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.
Papers, podcasts and blogs are full of the demise of Argentina. Maradona makes good press. His Anglo detractors remain bitter. The Argentine domestic game is bankrupt. Yet, despite the noise, Argentina remain poised to qualify. The competition in South America is that stale. A home win against lowly Peru in October should almost certainly seal their South Atlantic passage.
Argentina’s poor form has somehow detracted attention from the failings of some of Europe’s marquee performers.
[David ends his overview of Group 8 with a quick look at Montenegro]
Montenegro have a point less than Cyprus. The last of the Yugoslav Republics to fall off the Serbian rump have not won a game in qualifying, though they have secured four draws. Montenegro are no pushovers. The World Champions could only beat their former “protectorate” 2-1 at home. (Italy were responsible for Montenegro’s other Group 8 defeat, 2-0 in Podgorica.)
If’s not inconceivable Montenegro could win their remaining four fixtures, but even that will probably not be enough to secure a 2nd place playoff position.
Montenegro promise to be a football fairytale in future qualification campaigns or a right proper nightmare for some. It’s the sort of place England go to and loose.
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