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Le dichiarazioni dell’ allenatore della nazionale inglese Fabio Capello, pesantemente polemiche e, forse, ingrate sul nostro calcio e sul mondo del tifo organizzato italiano, hanno aperto un dibattito che pare estendersi anche sui tabloids britannici. L’articolo proposto, il quale pare non uscire da determinati luoghi comuni ma, comunque, relativamente documentato, è uno dei più accurati redatti sul tema e può rendere l’idea di come il pianeta calcio in Italia sia percepito all’estero, nello specifico nel Regno Unito. In Scozia, intanto, si parla della decisione arbitrale di sospendere, a fine primo tempo, Dundee-Rangers, incontro che si stava disputando sotto un autentico diluvio.
Calcio Debate: Fabio Capello Sees Just Half The Story
Goal
01 November 2009
Gil Gillespie
The England coach’s attack on Calcio has infuriated the authorities back home. Goal.com’s Gil Gillespie wishes he’d keep his half-baked observations to himself…
The grass, as the old saying goes, is always greener on the other side.
Every time an Italian coach goes to live and work in England, they always seem to return full of glowing reports of highly organised stadiums packed with charmingly behaved fans. Even the dismissively arrogant Roberto Mancini said he enjoyed the more light-hearted, less media-intensive climate of the English game after his brief stint with Leicester City.Fabio Capello is the latest wearer of this particular pair of rose-tinted specs and he has been upsetting the football bosses in Italy with an outspoken attack on Calcio at Italy’s university of tactics, Coverciano.”It’s the ultras who rule in Serie A. There is no courage to apply the laws against them,” stated the former Milan and Juventus boss sharply. “In England the stadia are full, there is a desire to go to the stadium, nothing ever happens and the stewards do a perfect job. I am saddened with what is happening in Italy,” he added. And, as if this statement hadn’t put enough noses out of joint, Capello then turned his ire on what he thinks are the dishonest on-field practices of Calcio itself.”In Italy the divers are praised and receive prizes – in England they are jeered,” he added, without acknowledging the possibility of cultural differences.Finally, he had a dig at the current world champions themselves.”The Italian national team has never fascinated me like the English one,” he concluded.He didn’t explain why. But it is possibly something to do with the rumours that he was never going to be offered the chance to coach the Azzurri as he has spent half of his career upsetting the almost aristocratic folk at FIGC.It’s difficult to disagree with him about Calcio being in crisis but maybe he should have concentrated on the swift and decidedly Draconian measures that have been introduced to remedy the situation.Okay, Italian football has been crippled by a raft of demoralising problems over the last few years; despite ticket prices being a fraction of those in the Premier League; the crumbling stadiums are often little more than half full, the giants of Serie A are not punching their weight in the Champions League; and the shadow of the confusing and somewhat evidence-empty Calciopoli scandal is still hanging over the game, the normal suspicions that Italian’s carry about corruption and bribery turned up to 11.Worse still is the spectre of fan violence which turned particularly dark when policeman Filippo Raciti was killed in fighting between fans following the Sicilian derby between Catania and Palermo in February 2007. Later that year, police shot and killed Lazio fan Gabriele Sandri when they were trying to stop violence between rival fans at a motorway service station in Tuscany. Rioting followed in a number of cities up and down the country as angry fans took to the streets. The response needed to be swift and decisive. They were. Severe restrictions were introduced to prevent away fans from attending certain Serie A games. My mum and dad, not normally known for starting trouble at football matches, recently tried and failed to get tickets for a Genoa home game when they were on holiday: Italian club football currently operates in a code red atmosphere.But by implying that Italy should become more like England, Capello seems to believe that the Premier League blueprint drawn up by Lord Justice Taylor in response to the Hysel and Hillsborough disasters is a one-size-fits-all model that should be employed across Europe. It isn’t. No-one can doubt the necessity or the validity of tackling the twin demons of hooliganism and poor stadium design but the England boss seems to be blind to the problems it has left in its wake. Capello’s state of mind is a little like that of a tourist who visits another country, stays for a little while and is fooled into thinking he is living in a bright new paradise where none of the things he hated about the old country exist.His comments are proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing because the Premier League is far from being the harmonious supporter haven he thinks it is. What the FA did at the end of the eighties is to learn how to control fans inside the stadiums and to distance themselves from any trouble that happened outside. Fair enough. But as a result of the measures they put into place, there has been a gradual disappearance of anything resembling a decent atmosphere at many of the country’s biggest grounds.The exorbitant cost of ticket prices for Premier League games hasn’t exactly helped either. Prices are prohibitive to the point of obscenity. As a result, the average age of fans in the English top divison has risen from 23 to 43 in the last ten years. In essence, a whole generation has been excluded. “Something really quite important has been lost,” says John Williams of Leicester University’s Centre for the Sociology of Sport.In Italy, despite the constant stench of corruption and the ticketing restrictions, it couldn’t be more different. Football is not a hobby for Italians, it is one of the defining characteristics of life itself. They don’t really have any other sport. Everyone lives and breathes Calcio, even if they can’t be bothered to go to the less spectacular matches : lawyers, postmen, bar managers, widows, priests, teenagers and university professors. Its ability to unify is matched only by that of Catholicism.This is why Capello’s attack on the Ultras role in Serie A should be seen as misguided, even a little dangerous. The multitude of fanatical supporters clans that follow every club on the peninsula are by no means perfect but their contribution to the Italian game is, in many ways, sacred and should be cherished. The game, remember, would be rendered utterly meaningless without the fans. And in Italy, the fans’ insist on having their say in just about every area, whether they are invited to do so or not.It is typical that the 200 Lazio fans who invaded the teams training session last week and sent the players running for cover by throwing some mild explosive devices in their direction then sought to explain their actions by calling a press conference a couple of days later.“They haven’t even celebrated under the Curva with us, which is what used to happen in the past,” said Irriducibili spokesman Gianluca Tirone. He also stated that they were more than satisfied by the clubs’ response. In an age when money has all but taken over the beautiful game, it is incredible that fans can have so much influence on their club. It is also unintentionally hilarious. Even these direct action Ultras would not go out to hurt anyone. In fact, they adhere to a code that prevents them from doing so. There are morals at play. And anyone worrying about the use of explosives should note that every major game in Serie A in living memory has been punctuated by a series of unexplained explosions. Italy does lead the way in the art of letting off fireworks.Lazio Ultras, like the groups at Inter, Udinese, Juve, Cagliari and one half of Roma (don’t ask) have fascist sympathies and think of Mussolini as a hero. But this really is more to do with the polarised political reality of the country than football. Fascism and communism are still capable of holding the balance of power in Italy. Anyone wanting a first hand insight into the staggeringly complicated, politically motivated, self-sacrificing world of the Ultras should read Tim Parks’ book ‘A Season with Verona’.So they are by no means angels, but the clans of Calcio have their good side too. While their Premier League cousins sit in rows munching on prawn sandwiches or embark on their own personal marathons of abuse aimed at opposition players, the Red and Black Brigade, the Griffen Den, Juventus Fighters, Lazio’s Irriducibili, Inter’s Boys and a bewildering number of other Ultra groups put on the most amazing, colossal, phantasmagorical displays of noise, symmetry and colour of any football culture on earth. In Don Fabio’s beloved Premier League, fans do not only not have any say, they haven’t even got a voice anymore. They sit, they absorb, they go away, they boast, or they don’t boast, at work on Monday.And Capello’s suggestion that his newly adopted home is full of happy-go-lucky orderly souls who the authorities keep under control also shows just how naive he is about the culture of the people around him.What the man from San Canzian d’Isonzo doesn’t know is that every Friday and Saturday night in nearly every village, town and city up and down the land there are flocks of offensively drunken young men (and sometimes women) stumbling and fighting and flashing their arses. And the fans who follow the England football team abroad are even worse. Ask anyone who was in at the World Cup in Germany in 2006.So persuasive is the vulgar culture of Nu Britain, that it even creeps its way into the behaviour of the nations’ millionaire footballers, too. Can you imagine a news story about an Italian footballer groping and then breaking the nose of a girl who rejected his advances in a nightclub? Capello’s vision of Britain is of a decent place where Corinthian spirited chaps stay on their feet and get a round of applause from both sides of the ground. He must wonder why Bobby Charlton never shows up at training. But that is a tourist’s view. To a trained eye, one sees that UK is a actually something of a bitter and twisted lost kingdom where morals have been abandoned, casual violence is endemic and no-one can even remember what it means to be British any more. Britain used to be a superpower that ruled the world. Now it contains a country that hasn’t even got one of their own in charge of the national football team.That isn’t to say that Italy’s societal problems are anything to sneeze at. Corruption in particular is a major issue. Yet to focus on the negative of Italy and only on the positive of England is to insult the intelligence of those who want to look deeper.Indeed, the man trying to get England to play more like Italy thinks it is acceptable to pop his head around the door and tell everyone that the thing they love so much is actually an outdated chunk of rancid old Dolcelatte.You are not only very wide of the mark, Mr. Capello, but you are seriously out of your depth.
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Tumilty explains Tannadice abandonment
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( BBC Sport )