Although I was born and raised in Rome, I support Juve. My choice was based on the need to find a club that could compete with AC Milan and Inter, my older brothers’ favorite teams. I was barely six years old when I first saw Juve play. It was in Perugia (my father’s team) and “we” somehow lost 0-1 thanks to a goal by Renato Curi. As a result, Torino won the scudetto. What a tragedy! But the real tragedy happened a year later when I returned to Perugia hoping for a better Juve performance: Curi collapsed on the pitch and died of a heart attack. Talk about putting things in perspective.
Over the next decade, I watched Juve “under cover” at the Olimpico against Roma and Lazio, and in other cities as well. It could be dangerous. At Marassi stadium, for instance, Genoa’s ultras invaded our curva (end) wielding broken bottles. When all was said and done, a guy two rows in front of me was oozing blood from a stab wound in his leg. Surely it would have been safer in Turin, but as a young teenager living more than 400 miles away it was tough to make the pilgrimage to the Stadio Comunale. And after I moved to the United States in the mid-1980s, it seemed as if I had been sentenced to never attend a Juve “home” match. A victim of contrappasso for my act of betrayal of Roma and Lazio?
The inauguration of Juve’s new stadium is inspiring me to finally make the journey to Turin.
September 8, 2011, heralds the arrival of a new era in Italian football, or calcio as we call it. Juve’s friendly against Notts County — the club responsible for the Old Lady’s adoption of black-and-white kits — marks the first time an Italian club will play in its privately owned stadium.
It is a welcoming football-specific stadium: no track, no moat, no fence. It has a capacity of 41,000 seats and a design similar to many English Premier League grounds. Juve’s stadium provides a long-awaited alternative to overpriced, under-serviced, militarized, and outdated grounds found all over the peninsula. It rises on the ashes of its cursed predecessor, the Delle Alpi. Built on the outskirts of Turin for the 1990 World Cup, Delle Alpi stadium was twice as expensive as originally planned, featured terrible sight lines (largely due to a never-used running track), a bumpy playing surface, and abominably high maintenance costs. In 2003 Juve took it over from the city under a 99-year lease and demolition started in 2008. In the meantime, both Juve and Torino relocated to the downsized ex-Comunale stadium, renamed Olimpico after hosting the inaugural and closing ceremonies for the 2006 Winter Olympics.
Looking at the calendar, I could make the Piedmont derby between Juve and Novara on December 18 . . .
On Sunday, October 17, 2010, history was made in the Italian serie A: a match was stopped due to fans’ racist chants. It happened at the Sant’Elia stadium in Cagliari (on the island of Sardinia). Just two minutes in, referee Paolo Tagliavento had enough of the monkey chants from the Cagliari ultras directed at Inter striker Samuel Eto’o.
Tagliavento blew his whistle, explained his decision to the two captains, then ordered the fourth official to have this announcement made over the stadium’s public address system: ‘If racist chants persist, the match will be suspended.’ It was repeated twice.
After the announcement no monkey chants poisoned the atmosphere. In a delicious twist to this sad affair, Eto’o went on to score the only goal of the match and celebrated by ‘monkeying’ around!
It’s taken three painful days to write something, anything resembling rational thought about Gli Azzurri. Last year I blogged about Italy’s impending demise under Lippi 2.0 — and eventually (inevitably?) Slovakia delivered the fatal blow at Ellis Park. Too many old, unmotivated players mixed with inexperienced, deer-in-the-headlights youngsters who folded at the first sign of pressure.
Since Thursday, my rage and disgust at Italy’s worst World Cup team of all time have subsided. The one sweet memory extracted from the Ellis Park debacle is captured in this video with Gigi Buffon graciously signing autographs for our kids before the Slovakia game. Grazie Gigi!
Father’s Day with family on the road to Italy-New Zealand. It doesn’t get any better than this! There are six of us in the van, including Ignazio and Marco just in from Rome. We are all rigorously decked out in Italy jerseys. With Igna at the wheel, we leave Joburg around 9am. The Sunday journey is smooth and we go by sleepy towns — ‘burgs’ ‘dorps’ and ‘fonteins’ — in the winter Low Veld.
Our first and only pit stop is at a service station with many Azzurri fans. Listening to them speak, I realize that very few are actually Italians. Most are South Africans of various backgrounds buying into the Italy brand — we dub them ‘Fake Italians’.
Back on the road we wind out way through the canyons of Mpumalanga. The scenic road is treacherous and we make a note of that for the postmatch return trip. 3.5 hours later we are outside Nelspruit, but miss the stadium exit due to poor signage. A burly yet friendly traffic cop on the freeway points the way back to it: ‘Make a safe u-turn,’ he tells us with a smile, ‘we don’t want you to die in South Africa.’
Ten minutes (and no signs) later we are at the Riverside Mall park-and-ride, but it’s full so we go to the Showgrounds instead. That country fair feeling again, shades of Polokwane. Our crew boards the bus, there are more ‘Fake Italians’! At 2:45 we arrive outside the Mbombela Stadium perched at the top of a hill with nothing around it. The landscaping is not finished so the ground has a construction site feel to it. It’s built on a land claim, entailed forced removals of two schools, and the corruption connected to the building of the stadium led to the murder of two whistleblowers.
But we are thinking of the match not blood and bribery. Will the Azzurri deliver against NZ? The answer becomes clear immediately after kick off. On the Kiwis first sniff of our goal they score. Oh my. Drunken New Zealanders just got more annoying, as they would spend the rest of the match hurling insults at the Azzurri. I reciprocate in kind when Iaquinta levels the score on a penalty midway through the first half. Italy seems bent on imitating lackluster France in this World Cup. It ends 1-1, which the All-White fans celebrate as if they had won the World Cup.
I gloomily exit the arena with kids in hand thinking of what might have been with Balotelli, Cassano . . . The Fake Italians don’t seem affected by this embarrassing draw. Brand loyalty is about consumption and vicarious association, not nausea and disgust at having driven 370km to endure unforgivably pathetic football against a team ranked 107 in the FIFA rankings.
We shuffle our way through the crowd at the shuttle buses and jump on board. Within a few minutes we are at the Showgrounds park-and-ride and our diesel engine is rumbling. It’s dark when we leave Nelspruit for Joburg. We drive cautiously, thinking about Netherlands-Italy in the round of 16 (we have Durban tickets) and the ‘High Accident Zones’ signs on the road. An Opel Corsa and several other cars with Gauteng license plates pass us. An all-encompassing foul odor fills the odor — it’s coming from a huge saw mill — ‘Who farted’? the children joke.
Then, two minutes later, a horrific scene. The Corsa that just passed us is a smoking carcass on the side of the road. A bakkie is overturned on the other side. A third car is crumpled. We order the kids not to look, but they do and are terribly shaken by the accident that happened maybe 2 minutes before. We drive even more carefully the rest of the way. On Monday, Radio 702 announces that four young South Africans died in the crash near Belfast, Mpumalanga. They were Italy supporters. Our condolences to their families. Today, there are no Fake Italians.
The Old Lady of Italian football was humiliated 0-3 by struggling Udinese this weekend, making it 12 losses and 47 goals against in 32 serie A matches this season. After this latest embarrassment, the formerly powerful and prestigious Juventus FC apologized to millions of fans and began a ’silenzio stampa’ (no media interviews until further notice).
Yet Marcello Lippi continues to live in an alternate universe and appears ready to go to South Africa with between half and two-thirds of the Azzurri’s starting 11 from Juve’s ranks. Tired pensioners like Cannavaro, Legrottaglie, Camoranesi and Grosso are like a concrete block around Italy’s neck. Unless Lippi has a last-minute change-of-heart, then expect the Azzurri to sink fast come June.
1. FIFA got the seedings right. Pot 1 seeds earned their ranking. France did not. France’s final appearance was four years ago.
2. Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay have come out of the pot alignment better than most. Each of the smaller South American nations will avoid the big five African qualifiers in the 1st Round.
3. Argentina and Brazil cannot avoid the African qualifiers from Pot 3. The seeds for two potential Groups of Death have now been sown. Has FIFA put Brazil at risk for an early bath?
4. The most frightening Group of Death would be: Brazil, Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire and Portugal.
By now you’ve heard the news: 2006 World Player of the Year and Italy captain Fabio Cannavaro failed a doping test in late August, testing positive for cortisone. The Italian football establishment–players, coaches, officials, media–came out in his defense. “The cortisone was lifesaving treatment for a bee sting!” it was claimed. “I was once stung by a wasp,” joked his manager at Juve, “but it was not the same as Cannavaro’s, as there was no need for me to use cortisone.” (I thought adrenaline injections or inhalers were the best emergency treatment for stings.) Skeptics wonder why it took two months for the positive test to be publicized. “It’s just a bureaucratic mistake,” proffered the Italian national team doctor. Given the well documented history of performance-enhancing drugs in Italian football, and in world sport more broadly, these explanations invite scrutiny.
It was in August 1998 that AS Roma manager Zdenek Zeman stunned us with revelations about widespread doping in Serie A. A few weeks later, Italy’s only IOC-accredited anti-doping laboratory was shut down (for one year). Cannavaro himself was implicated in PED use after being shown on national TV enjoying an IV drip of Neoton in a Moscow hotel room before the 1999 UEFA Cup final, a fact confirmed by his lawyer. And Juve’s current manager, Ciro Ferrara, played for Marcello Lippi’s pharmaceutically enhanced Juve side in the 1990s, a team whose physician received a 22-month suspended sentence for his involvement. Several years and one World Cup triumph later, the specter of pharma-calcio is still with us.
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