Georgia on my mind, Italia on my tits.

Let’s, if we can, for one second, take our mind off the prospect of Rangers not selling tickets to their own supporters for European away matches (Have to say tho, what happens if we draw Espanyol next season, in the always-empty Olympic Stadium up the Montjuic in Bacrcelona? No official sale to travelling Bears but 50,000 spare seats going???!!! - just a thought - not only is this the ground on which our victorious 1972 team trained prior to the Nou Camp final but it’s a typical example of many stadia we could play in, away from home, which will have acres of empty seats and plenty of unscrupulous locals willing to sell …) ANYWAY - there are more pleasant things to be considered this weekend …

But, dinnae worry - just coz I’m talking about Scotland games, it doesnae mean this won’t eventually turn into a bitter rant. Just go with me here …

All the VERY BEST in your new joab, Eck McLeish. As I head for Mount Florida this Saturday and then the sofa next Wednesday, I sincerely hope you get off to your usual flying start. The opposition will also feature Ex-Gers, both at Hampden and the Santa Claus Stadium in Bari - but, for once, I’ll noh be cheering on Shota, Zurab or Rino.

Georgia, I hope, are thoroughly thrashed this weekend but I know they won’t be - three points is the most we can get from this sifrst match and it’s everything we need if we’re to continue our serious chance of actually progressing from this hardest of all qalifying groups. The lads from Tiblisi can come and go with our best wishes and an equal level of admiration and respect. We need to beat them buthere’s no malice involved.

However, the Italian boys are ADORED, HAILED, BOWED BEFORE. Gli Azzurri are amazing, both currently and historically. If we get anything other than leathered, Alex McLeish will have done it again - instant legend. But in this game my hopes are slightly darker in their motivation. I REALLY HOPE WE FUCKING TANK ITALY in Puglia.

Why? Is it the fact I’ve seen them a couple of times in the flesh but have never seen Georgia before? Is it a very basic familiarity breeding disproportionate contempt?

Erm … nah:

Any magazine or supplement with the slightest interest in sport has, since the turn of the year, featured Italy for more than the fact they’re CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD: For as long as they’ve been brilliant at playing the game, Italians have been BRUTAL in ruining it as a genuinely sporting spectacle. Sometimes I understand that and even admire it but, the older I get, the more it sickens me. And anyone else with even a passing knowledge of Calcio will be equally unsurprised by the confusion of emotion which reigns with regard to the latest scandal hitting the big Mediterannean boot and its islands.

Only Italy could manage a match-fixing scandal which sees its biggest clubs stripped of points and prizes as well as a series of violent incidents ending in the tragic death of a policeman and the suspension of all domestic fixtures, yet still win the World Cup inbetween times. Only Italy. Mussolini bankrolled and extorted their first World Cup success, in 1934. Undoubtedly these players were great in their own right but it was Fascist salutes all round when they triumphed again in France four years later.

In 1966 the Azzurri national side was eliminated from the English World Cup at the first round, thanks largely to a 1-0 defeat by North Korea at Ayrseome Park, Middlesbrough. This had a mob of rotten-tomato-wielding tifosi awaiting the team’s homecoming - but two years later Italy were European Champions! In 1982 they came to the Spain World Cup finals on the back of another domestic match-fixing scandal - AC Milan were relegated for their part in that one. They won the damn thing, mainly thanks to a top-scoring striker, Paolo Rossi. He’d had a suspension commuted from three years to two to allow him to take part in the finals after his role in the aforementioned scandal, at a time when he was on loan from Lanerosi Vicenza to Perugia and about to be bought by Juventus!

Ci, Signore - only in Italy!

We don’t ever feel sorry for them on these pages but travelling Celtic fans spent the best part of a fornight wondering if their Champions League away game against AC Milan would take place in Geneva, Newcastle, Rome or - strangerst of all - the San Siro stadium, home of AC Milan! Rangers fans last season missed out on a trip to the same stadium because of previous disturbances among the supporters of the other resident club, Internazionale. Scotland’s Tartan Army has been left in a quandry as to whether or not the national side’s forthcoming visit to Italy for a crucial Euro 2008 qualifier would take place in Bari as scheduled, somewhere else in Italy, somewhere else in Europe, or at all.

Oh, and the last time Scotland played Italy away in a competitive match, in the qualifiers for Germany 2006, tear gas and riot police permeated the stadium as Italian fans fought with the security forces: Where was this? Surprise surprise - the San Siro, Milano!

And,surprise surprise again, the San Siro was open for business a mere nine days after Italian Football Federation (FIGC) president Luca Pancalli decreed all football in the country should be stopped, all stadia closed. Officer Filippo Raciti was killed on Friday 2nd February, during a full-scale riot between fans and police in the streets outside the Stadio Massimino in Catania. Perversely, The Catania-Palermo match, a Sicilian derby, had kicked off early as a deterrent to potential trouble and was preceded by a minute’s silence in tribute to another victim of soccer-related violence. A 40-year-old official of the amateur club Sammartinese, Ermanno Licursi, collapsed and died after being punched while trying to separate brawling players and fans at the end of a game against Cancellese just days earlier.

This took place on the same weekend as a Livorno fan required 20 stitches in a head wound inflicted by Fiorentina followers, a bus of Catania fans was attacked by a 100-strong mob of Atalanta ultras and a linesman was hit by a drum - yes, a drum! - thrown from the crowd at a Serie D match. On the Monday, Pancalli declared “We are on high alert. To defend referees and the image of football, I am ready to take drastic measures.” By the following Friday a policeman was dead and many more injured.

The Sicilian derby itself was played to a finish, after a half-hour break to allow the tear gas to clear, of course. Pancalli’s next statement was made that same evening, when he announced that Italy’s forthcoming mid-week friendly with Romania and all the Italian domestic matches of saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th February 2007 would be suspended “One day is not sufficient” he boomed,” Without drastic measures, we cannot play again”. Well, one day wasn’t sufficent - it seems to have taken the FIGC a whole nine days to get things going again. A lot of games took place behind closed doors two weekends after that fateful Sicilian derby, but they took place. Milan only allowed season-ticket holders into their ground for their tie with Livorno that Sunday - but fans were back in the stadiums, a mere week after the “crack down” was announced.

In the 1990/91 European Cup quarter-finals, Milan found themselves on the end of a footballing lesson, if not an outright thrashing, from Olympique Marseille, themselves no stranger to off-field chicanery. Towards the end of the second leg, the French side were dominating on their home pitch when a floodlight failed. One floodlight went out. It didn’t seem to affect Marseille but the Milanese stars, holders of the Cup for the previous two seasons, decided to walk off with much animated protesting to the referee, invoking the big bad light bulb “disaster”. That time, thankfully, UEFA weren’t swallowing it and Milan were fined as well as eliminated.

But who could blame the Red and Black half of Milan for trying it on when their derby rivals had got off with the very same trick in the same competition in 1971/72. Borussia Moenchengladbach lost 4-2 to a brutal Inter in the first leg of a European Cup second round match that season. The return in Germany saw the home side win 7-1 but Inter striker Roberto Boninsegna claimed to have been hit by a solitary can which had arrived on the side of the pitch in the first half. The protesting to UEFA from the north of Italy was instant and vehement and the second leg was replayed. Inter changed their tactics to gain a 0-0 draw and go through. Austrian coach Max Merkel, present at the game, said of Boninsegna , scorer in the 1970 World Cup final against Brazil “He was having a natter with his mates while laying on the ground, telling them to complain to the ref. Since that night I’ve known that an Italian lying on the ground is more dangerous than one standing up.”

Marco Materazzi is a big guy. I don’t doubt a head-butt to the chest is sore but he’ll have had sorer. Yet there was no way he was getting up off the Berlin Olympic Stadium pitch last July until the referee had been made aware of Zidane’s head-butt. It was the correct decision but a lot of other nations would have had a bit of a moan and left it at that. Zidane would have got away with it if he had been playing against anyone other than Italy (okay - maybe not Argentina or Uruguay). It was obvious that the Italian players were making sure the match officials knew they’d have to dig themselves out of an almighty hole, made apparent by TV pictures in the stadium itself. And TV pictures are what the Italians scoured and scoured until they could find evidence that Torsten Frings, Germany’s power-house midfielder in those finals, was guilty of landing a punch on an Argentinian in the quarter-finals post-match fracas. No other country in the world tried so hard to find evidence of German indiscretion after that Argentine-instigated brawl. But then no-one other than Italy was playing Germany in the semi-finals. Italian TV simply kept playing the image of Frings’ misdemeanour until FIFA were almost blackmailed into action. Frings was suspended for the semi on video evidence and Italy won a nip-and-tuck match at the end of extra time. The kind of game, you’d say, in which Torsten Frings would have made all the difference.

The attempts to remedy the current crowd problems are like so many of the matches played in Italy since the turn of the year, enveloped in a fog. For tear gas and flares on the pitches and the terraces, read sound-bites and posturing in the boardrooms and ministries.

The artful confusion which so many Italian sides bring to international football - administering brutal fouls and inciteful abuse off the ball then pleading victimised innocence and incredulity when they have so much as a shirt tugged - stems from and feeds back into their administrative leadership. On the field it’s understandable, even excusable, and it’s interspersed with brilliant football - it’s professionalism as an art form. Off the field, it’s simply sickening.

In the infamous words and style of Kevin Keegan , I would LOVE IT if we did them in Bari.

But I think we’ll end up with the same result as that which Kev achieved against Sir Alex.

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Published:
03.22.07 / 7pm
Category:
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