Naples, said Malvermi – hell, hell, hell.
I flew via Rome where, waiting for the connection, I learnt (from Newsweek) that Sierra Leone had produced a postage stamp honouring the Cameroon team already.
By saying the magic formula – COL 02447 JXZDOA, easy when you know how – I’d succeeded in retrieving my $500. On other fronts, things were looking less rosy.
I had no ticket for the game. Olivetti said that there was one reserved; but in Cagliari they said, in Naples that means nothing. And I had no room booked either – but then, I’d not be out of the stadium until after midnight – and with the return flight leaving at seven the next morning, I figured I’d do without.
Because you think to yourself, here’s a chance to see Maradona play before his adopted home crowd in a match which, if they lose, sends Argentina home … and there was a press lounge at the airport. This was worth sleeping a few hours on a sofa for.
Coming in over Naples past the glossy blurs of Ischia and Capri, the green of the pitch in the great ring of the San Paolo looked the brightest thing in town. We got out of the plane – into chaos and heat.
I got a ride in a cab with Barclay, Powell, and Colin Gibson to Castel dell’Ovo – Egg Castle – where they’d housed what Powell called, ‘the prettiest inefficient press centre in the world’. The traffic was the densest and most freeform I’ve seen, outside of Cairo – but then Naples, once the third city of Europe, is more African than European anyhow.
The ticket took two minutes; but placing a phone call was more protracted. The simplest request, in Naples, often requires the convening of a meeting of at least five people. A collect call? Well, let’s talk about it … and after five minutes they’ve forgotten you exist, they’re talking about something else altogether. Or a map of the city, at the information desk? Mass conferral; frantic heaving open of drawers, rummaging among piles of paper, examination of phone directories and brochures and every kind of FIFA print-out and PR document on earth … but no maps.
Egg Castle was a cool labyrinth of damp, dungeony rooms, a beehive of work areas and offices; it was an ochre pile parked on a rock fifty metres offshore from the main five-lane drag along the edge of the bay, opposite the costliest hotels in town. The causeway that connected it to land sheltered a marina with restaurants round the quays; and the views across the water south to Vesuvius, or north to the ramshackle rise of Mergellina, were vivid and bright under a blazing sky.
The ramped jumbles of boulders along the base of the sea walls were bedecked with dark-skinned swimmers and sunbathers; very much like the over-populated sea defences of Rabat or Casablanca, bodies strewn in the sun in a third world indolence by the rim of the chattering waves … further afield, cranes stood stacked along the docks, round frigates and merchantmen. Three rusty freighters waited in the bay with a shining white gin palace, and a Guardia di Finanza motorboat. Vesuvius beyond was a lazy threatening brute, a grey mouth gaping ominously at the bleached and featureless sky. Families fooled about in little boats in the foreground. On the Via Caracciolo the traffic raced and hooted; the scooters whined and buzzed, their riders helmetless showmen all.
And maybe to some Naples is hell, hell, hell – for sure, I know I wouldn’t want to live there – but it’s a great place to visit. I went walking in the packed and narrow streets, and talked with rotten-toothed and rampantly cheerful people; it was easy to remember how, when I was eighteen, and hitchhiked round Italy for three months, the people here were kinder to me than in any other city in the country.
On the smeared and crumbling walls of the backstreets I saw two posters, in both Italian and English. The English version on one said, ‘Water not drinkable, there aren’t houses and work – shameful Mondiale’. And on the other, ‘If we doesn’t have our job, we will boycott Italy ’90’.
With Maradona in town, there was little chance of that.
Buses for the media left Egg Castle every half-hour through the late afternoon. Via Caracciolo was theoretically five lanes, one way; Neapolitan style, it accommodated six lanes, inchoate and ill-defined, heaving and weaving. With a police escort going ahead the bus pulled out and then, to our amazement, did a U-turn, and set off nonchalantly straight into the oncoming traffic.
On the bus we talked injuries. Hodge was out, Webb didn’t seem match-fit; Butcher had a knee, Walker had an ankle – and now Lineker had a toe, Bryan Robson a toe and an Achilles …
‘There you go, lads,’ said Powell, ‘the wheels are falling off. England take on the world with Platt and Bull. An Aston Villa humper, and a second division battering ram. Italy in crisis. Germany in trauma. Brazil all a-tremble …’
Gibson said, ‘And Platt puts in the cross from the by-line to the near post, Bull rises to head unerringly home for his third goal in the final … then you wake up. On a beach somewhere.’
‘And you’ve been there fifteen days,’ said Powell.
The police escort worked miracles to get us through the honking, surging mess of the streets to the stadium. As we pulled up, an American photographer was brutally rude to a couple of small Hispanics as they tried to get out of their seats. ‘Fuck you,’ he said, ‘get in my way again, and I’ll kick your ass.’
‘Maybe,’ muttered Gibson, ‘he doesn’t like your camera case in his face, pal.’
‘I just don’t like a man getting in my way, mac.’ Which is rich, coming from a photographer.
Gibson, a big man, said, ‘He’ll quieten down when he sees me get off the bus.’
‘I’ll go first,’ said the somewhat smaller Powell, ‘give him a false sense of security.’
Gibson grinned. ‘Well, don’t leave me behind, boys.’
Then we were on the Tarmac, outside the enormous spartan mass of the San Paolo. No Roman fancy here, no Milanese sci-fi fantasy – just a vast industrial barn of a place with functional plastic roofing, and huge hulking walls like some old military fort … the poor man’s palace in the poor man’s capital, pretention-free.
I remarked how in the traffic I’d seen a man in shades shimmying through the cars on a trail bike, with his little girl (both helmetless, of course) just plonked between his knees, hands flat and clutched fiercely to the petrol tank. And with a child of my own now, I’d looked at that horrified – it took the indifference to risk or danger to a terrifying and irresponsible degree.
Yes, said Barclay – but you’re in a different country now. When David Miller of The Times wrote a book on Trevor Francis, he said that in one game, Claudio Gentile behaved like ‘a barbarian’. And an English defender might have been flattered – but northern Italians habitually dismiss southerners as barbarians; the regional antipathy is so great that hatred need not, sometimes, be too strong a word for it. Gentile, a southerner, was so furious that he sued.
I don’t know the outcome of the case – but a Neapolitan took revenge on Miller anyhow. He was stuck in traffic there, and suddenly had his car window stove in by a crowbar. Then, as the shattered glass landed in his lap, in came the thieving hand, and out went the briefcase; so Miller jumped out, in fruitless pursuit. It was, he said later, a bit alarming, and rather inconvenient – bye bye press pass, ID, tickets, wallet, the lot. But what really narked him was chasing the guy down the street, and seeing a police car indifferently wedged in the traffic, just a car or two behind his own …
As we talked, yet another immeasurably gorgeous stewardess led us through the crowds to the media gate. There were Romanian tourist buses – and a man in full flag Romanian regalia, wearing red-yellow-blue robes from head to toe, and carrying a six-foot tall Orthodox cross.
Inside, they even had Italia ’90 liner bags … and here’s Neapolitan organisation for you. I’d not booked in for the post-match press conference – but forty minutes after the deadline by which you were supposed to have reserved your ticket for that, I strolled into the conference room where they were dishing them out. All these press were sat orderly like schoolkids, waiting for their names to be called – so I moseyed up to the desk and said, ‘Can I have one?’
‘Sure, here you go.’
Naples, I love you.
There was a new species of the fauna of Planet Football here too. We’ve met green for beer already, blue for COL, and red for Coke – but now there was a girl in glaring yellow as well, a Grana Padano girl, Grana Padano being ‘the official cheese of Italia ’90’ … Cheesewoman. She was of such an unearthly height, she must have had a vertical leap on her to make Oman Biyik look ordinary. I watched her go past through the teeming throngs of press in the bar and the work areas, the way you watch a giraffe towering on an African horizon.
Things, I thought – feeling sticky and dirty after another early morning, two flights, and a long afternoon in this hot packed town – were getting more weird by the minute.
The Databank reported howls of grief and anguish from Uruguay.
‘Belgium has deflated the ball of our hopes!’
‘A black Sunday for the faded pale blue!’
‘A red devil showed us the ugly face of reality!’
In Brazil, they were promoting Lothar Matthäus as ‘a candidate for immortality’. And in Germany, after Italy–USA, Bild said, ‘Only the Brazilians are dangerous – we needn’t fear the Italians.’
In Holland, the draw with England was judged, ‘a lucky escape’.
We were into the last first round games now, played in simultaneous pairs to avoid fixes (in theory). And from here, it worked like this.
In each group of four, the top two went through automatically: twelve qualifiers. Then, to make it up to sixteen for the second round knockout, the four teams in third place with the best records went through too. Argentina and Romania, both beaten by Cameroon, both winners over Russia, had two points each; so a draw, and another point each, would see them both through.
Russia played Cameroon in Bari at the same time – and for the Russians, parked at the door marked Exit, the last desperate calculation was this: if either side in Naples lost, and they put a hatful past the Africans, they’d get third place in the group with two points, and a better goal difference than the losers in Naples.
And they might still then survive, if the hat they filled against Cameroon was a very tall one; because in at least two other groups, there’d be third placed sides also finishing on two points – Austria after they’d beaten the USA in Group A, Sweden or Scotland or Costa Rica in C, Colombia after defeat by the Germans in D – and anybody at all in gridlocked Group F. All over Italy, people permed the possibilities.
For Argentina, there was another factor in the equation. If they won and the Africans lost, they’d top the group, and stay with Maradona’s fans behind them in Naples. Whereas if they drew, they’d have to travel to the Germans in Milan, or to Brazil in Turin …
I went into the stadium at 8.30 – and to my dismay, it was half-empty.
FIFA and ’90 Tour claimed that over ninety per cent of the tickets for the tournament had been sold. But ’90 Tour was only a wholesaler – tickets sold by them to retail agencies abroad didn’t necessarily mean bums on seats in Italy.
So now, in Naples, they claimed an attendance of 52,733 – but I doubt it. We were learning – with attendances announced according to the tickets sold, as opposed to the numbers actually present – that there were travel agencies world-wide going to bed with tickets they’d failed to move on … and I’d come here for this?
Maradona, what’s worse, had an iffy knee … but they cheered his name to the blue sky, as the squads came out like ants from a hole in the ground behind one goal.
Diego! Diego! Diego!
The stadium did fill a bit, as the whistle approached; and the blue-and-white of Argentina was everywhere. Banners announced Sante Fe, Banfield, Café El Monoguillo, Snack 78 Cordoba … Diego’d picked himself a good second home.
Because after World War II, many of the Italians who went to Argentina came from the south, escaping the ruin and desperate poverty there. In the centre that afternoon, I’d seen a right-wing poster protesting African immigration. It said that in Argentina now, there were half a million Italo-Argentines who wanted to return – to escape the ruin and desperate poverty there – and they should, said the poster, get preference … so Maradona couldn’t have picked a better town to play god in. It was Buenos Aires on the Med.
Meanwhile, I don’t know whether Romania’s done anything about its anthem already, after all their grief and uprising – but they certainly ought to. It’s Coronation Street on qualudes, very Ceausescu … at least Naples, predictably, had the fanciest band so far to play it, with king-size gold epaulettes, and dinky red and white tufts flapping on their Napoleon hats. (In Cagliari, we got a bunch of engineers in khaki.) And here we go …
Maradona commits the first foul of the game.
Maradona commits the second foul of the game.
The third foul of the game is committed on Maradona, he rolls half-way to Buenos Aires, and Lacatus gets booked. Then, unbelievably, he gets Hagi booked too – by fouling him, then acting up another ersatz death scene when Hagi, flattened and irritated, clips his feet as he passes with a trailing leg. And all this in the first ten minutes …
By then Caniggia had already set off from half-way, ridden a tackle instead of diving for once, worked an effortless and immaculate give-and-return at full pelt through the middle with Maradona – and shaved the side netting on the end of it.
Not that the Romanians weren’t handy too. Where Argentina’s football was rough and jerky, Romania’s was complete; they had more possession, incisive passing, strong running on and off the ball … and Hagi, ‘the Maradona of the Carpathians’, was outdoing the real thing, while the real thing just strutted and pouted, the crocked cock of the walk. And as Argentinian drumbeats rattled like gunfire, the crowd began to swing Romania’s way.
Their attacks were determined, shapely, and sewn together from front to back. Argentina’s, which were fewer anyway, seemed abrupt and ill-considered – spasmodic darts and stabs, the psychotic lunges of an angry but lazy man.
Viva Viva Lacatus!
Hagi! Hagi! Hagi!
Batista brought him down, deliberate, casual, cynical; he did the same to Balint. And there were sorties spilling in at both ends now; the drums were a constant thud and clatter round the stands. Lacatus came close, rifling it in from the angle that had defeated Dasaev; but Goycochea was equal to it, and equal, too, to Hagi’s fierce and curling free-kicks.
So, still o-o at half-time – it was fast, bright, end-to-end, but it lacked the last punch. Maradona was peripheral, all act and no football – whereas Hagi was everywhere, shredding Argentina’s clumsy midfield with ease, pulling men left and right, and getting kicked for it too … Romania were ahead on points, no question.
Word came from Bari that the Russians were 2–0 up, and could have had four more.
Romania came back out, and took charge of the ball again. Hagi got to the by-line, Balint’s shot from the cross forcing Goycochea to tip it over the top; another free kick from Hagi found Balint’s head this time – but the chance flew high.
I noticed a Romanian offering his hand to the Argentine he’d just brought down – and having it refused … then Maradona forced a corner, took it himself, and Monzon glanced it in.
It was against the run of play – but never mind, the Romanians had another gear. They came pouring up, Hagi beat two men to force a corner, Andone missed a sitter – and then, seven minutes after going behind, Lacatus crossed, the ball bounced back across the face of goal from Sabau’s head to Balint – and his header, this time, was true.
It was greeted with a cheer easily as big as that for Monzon’s goal; and boys ran round the moat with that tragic emblem, the Romanian flag with the hole torn in its middle, among them two bearing a banner that read, ‘Italy loves a free Romania’. And who cares about Diego, indeed, when they’re dying in Bucharest?
Argentina did try to chase the game after that, with the big boys looming to meet them in Milan or Turin; but their efforts were scrappy. They weren’t worth more than a point, and they were barely worth that. Romania, meanwhile, were happy to hold the ball, and play out for the point – they had, after all, never gone beyond the first round before.
So they, and the match, ended dull. But the bigger disappointment, by far, was Diego Maradona – he’d not now had one single chance in three games.
And it seemed a long way to come, and a long day to spend – with a sleepless night ahead – to see half a hero, in front of half a crowd.
Argentina 1, Romania 1. So though the Russians ended up with four goals in Bari (against a Cameroon who probably weren’t much bothered) it availed them nothing. Powell said Cameroon were knackered anyway – they’d be out of it next game.
I went to the press conference. Hagi was a good-looking bloke, tousle-haired and puckish; Lacatus, on the other hand, had one of those pudding bowl eastern bloc haircuts out of doomy-gloomy movies about hard times in black and white places with grey edges, fog in the trees, and nothing to eat … i.e., Romania. Still, he’d just signed with Fiorentina; they’d get him a stylist, no doubt. And the both of them, not unnaturally, looked pleased as punch.
They were asked if events at home had affected them.
Lacatus smiled, with a sad hint of exasperation. He said, ‘Certainly, what’s happened has left traces in the hearts of our players – we think about what’s happening. But we hope it’ll be resolved, as we’ve resolved things in football here tonight – and that equality will prevail.’
So now they’d come second in the group, who would they like to come second in Group F, to meet them in Genoa?
‘No preference. Whoever qualifies, we have to play them.’
Emerich Jenei, the manager, said, ‘Between England and Holland, I’d prefer Egypt.’
But Lacatus, with his second booking tonight, would be suspended from that game.
‘It seems to me the referee gave yellow cards for no reason.’
But of course there was a reason, pal – you were playing Argentina …
Was Maradona over-protected?
‘Yes indeed.’
Hagi thought it was a real crack, when Jenei said Lacatus was ‘one of the greatest of our players’; he sat nudging him, and whispering like a schoolkid.
Then the politics came up again, and the question of fans seeking asylum. Hagi said, ‘We’re sportsmen, we’re not worried about asylum – we are Romanians, we in any case will go home.’ Which was easy for him to say – because, being sportsmen, they could now get out. It was Lacatus to Fiorentina, Hagi to Real Madrid, and the market in full swing – the manager of Bari flew to Romania the next day, to enquire after the forward Raducioiu, and the sweeper Popescu. (Though funnily enough, Popescu’s ended up at … PSV Eindhoven.)
Bilardo, meanwhile, looked more worried than ever. Diego, he said, had ‘no one to play with’; and as well as the knee he had an ankle now too, swelling up something rotten. He’d asked to be subbed at half-time; then changed his mind and said he’d play ‘if it killed him’.
And all around, Babel – voices in Italian, Spanish, German, French, Romanian … some frazzle-nerved jerk from Maxwell’s new paper, the European, went round hassling anyone who’d listen about what teams might end up where; a bunch of Germans bullied some complacent toad from FIFA about how the draw would be made to pick qualifiers from Group F, if the football couldn’t do it.
And thus did quotes emerge from Italia ’90, through a tangle of languages; thus did the stories stumble out, mangled in translation, and passed from notepad to notepad by grown men acting like a pack of yowling infants.
Back in town, I had a post-midnight pasta with Jeff Powell and Patrick Barclay on the quay by the Egg Castle marina. And, seeing how the game had been straightforward, Group B was settled, and boiling your brain over who’d play whom where next was pretty pointless, we talked about the press instead.
They were both dismayed by the Hostess Isabella thing. Their attitude was that if a politician of, say, ‘the party of the family’, got caught offside with a lady other than his wife, then yes, the public interest was valid. But footballers were only public figures in so far as they played football. So if a player wasn’t married, it was entirely his business who got into his bed; and if he was married, it was entirely his and his wife’s.
‘We all know,’ said Powell, ‘they’re red-blooded boys. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t want them out here.’ But they’d not been dallying with hostesses – and if they had been, it wasn’t legitimate public material.
‘Unless,’ Powell laughed, ‘she got into bed with someone to find out if England were playing a sweeper.’
‘We have,’ said Barclay, ‘the worst disciplined – not the least competent – but the worst disciplined press in Western Europe. Just as we have the worst disciplined schools, fans, society …’
All played out.
Then they said that if Vicini wrote for the papers, he’d not give you, so-and-so’s a plonker, or, so-and-so MUST PLAY. He’d give you a reasoned notion of what any given player would or wouldn’t give you in any given formation, against any given opposition.
The implication was, you want intelligence? In English football?
Powell said, ‘You think we’re a rotten press? Have you seen what they’re doing to Beenhakker in Holland? Or to Vicini here? He’s won twice, and they’re doing him for not winning well enough. Or Bilardo – Bilardo’s got the bloody President on his back. Can you imagine that? “Ah, Mr Robson, it’s the Prime Minister here – I think you should drop Terry Butcher.” ’
Certainly, Powell and Barclay both thought that he should. Powell said, ‘His legs are going.’
And then, this not-talking-to-the-press thing – it was all exaggerated. The only two that absolutely didn’t were Des Walker and Stuart Pearce – and that was down to Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest. He allowed none of his players to talk to the press, then did it all himself – but only for money. And it was partly, they said, because he’d not want any of them talking about him …
And then they asked, as the small hours crept closer and the water lapped against the quay, what I’d be saying about them, in this book.
‘It’ll be easy enough to find us,’ Powell grinned. ‘We’ll look under W in the index. For Wankers.’
But you don’t have to agree with all of a man’s opinions to think he’s good company anyway.
Besides, there is no index.
The press centre was open until four in the morning; I sat slumped in front of the Databank for a couple of hours. I learnt that in the first 400 days of its World Cup coverage, the ANSA news agency had transmitted 2,500,000 words. The globewide chatter of Planet Football …
In a magazine I learnt that when it was all over, you could buy a piece of the turf from the Olympic Stadium in Rome, 5 × 6.5 cms in a plexi-glass cube, for £55. Or a piece 13 × 20 in a stadium-shaped container, for £100. Projected sales: $40,000,000 …
I got a cab to the airport at 3.45 – and the press lounge was closed. No soft sofas for Davies … the airport was a grubby dump, silent and empty. I tried, and failed, to sleep stretched across three hard plastic seats, with a paperback for a pillow; maybe about five, I drifted off. Then at 5.30, a roaring party of Neapolitan holiday-makers arrived … the bar opened at six, and I golloped down some cappuccino.
Gibson turned up, and Millichip, who – wearing his FIFA hat – had been what he called ‘commissar’ for last night’s match. When I asked him what that meant, he sat twinkling like a gnome as he ran through his awesome responsibilities – making sure that the teams went out on time, that the ref and linesmen were OK, pulling names from a hat for the dope tests, writing a report … he said the bookings had all been fine. So he obviously wasn’t commissar-ing the same match that I was at.
He and Gibson talked golf; and I sat there feeling, raw tempered, that there was something vaguely wrong, having this smug, 76-year-old, roly-poly scoutmaster-type being unctuously feted round Italy writing his merry little reports – while the fans who paid his wages got their hides truncheoned back in Cagliari … there was word, now, of not one, but three club chairmen’s yachts moored offshore.
So, a flight to Rome, another back to Cagliari, then a lift with Gibson to Pula and the training ground once more. We played Egypt in two days …
When I got back to La Perla sometime later that day, the excellent Signora Orru took one look at me and said, ‘You are destroyed!’
But not at all, ma’am, not at all – because we’ve barely begun …