Tuesday,
February 06, 2007
The
ANNOTICO Report
This is
unprecedented action, the kind that was never even contemplated in England in
all those years when hooliganism was gestating and then being exported into
every corner of the European game, a product leader which in its numbers and
its scale exceeded anything ever seen before, even in some of the more warring
examples of Italian volatility.
But
Further
more, JUST last week 11 policemen were injured,
fortunately not fatally, as an estimated 500 Wolves fan expressed their anger
at being defeated by
Monday 5, February 2007
The suspension of
matches in
Now the shame of Italian
football is washed in the fresh blood of a Sicilian policeman some, especially
it seems here in a land of football sweetness and towering profit, are saying
it is some final, damning judgement. Maybe, but then maybe not. Perhaps the accumulation of
match-fixing corruption and violence on the terraces and in the streets, and
climactically the tragedy in
The truth is
there can be only one interpretation of the decision by the emergency
administration of
This is
unprecedented action, the kind that was never even contemplated in England in
all those years when hooliganism was gestating and then being exported into
every corner of the European game, a product leader which in its numbers and
its scale exceeded anything ever seen before, even in some of the more warring
examples of Italian volatility.
Interestingly,
there could only be reflection when one English newspaper yesterday listed the
trail of Italian football violence. There were some shocking examples
stretching back to 1962, no doubt, but the death toll happened to be seven.
You may say that
every football game ever played is not worth the unnecessary cost of an
innocent human life, and there is certainly no way to comfortably measure a
problem by counting up fatalities, but it does happen to be true that the cost
to life in Italy, over 45 years, was only fraction of that caused to Juventus fans in Heysel, largely
by the conduct of Liverpool fans. And it took not 45 years but roughly 45
minutes. What happened then? English football was banned from
This may go
against the prideful assumption that English football has largely cured itself
of institutionalised hooliganism, but if intelligent
co-operation with the police has brought huge benefits, the problem, as it
always will be, has not disappeared but is reassuringly dormant, a fact which
was illustrated dramatically enough last week when 11 policemen were injured, fortunately
not fatally, as an estimated 500 Wolves fan expressed their anger at being
defeated by West Brom.
How serious will
be the repercussions? No heavier, we can be sure, than when Leeds fans invaded
the Elland Road pitch in the Seventies, and the club
were required to play a few games on neutral grounds, or when they rioted on
the south coast during a push for promotion in the Eighties. How sustained,
come to think about it, was the official reaction to the attempts last season
of Liverpool fans to overturn an ambulance containing the Manchester United
player Alan Smith, who had just broken his leg.
The point here is
not that Italian football is suddenly a paragon of strong-minded virtue - or
that it has not inherited a malignant harvest after many years of refusing to
face up to the long-terms consequences. No, it is not that - it is to say that
however late the hour, Italian football has responded to the scale of its own
problems in a most meaningful way.
Yesterday one
Italian football lover Alessandro Berto contemplated
an empty football field in a suburb of
"There is so
much wrong with the game in
One did not hear
too much of that sentiment in English football circles when "fans" of
the national team were raging through places like Marseilles and Brussels in
the 1998 and 2000 World Cup and European championships, when in the first case
the despairing chief executive of the Football Association, Graham Kelly,
shrugged his shoulders in despair at the hopelessness of advocating serious
sacrifice by the national game and agreed that the only solution was probably
summary execution.
There was a more
realistic possibility, when you thought about it, and Italy's embattled
football authorities - who when they staged the World Cup in 1990 banned all
alcohol on match days because of the presence of English supporters - may in
their extremis have produced it. It is also true that, despite many reports to
the contrary, that behaviour by England fans was much
less than impeccable, something that can be confirmed by anyone who was either
in Cologne to see them rampaging on the steps of the ancient cathedral or saw a
recent television documentary on the currently unfashionable subject.
They have said,
unlike the FA and almost all leading football men in this country when
misconduct threatened to squeeze the life out the game before Hillsborough,
decent grounds, and vast amounts of television money, that hooliganism is not a
problem that can separated from football. If the game is where abusive and
violent behaviour attaches itself as a gruesome,
life-threatening parasite, then the oxygen it provides must be cut off - at
whatever the financial cost.
Last week it was
written here that Italian football was likely to live in a moral vacuum for
some time, an inevitable consequence of confirmation that it was in so many
areas rotten to its core. This provoked a thoughtful message from
Such is the
terrible cynicism - and lingering beauty - of the Italian game. Yesterday an
English headline proclaimed, "Italian football hunts for its lost
soul." No one could argue with such an assessment as the widow of officer Filippo Raciti tearfully
faced a suddenly empty life. But then by saying that no profit, no pleasure,
could justify such waste, and that the alternative to violence-infected
football, for at least some time, was no football at all, the Italian administrators
may at last have launched a proper search for that elusive soul.
Certainly they
have earned the right to a little suspended judgement,
and nowhere more so than here.
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