Newsgroup: it.sport.calcio
Titolo: Ascesa e Declino

Decline and decay of country that ruled Europe
Serie A finally kicked off this weekend in worse health than ever
Richard Williams
Monday September 16, 2002
The Guardian
Five minutes before the season kicked off at the San Siro on Saturday
afternoon, a group of fans on the balcony of the Curva Nord unfurled their
banner. Forty yards long, its black lettering expressed the bitterness
gnawing at the heart of Italian football.
"In a world of whores and opportunists," it said, "we chose the most fitting
representative. Goodbye, Ronaldo."
A few hundred miles to the west, the Brazilian was preparing to welcome his
wife to their new appartment near Real Madrid's training ground. Back in
Milan, however, Internazionale's supporters, assembling to greet the delayed
start of their league season, were still having a hard time overcoming the
humiliation inflicted by his departure.
"I hope that's the last we hear of it," Massimo Moratti, Inter's president,
said afterwards, keener to discuss the 1-0 victory over Torino with which
his team had opened the Serie A season. "It's time to turn the page."
But there are many pages that will need to be turned if Italian football is
to recover from the effects of a traumatic few months in which the perceived
injustice of the World Cup disaster came on top of financial uncertainty
among many prominent clubs together with a longer-term suspicion that, in
strictly football terms, the Italian league no longer looks down on the rest
of Europe.
The postponement by a fortnight of the start of the Serie A programme,
caused by the failure of several clubs to conclude deals with pay-TV
stations, was one symbol. Ronaldo's ugly departure to the reigning champions
of Europe, following in the footsteps of Zinedine Zidane, was another. After
five seasons at Inter, where he spent far more time on the treatment table
than on the pitch, Ronaldo's flight to Spain underlined what many have been
saying for the past three or four seasons: that Serie A has fallen behind La
Liga in terms of beautiful football, and behind the Premiership in terms of
raw excitement.
In what Marino Bartoletti, the editor of the magazine Calcio 2000, describes
as "the most embarrassing summer in the history of Italian football", the
imperial decline has been accompanied by the sound of the mighty crashing to
earth.
Fiorentina, the plaything of the movie mogul Vittorio Cecchi Gori, went bust
so badly in the spring that they are starting life again under another name
in Serie C2B, the equivalent of the Dr Martens League. Angelo Di Livio, the
"little soldier" who played an important role in Juventus's European Cup
exploits of the 90s, has gone down with them, accepting a tenth of his
previous salary from the newly constituted Florentia Viola. "It wasn't a
difficult decision," he said last week. "I didn't want to be remembered as
the captain of a team that was relegated and a club that went bankrupt.
Florence has shown me so much affection and this is a way to repay it."
Lazio, winners of the league and cup double under Sven-Goran Eriksson only
two years ago, are among the more spectacular victims of speculative
investment. After counting the cost of Sergio Cragnotti's £300m investment
over 10 years, funded by the Banca di Roma, they were forced to sell their
best players - Hernan Crespo to Inter for £28m, Alessandro Nesta to Milan
for £23m - on the eve of the season.
Two years ago Cragnotti thought he saw the future. "Television rights are
exploding," he said, "and we're only at the start." Yet last spring it was
discovered that he could not pay his players' inflated salaries, and Lazio's
transfer dealings at home and abroad were suspended. A couple of weeks ago
their infuriated supporters wreaked £250,000 worth of damage to offices
around the Olympic Stadium in Rome.
Rash generosity fuelled by overweening ambition is a familiar recipe for
disaster. In less than 20 years, Bartoletti pointed out, players' salaries
have increased by a factor of 15. "Now the clubs give seven, eight, or 10m
euros a year to kids who are barely 20. Would it change much if that 10
became three, or that eight became two? Would these boys be less happy? Or
would it give them a healthier attitude towards their lives and their
profession?"
The postponement of the start of the season provided official confirmation
of the turmoil within Italian football. Even the ITV Digital catastrophe did
not interrupt the start of the British league programme. But the failure of
eight smaller Serie A clubs to secure television deals in Italy's
every-man-for-himself system created chaos requiring government intervention
- and, eventually, the unprecedented agreement of Juventus, Roma, Lazio,
Parma and the two Milan clubs to forfeit about £4m of their own TV income in
order to subsidise a collective agreement.
This being Italy, what might elsewhere be seen as conflicts of interest are
seen as making the world go round. The clubs' delegation to the emergency
meeting with the culture minister two weeks ago was headed by the president
of the Italian league, Adriano Galliani, who is better known as the highly
visible vice-president of Milan. The owner of Milan, of course, is Silvio
Berlusconi, prime minister of the republic, whose minister received
Galliani's submission. Between them, inevitably, they sorted out a deal
enabling the season to commence at the weekend.
But although there were 66,000 at the San Siro to acclaim Christian Vieri's
winning header for Inter against Torino, and 40,000 in the Stadio delle Alpi
yesterday to see Alessandro Del Piero's two goals get Juventus's defence of
their championship off to a winning start, plenty of problems remain.
This week those two clubs, along with Roma and Milan, return to the
Champions League, in which Italy's record has been abysmal by their
standards since Juventus's last victory in 1996. Real Madrid's return to
pre-eminence, and the renaissance of Spanish league football in general,
combined with the increasing confidence of the English and German clubs,
seems to have shoved Italian clubs back into a dour, introspective mood all
too easily reflected in the functional conservatism that is the default mode
of the Italian game.
Nor can Italy get over the nature of the national team's departure from the
World Cup. Every day the newspapers devote space to the latest news of the
career of Byron Moreno, the Ecuadorian referee whose decisions were believed
to favour the home team in the fateful match against South Korea. The
Italian federation has finally persuaded Fifa to institute an inquiry into
his performance in the World Cup, and the news that he has just been
suspended for 20 matches by his national federation for letting a league
match run more than 10 minutes over time has been greeted with sour
amusement.
Some are having greater difficulty than others in following Moratti's advice
to turn the page. "Nobody's saying anything about the Argentinian linesman
who raised his flag to deny Tommasi the joy of a golden goal," a columnist
in the Corriere dello Sport grumbled on Saturday morning. "Maybe he's being
protected by the shield of his compatriot [Julio] Grondona, the
vice-president of Fifa."
And in the bookshops of Milan there are piles of a slim volume by the
journalist Luigi Garlando, published last week under the title Ronaldo - The
Ungrateful King and written in the tone of a jilted lover. "The day of the
final of France 98," Garlando writes, "Ronaldo said, 'I've lost the World
Cup, but I've won the cup of life.' Four years later, try turning those
words around. Ronaldo has won the World Cup, but lost the cup of life."
The phenomenon they are calling calciocaos is composed of small events as
well as large ones. Eriberto Silva, the Brazilian star of Chievo Verona,
last season's Serie A surprise packet, suddenly announced in the summer that
he had been playing under a false identity. Luciano Siqueira, as he is now
known, is currently suspended, his case under consideration by the league.
Equally strange, a 7.5% stake in Juventus taken by El Saadi Gadafy, the
Libyan ruler's son, received acknowledgment a couple of weeks ago when the
champions played Parma in Tripoli for the Italian Super Cup.
At least the sun shone on Italian football throughout the weekend. But Inter
were lucky to hang on to their points against opponents reduced to 10 men
before half-time, needing a poor offside decision to enable them to send
66,000 fans home happy, while Juve, two goals up after 35 minutes, evidently
decided that enough was enough and concentrated on keeping a clean sheet
until Salvatore Fresi drove in a third in the last minute.
"Our football has overcome the destruction of a war, tragedies like the
Superga air crash, disappointments like the failure to qualify for the 1958
World Cup and the eliminations of 1962 and 1966, and even the scandals of
match-fixing and bribery," Bartoletti concluded last week. "Evidently it
must be immortal."
Immortality, however, belongs to the gods. And, as those fans on the Curva
Nord have worked out, at the moment there is nothing remotely divine about
Italian football.
2002: How the game lost its lustre
March
Italian clubs fail to make the last eight of the Champions League, as
Juventus and Roma are eliminated in the second group stage. Juventus's last
home game, against Arsenal, attracts only 8,562 people.
April
Hopes of an all-Milanese final in the Uefa Cup are dashed when both sides
are defeated in their respective semi-finals, Inter against Feyenoord and
Milan by Borussia Dortmund.
June
Italy, one of the favourites to win the World Cup, endure a torrid
tournament and are eliminated in the second round after scraping through
their group. Accusations against the referee Byron Moreno.
July
Fiorentina, two-time league champions, but relegated in the 2001-02 season,
were demoted from Serie B due to their parlous financial state. The club was
placed in administration and then folded. The reborn club, Florentia Viola,
must start in lowly Serie C2.
August
Despite the Milan clubs bucking the financial trend and signing players,
Inter lost Ronaldo to Real Madrid. The Brazilian had put his injury
nightmare behind him to score eight World Cup goals but signalled his
intention to leave soon after. Lazio, who were threatened with exclusion
from Serie A, were forced to sell Alessandro Nesta and Hernan Crespo. In
response 300 fans went on the rampage causing £250,000 damage.
September
League season got off to a late start after a row over TV money. The
two-week delay was caused as eight clubs were left without a pay-per-view
deal. They backed down after the big clubs agreed to help them out
financially.
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://usenet.libero.it

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 18:23:46 GMT Switters wrote:
[Cut]
Sei OT e hai cagato il cazzo.
-- 
inter doppiata: 13+13=26 VENTISEI - 
www.anticalcio.com
Miglior Attacco + Miglior Difesa + Capocannoniere = SCUDETTO
"VE DOVETE MOZZICA FINO LI GOMITI" (Cit.)
Il vostro rosicamento, il mio godimento

financially.
Frogghe, ma sei scemo o ci fai?
Sarà la milionesima volta che ti si chiede di non postare messaggi in
inglese.

 wrote in message
news:T1iGPayMNFqK6s...@4ax.com...

e secondo te mi mettevo a tradurre tutta quella roba? ma sei matto?
era solo informativo... non importa che tutti capiscano..
tanto mica tutticapiamo quello che dicono i troll...per esempio...;)

 inglese.
Oltretutto manco li capisce.


Il punto è proprio questo, signori: l'inter è vista,
IN TUTTO IL MONDO, come il club-zerbino
umiliato da Ronaldo, ed è la pura verità.