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.

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