Cynicism prevails

One of life’s puzzles is why in a country as stylish as Italy, where people’s abiding preoccupation is to cut a bella figura, they should play such flat, joyless football.

Inter Milan raised the question once again last week after the manner of their qualification for the semifinals of the champions league.

We are all used to people bleating on about the unfairness of football. As in ‘We deserved at least a draw”, ‘How the linesman failed to spot that blatant offside, I’ll never know”, and so on. We are used to it and after a while we stop listening. It’s as futile as players complaining to referees after the fact about penalties and red cards.

Of course football’s unfair. So is life. Get over it.

But there was something so excruciatingly cruel about the Italians’ victory over Valencia — 2-2 on aggregate, Inter through on away goals — that it bordered on the immoral. The indignation of Rafael Benitez, the Valencia coach, was so epic, was founded on so manifest an injustice, that it forced one, for once, to listen.

‘We were better than Inter in both games,” said Benitez, uttering a truth that no one on the planet could possibly dispute.

‘If all teams played like that, football could disappear altogether. The stadiums would be empty because no one would come and pay to see this kind of thing. They are the death of football.”

A spectacle more different than that provided by Real Madrid and Manchester United, whose two games were the elixir of football — the guarantee that the game’s appeal will be eternal — it is almost impossible to imagine.

Nothing to do with Valencia, who played with as much fire and pluck as they did in eliminating Arsenal from the champions league. And everything to do with

Inter, who plunged catenaccio to new lows of cynicism.

In each game they scored one utterly unlikely breakaway goal — thanks to their one attacking plan, Christian Vieri — then retreated to their castle and slammed down the portcullis. In the second leg in Valencia, the home side shot on goal 27 times; Inter (so the official statistics say, but it seems a gross exaggeration) three. Still, you’ve got to hand it to them for efficiency. Of those three efforts, one resulted in a goal; of Valencia’s 27, two.

Efficient is the word that also comes to mind in characterising Italy’s other two European triumphs last week. Milan squeaked past Ajax, Juventus past Barcelona to achieve what it would be churlish not to acknowledge as a notable ccomplishment.

Three out of the four semifinalists in this year’s staging of the best club competition in the world are Italian — a feat matched only once before, by Spanish teams, three years ago. All the more impressive is the fact that no Serie A team has won the European Cup in seven years. That was Juventus, the last Italian team to reach the semifinals, in 1999.

The Italian press duly celebrated their football’s ‘heroic” return from the abyss, some going so far as to claim that ‘the supremacy of il calcio” had once again been restored.

What perhaps they did not expect was the flood of vituperation from the rest of Europe (Ronald Koeman, the Ajax coach was almost as scathing as Benitez), but especially from the Spanish press. As if calling for the Inter team to be burnt by the Inquisition at the stake, one Madrid newspaper described their victory over Valencia as ‘heresy”.

All the more so, in a way, because there are so many great individual players in Italian football whose talents are stifled — a point amply demonstrated by players such as Thierry Henry, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo, who have only truly flourished once they have cast off their Serie A chains. Ronaldo, shortly before moving from Inter to Real last season, compared Italian football to chess.

Still, the Italian newspapers’ counter-attack on the Spanish last week Friday was more splendid than anything their players had exhibited earlier in the week on the pitch. A former editor of Gazzetta dello Sport railed on the front page against fallen ‘Spanish pride”.

‘They have called us all kinds of names,” he wrote, ‘they have portrayed us as if were pigs rolling in excrement, they have spoken with scorn of the decay of Italian football. Now they must swallow their own bile.”

With the exception, of course, of Real Madrid before whose majestic style of play, Gazzetta dello Sport graciously concedes, we must all bow.

But that’s the funny thing. Italians are just as ready as anybody else to acknowledge the sublime talent of Real, yet they do not hesitate to exalt what — measured by the same standard — are the viler attributes of their own game. ‘What’s wrong with cynicism and luck?” asked another columnist in la Gazzetta. ‘Don’t they have their place in football too?”

Even more revealing was a quote from Luis Suarez, a Spaniard who played in the original Inter catenaccio team of the early 1960s and has remained in Milan ever since. It’s a question of different mentalities, explained Suarez. ‘In Spanish football the spectacle is king. The crowds get excited when their teams attack — even when they are winning.”

Weird, Suarez seemed to be saying to his no-doubt baffled Italian interlocutors. Weird but true.

Which brings us back to the question of why it is that a people who are so

expansive in their love of life should be so constipated when it comes to football. The answer, as an Italian friend explained, is that Italians do not correspond entirely to the caricature.

Beneath the bella figura posturings, there is a hard-nosed pragmatist at work. When the issue at hand is truly serious (and how much more serious than football does it get?), when what is at stake is winning or losing, you don’t mess about. You win at all costs.

You are — and this is a quality none of the Italian teams who triumphed last week can be denied — ruthlessly competitive, and fiercely attentive to detail.

Of course, if the Italians did not possess these qualities how would they have produced such architecture and art, how would they have contrived to become — from Roman times to the present day — such a mightily successful nation?

Because they keep their eye on the final objective. Which is, above all, not to lose.

That’s why it is absurd to go on the attack when you are winning. To enjoy going forward for the sake of going forward.

Machiavelli anticipated all this 500 years ago. In The Prince, the cynic’s bible, he defined in words that ring through down the ages Italian football’s not only chief but sole article of faith. ‘One judges,” he wrote, ‘by the

result.” —