jobs for life without really having anything to do except bog things down in a miasma of bureaucracy. In case you’re wondering, some of the other teams on this august list are: Casale, Cesena, Empoli, Lecco, Legnano, Pro Patria and Savoia. No, me neither for most of them.

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