The Roma-Manchester United soccer match a few weeks ago (2-1) and the return Manchester United-Roma game (a whopping 7-1 for M.U.!) the other day saw the usual nauseating stadium violence. In the Rome match several M.U. fans were beaten senselessly by rather hyper Italian cops. Naturally, the good’ol blah-blah-blah occurred right after both matches, in particular the Rome game (Rome’s mayor Walter Veltroni was slightly offended when a Manchester newspaper had warned its fans to be careful of certain neighbourhoods in Rome. While crime in Rome is not per se terribly violent—the crime rate though has increased by 9% and Rome has apparently become the most violent city in Italy—as other major international cities, car and scooter thefts as well as pick pocketing on buses and in the subways are not only rampant but also a bloody plague to both Italians and foreign tourists!).
History again repeats itself, exactly 10 years after: October 15, 1997. I was with a good Canadian friend of mine, who also worked at the Canadian Embassy in Rome, at the Italy-England match in Rome’s Olympic stadium during the qualifier for the 1998 French World Cup. Cesare Maldini was Italy’s head coach at the time. We got to the stadium at about 5.30 pm in order to meet other friends. The tension was sooooo thick that night that you could have cut it with a knife: Italian papers didn’t help either as for about 1 solid week before the game they spoke about up to 500 of THE most dangerous British hooligans who were going to descend upon Rome “à-la-Attila the Hun”! Mass destruction was in the works according to the papers.
We had over our heads about 3 or 4 police and carabinieri helicopters plus traffic cops and also finance police officers. About all that was missing was John Wayne and the Indians! And yet, about 30 metres from us, who was working totally undisturbed? Neapolitan scalpers (I managed to understand their accents)! It’s really no wonder then that the 500 hooligans managed to get inside the stadium with illegal tickets.
The match, which I thought was rigged anyway, ended up 1-1 (rigged in the sense that had Italy won TOTAL mayhem would have been unleashed by the British fans on Rome, mayhem worthy of Nero’s days. Ditto had England won. The Italian fans would have chewed up the English fans. In fact, just with a tie, up to 85 fans were injured, including an Italian kid who had had his eye gauged out with a broken beer bottle!). Very eloquent indeed was a banner in the north curve of the stadium. It read the following: “England fuck-off”! (and strangely enough, for tv viewing purposes, it was immediately removed). My friend and I, both speaking English the entire time, entered the stadium with absolutely no problems (n.b. the average Italian cop doesn’t know the difference between an American, English, Australian, Scottish or Irish accent if his/her life depended on it). We did though get some strange looks from the surrounding Italian fans in the south curve, but no one dared touch us.
I even recall that I was not all that concentrated on the match because with one eye I was watching the pitch and with the other I was watching what was going on to the left of us on the opposite side of the curve: Italian fans were taunting English fans through the glass walls, and vice-versa. They were also throwing garbage and what not at them. The day after my friend called his colleague at the British embassy to find out how things ended up that evening. It turns out that English fans, INCLUDING British embassy personnel, were not only holed up in the stadium until 2 a.m. (and thus many were furious that they had missed their return flights to England) but many women even had their Valentino belts (from their very own pants) removed prior to entering the stadium because they could have been used as weapons (I on the other hand was not at all frisked when I entered the stadium, and I was speaking in English with my friend).
Having worked at several embassies, I can assure readers that you’re not going to embarrass the government that your working for with acts of violence at international or events (let us just say that your big boss, the ambassador, wouldn’t be terribly happy of seeing his embassy in the local papers). Why on earth EVEN embassy officials were kept together with the average English fan (when I say “average” I don’t intend a hooligan), is totally beyond me.
I only presume that the same thing happened for the Roma-M.U. match in Rome, thus not only repeating what had happened to us in 1997 but again giving Italy and the rest of the world the usual bad image of a totally inefficient country. Also from a linguistic point of view: the latest news comes from UEFA’s PR man: he said one of the causes of the scuffles in Rome the other day was (also) due to the fact that many Italian police officers probably didn’t know English well, or at all for that matter. Nothing much has changed from 10 years ago…
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