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.