Saturday,
March 08, 2008
Spanish Hate the Italians Because of Their
Football
The
ANNOTICO Report
If
there's one thing the Spanish really, really hate, it's the Italians. In fact,
it's become an obsession. Not because of the fashion, the impossibly
perfect facial hair, or even the crazy driving and mopeds:
Sid
Lowe
Thursday
March 6 2008
As if
going out of the Champions League was not bad enough, as if seeing the dream of
a tenth European Cup disappear in smoke was not sufficiently painful, Real
Madrid had to go out to a AS Roma, a team from
Because if there's one thing the Spanish really, really hate, it's the Italians.
In fact, it's become an obsession. Not because of the fashion, the impossibly
perfect facial hair, or even the crazy driving and mopeds:
And Roma are not
your typical Italian side because they attack, because they score goals,
because they are worth watching. In
Few people were
less impressed with Fabio Cannavaro winning the
Golden Ball as European player of the year than the Spanish, even if he had
just joined
When Cannavaro played poorly, he was rubbish; when his partner,
Sergio Ramos, played poorly he was suffering an injury, having an off day, too
keen to win - or dragged down by the Italian playing alongside him.
Likewise, when
Fabio Capello was sacked as coach of Real Madrid for
being "too boring" despite winning the club's first league title in
four years, ending the longest Santiago Bernabiu drought in over half a century, his
"anti-football" - and, yes, that is what they called it - was seen as
being the logical conclusion of his nationality.
And the day Claudio Ranieri was sacked as
Over here, people
think Italian football is dirty, cynical, talentless
and boring. Few Italians have succeeded in
When Real Madrid
faced Juventus in the 2003 Champions League quarters,
a Spanish television trailer used the music and opening credits from Star Wars
to announce an apocalyptic clash between
A few years
earlier, after the Italian press complained about a blatant - and deliberate -
handball goal by Razl in the Champions League, the
Spanish press got their knickers in a twist, screaming: "How dare you
lecture us?!" The sports paper Marca published a
"dossier" on the tricks of the trade of Italian football, "the
most unsporting in the world" - tricks such as diving, fouling and, ahem,
winning.
And that is, kind
of, the point. Because perhaps the worst thing about the Italians is that they
are successful, the current World Cup winners.
Italian football
so perfectly fuels the schizophrenic Spanish psyche, that uneasy coexistence of
massive superiority and inferiority complexes. The Spanish are convinced they
are better than the Italians. But, deep down, they are also convinced the
Italians will beat them. By foul means, not fair.
When Tassoti smashed Luis Enrique's nose - in the penalty area -
in the last minute of the 1994 World Cup quarter-final, leaving Italy going
through, Spain going out and Luis Enrique going to hospital, it was the perfect
embodiment of Spain and Italy: one side played all the football; the other
smashed an innocent man's nose all over his face - and won.
Those victories
are illegitimate, whispered sins. Asked about Italian dominance of the
Champions League a few years ago the Real Madrid defender Ivan Helguera, a man who had played in
Just as this
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