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Football: Pride and self-image at stake for a nation of football fundamentalists

Andrew Gumbel
Thursday 09 October 1997 23:02 BST
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In Italy, it is less a national passion, more a second religion. Andrew Gumbel reports from Rome on why defeat tomorrow night would plunge the country into a depression excessive even by English standards.

Whose side is everybody on then? This is supposed to be a final showdown for a place in the World Cup, a bestial fight to the death between two European giants, but the Italian and English sides seem to be treating each other like brothers in arms, not mortal enemies. One day there is Gianluca Vialli, not so long ago one of the Italian national side's leading lights, sitting at home in London and predicting that England will win the group and qualify. The next day there is Tony Banks admitting he would find it hard not to jump for joy if his idol, Gianfranco Zola, scored against his own team.

These may be interpreted as unwise or intemperate outbursts, but times have unmistakably changed. In Rome, at least, as the clock ticks away towards the big game, there is an odd sense of familiarity about the visiting England team. Everybody knows exactly what they are facing. The experience of Zola and Co in England and, on the other side, Paul Gascoigne's and Paul Ince's exposure to the game in Italy, have made this match seem more like a derby than a major international stand-off.

The talk in the sports papers, in offices and buses, bars and restaurants, is all much the same. Italy may still be the stronger side, but they will face an England side who have matured considerably since losing at Wembley in March. The Italians may have the support of their home fans in the Stadio Olimpico, but they are also starting out from a position of weakness, knowing that only an outright win will guarantee them a place in France.

Of the players, Zola has been particularly incisive in his analyses. "The English have improved tactically," he said this week during a training session in Florence. "They've got sneakier. Ever since they lost against us they've been devouring point after point, winning everything in sight...We need to forget the old England we used to know." Zola already has a good idea what awaits him out on the field: a ring of England players determined to stop him getting the ball. And his nomination for the man to watch out for? No hesitation there: Ian Wright.

There is something about all this inside knowledge that makes Italian fans uneasy. There have been worries circulating all week that the chumminess between the players will take the competitive edge off the Italian side. The two teams may treat this as a contest between friendly rivals, but for ordinary football followers it is something far, far more important. Football is like a second religion here, and the very idea of a World Cup finals without Italy is a thought too appalling for most people to contemplate.

Mostly this is a question of pride. Italy is famously attached to its sense of self-image, especially when it comes to the way the country is viewed abroad. To miss out on the World Cup, a bit like missing out on the single European currency (the other great national preoccupation of the moment), is not just a lost opportunity. It is something that would make Italians feel as though they were losing an essential part of themselves.

Football is not just something that Italians watch. Indeed, they frequent their stadiums far less than the English do theirs. Rather it is something to follow, something to talk about, something about which everyone can feel an expert and offer an opinion. The television is awash with football programmes - not so much the games themselves as endless talk shows in which performances, tactics, transfers and the rest are painstakingly analysed and argued over. The specialist newspapers, the Gazzetta dello Sport and the Corriere dello Sport, are by far the best-selling dailies in the country.

Football, it has been suggested, is the way ordinary Italians identify themselves with the byzantine structures that govern the country. They may be intimidated by politics or high culture, but football enables them to engage in the same sort of rhetorical flourishes, opinion-making and convoluted conspiratorial thinking that characterises the chattering classes without feeling that they are somehow talking out of turn.

This has been especially true since the landmark World Cup victory of 1982, when football was transformed from a largely lower-class passion to a national obsession in which politicians, industrialists, writers and artists all felt obliged to play their part. It is impossible not to have an opinion on Internazionale's acquisition of Ronaldo, or on Cesare Maldini's track record as national coach, just as it is impossible in Britain not to have an opinion on the death of Princess Diana.

In a highly regionalised country in which north and south sometimes seem to be on separate continents, football is one of the few unifying factors. They are as nuts about it in remote villages in Sicily as in the elegant business salons of Milan and Turin. That helps explain why so much is riding on Saturday night, and why the streets of Italy will be deserted on Sunday in a gesture of national mourning if gli azzurri, the boys in the blue strip, don't get their three points.

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