Newsgroup: it.sport.calcio.roma
Titolo: Il TIMES sulla Juventus... CHE PENA

The Times
May 27, 2006
What's black and white and has a foul smell? Ask Signor Moggi
Tobias Jones
We who stood in the stand for Parma v Juventus had felt hard done by for
years
THERE ARE 58 million people living in Italy but it's a small world. Italians
call it Italietta, a pejorative term implying that the control of the
country is in the hands of a select gang of unscrupulous people. For almost
a month now, Italians have been learning, with bitterness, just how small
their country is. Football is at the centre of the scandal and the lead role
is played brilliantly by Luciano Moggi.
Moggi is comic-book bad. His put-downs are awesome, especially because of
his trademark droopy eyelids. When he smiles, his whole face sparkles, but
he does "angry" with whispers and shouts. This is a former station master
nicknamed Paletta ("lollipop man"), a small-time fixer who reached the
summit of power: he was until two weeks ago director-general of Juventus,
the Rolls-Royce of Italian football teams.
You know the story by now: he was a phone-slinger from down south. He won
games from the stands, kicking ass instead of leather. Juventus were
systematically favoured by hand-picked referees ("see also what's not there
sometimes" was one instruction relayed to a referee). It was favoured by a
mathematical usage of yellow and red cards against their future opponents.
Surprise, surprise: Serie A was more bent than the Charlton attack.
It's hard not to scream through embittered lips that "we told you so". For
years it has been a running joke in Italy. We whingers who stood in the
stands for Parma-Juventus matches had felt hard done by for years: Parma
reduced to nine men, another Del Piero penalty, another Parma goal
disallowed. We felt convinced something whiffed but were repeatedly told by
TV hosts (who, it now emerges, also colluded with Lucky Luciano) that we
were paranoid.
Markets as well as matches were allegedly fixed. The world was so small that
Moggi twice employed Marcello Lippi (now national manager) as "technical
commissariat" (manager) at Juventus. Moggi's son works with Lippi's son at
Gea. Gea is the sports agency that represents almost 300 footballers. It
controls more than 17 per cent of the estimated transfer market. Moggi even
had Giuseppe Pisanu, then the Minister of the Interior, pleading on the
phone for help to save a team in his constituency. Moggi, of course, did the
trick.
This political and financial involvement in football means that the actual
game defies gravity. Only in Italietta is it possible to win three
promotions in two seasons (Fiorentina). It's never clear at the end of each
season which division your team will play in next time round because no 
one's
quite sure where the chairman has gone: he could be in Santo Domingo
(Gaucci), in prison (Cragnotti), on trial (Tanzi) or caught red-handed
giving a suitcase of cash to a fixer (Preziosi).
This time, though, the scandal seems bigger. The Juventus share price has
plummeted by 40 per cent in less than a month and investors are scratching
their heads at quite how tawdry the club's bar code black-and-white stripes
are. Italy goes into the World Cup having been forced to withdraw its
refereeing representative; Franco Carraro, the president of their FA, has
resigned. The national coach, captain and goalkeeper are under
investigation. Even by Italietta standards, this is quite a crisis.
What happened next is interesting. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the head of the
Catholic Church in Italy, tried to sdrammatizzare (make a molehill out of a
mountain): "I wouldn't want there to be a change of register," he said this
week, warning us away from outright revolution. "Dissension grows with the
grain", whatever that means. Others step forward to calm things down, not
least because the investigation is now under the command of Francesco
Saverio Borrelli, a man who spearheaded the Tangentopoli political
corruption clean-up . . . and that means Berlusconi is both happy and
nervous: his AC Milan might enjoy Juventus being stripped of their two most
recent championships and dropping to Serie B, but the return of an empowered
magistrature makes him understandably a little twitchy.
There's so much momentum to the story that every hour new accusations,
transcripts and confessions emerge: Moggi was apparently able to bounce
players into the national team and thereby increase his market assets. He
could get fixtures altered. He could even soften up the opposition because
some of them were bound to be Juve boys on loan anyway.
But if you didn't return his calls you would be frozen out: Fabrizio Miccoli
and Enzo Maresca, two of the brightest young talents in Italy, were publicly
humiliated by Moggi and now play in Portugal and Spain respectively. There
are others: Zidane, Henry, Di Vaio and Davids. World-class players were
rudely shunted if they didn't adhere to Moggismo.
Most Italians won't consider Moggi an evil man: he's accused of being a bad
sport, a jolly rotter, but he's not at the time of writing accused of any
crime. But what really riles about Moggi is that he knew nothing about the
sport. Playing football in Italy has always been a pleasure because of its
innocence and aspiration. You play at dusk on small pitches overlooked by
the parish priest. If you can't afford the pitch you play on the cobbles,
dribbling past Vespas. Now that all seems romantic drivel. In Moggi's world
sport is a stitch-up played with calculator and cash till.
Tobias Jones is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy
-- 
http://tinyurl.com/hjwfj

<a href='
http://www.yahoo.com
'></a>Thanks!
http://www.insurance-top.com/auto/
 <a
href='
http://www.insurance-top.com
'>auto insurance</a>. <a
href="
http://www.insurance-top.com
 ">Insurance car</a>: auto insurance,
insurance car, Best Insurance Web site. Also
[url]
http://www.insurance-top.com/car/[/url]
 and
[link=
http://www.insurance-top.com
]insurance quote[/link] from site .
-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

Hi! 
http://www.insurance-top.com/company/
 car site insurance. auto
insurance, insurance car, Best Insurance Web site. from website .
