The best form of offence – a review of John Foot’s "Calcio: A History of Italian Football"

Most football enthusiasts prefer their game the pulse-racing, riveting way. The dazzling centre-forward racking up goals aplenty, agile wingers bursting forth from both flanks in gay abandon, piercing runs that paralyze the defence and culminate in the dejected goalkeeper collecting the ball from the back of the net – these are the stock images that populate the legends and lores of the “beautiful game”. In the eyes of the demanding fan, any approach to the game that does not guarantee ceaseless adrenaline rush is an object of derision and disdain. The exalted status that the Latin American teams enjoy is mainly due to the pace and radiance attributed to their game. However, Italy, one of the most successful of the footballing nations, is perceived to have thrived by embracing an intransigent defensive method, which diverges markedly from the devotees’ lofty expectations. Indeed, votaries of the game view the persistent defensive streak in the Italian game as boring at best and as a cynical ploy to win at any cost at worst. As conventional football wisdom would have it, the Italian teams may be adept at holding on to an early advantage, their domestic league (Serie A) may attract talent from all over the world, but the way they play their game makes totally reasonable men crave for the relative charms of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. And this persistent defensive mentality is not just a blight that afflicts the national team; it seems to seep into the club level as well, generating comparisons that pit the Serie A unfavourably against other European domestic club competitions like the English Premier League and the Spanish La Liga. This much-derided technical orientation of the Italian game is one among the many themes that John Foot explores, in an engrossing work that chronicles the history and development of the Italian football from its early stirrings in the late nineteenth century to the World Cup glory of 2006.

In order to complement the intense personal strain that permeates the work, Foot largely eschews the well-worn chronological narrative style, in favour of chapters organized around various themes. Foot’s love affair with Italian football began on a bitter note, as he was enraged by the Juventus’ 1980 acquisition of his Arsenal hero, Liam Brady. It was cold comfort to him that Brady faithfully lived up to the time-honoured tradition of English players faring miserably in the Italian league. The sense of distaste that emerged in the wake of Turin club’s audacity in depriving his club of the services of his favourite player lingered till he moved to Milan in the late 1980s, ostensibly for an academic purpose – to study the origins of Fascism in Milan. Thereafter, he began to be captivated by the profound, all-consuming fervour that the game of football evoked in the Italian psyche. The shift in his attitude towards the Italian game coincided with the meteoric rise of the city’s premier club, A. C. Milan. Aided in no small measure by the brilliance of  the Dutch trio – Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, and Frank Rijkard – and a spirited attacking style (a much-vaunted break from the usual defensive Italian method) ushered in by the redoubtable coach, Arrigo Sacchi (who went on to manage the Italian national team in their tumultuous campaign at USA 94), Milan reached the pinnacle of footballing success, winning seven Serie A titles and notching up five European championships.

Foot’s personal reflections on the Italian fascination with football that he encountered in Milan set the tone for his journey into the turbulent yet fascinating world of Italian football that ensues. Tracing the origins of the game in Italy back to the “kickabouts” and impromptu games organized by British sailors in the port towns of Livorno, Genoa, Palermo and Naples (Italy was a stopover on their way to India) in the late Nineteenth Century, Foot touches on how even these origins are contested and politicized in the fractious Italian football parlance. The instant and tremendous popularity the game attained in Italy lent itself to appropriation for political means by the emergent nationalist and Fascist parties in the early Twentieth Century. This was reflected in the decision in 1909 by the nationalist Italian football authorities to give the game an Italian name – Calcio, based on the highly dubious premise of identifying Calcio Fierentino, a game in vogue in Florence during the Renaissance, as the precursor of modern football. However, regardless of the high level of legitimacy that the nationalist attempts to claim the game for their own attained in Italy (even some experts were gullible enough to succumb to this version of events. For instance, the legendary Italian football journalist, Gianni Brera, gave credence to the nationalist position by opining that the English had merely “reinvented” the game), the early history of football in Italy retains a distinctly English flavour. The first football club in Italy, Football Club Torinese, was formed in1898 by Edoardo Bosio, an employee of a British textile company, who had picked up the rudiments of the game in England. And it was an English maritime doctor, James Richardson spensley, who organized the first competitive football match in Italy, between Football Club Torinese and a Genoan club formed by British consular officials.

Having set the record straight on the British contribution to the development of the game in Italy, Foot sets out to fashion a panoramic account of the various partakers and characteristics that make up the spectacle that is Italian football: the love-hate relationship between referees and fans; the enduring nexus between football and politics – a grassroots version of which plays itself out in the vehement confrontations that accompany matches involving teams whose core fan bases champion antithetical and diametrically opposite political creeds, such as the perennial tussle between the predominantly right-wing Lazio ultras and the Livorno zealots who proudly brandish their Tuscan leftist lineage with blaring recitals of anti-Fascist anthems like Bella Ciao and Avanti Popolo (the city of Livorno lies at the heart of the "Red Quadrilateral", a stronghold of the erstwhile Italian Communist Party); great derbies that set the sparks of frenzy alight – Derby della Madonnina between the two towering Milan outfits (delightfully named after the statue of Virgin Mary atop the Milan Cathedral), Derby della Capitale between Roma and Lazio, Derby d’Italia between Internazionale and Juventus, etc.; the passion and violence that underlie the fan rivalries. He also provides a revealing glimpse into the extraordinary level of pressure that plague the players and managers week in and week out, the adulation they inspire matched only by the brickbats they receive when falling short of fans’ expectations. But, despite the crushing burden of expectations, numerous mercurial stars have always graced the world of Italian football with their enthralling and consistent performances. The names and exploits are too long to be described in detail, but some do deserve a cursory glance at the least: Gianni Rivera, the Golden Boy who marshalled A.C. Milan and the Italian national team in the 60s and the early part of the 70s; The Mazzola dynasy, who blazed new trails in midfield generalship; Gigi Riva, Paolo Rossi, Roberto Baggio, Del Piero; and foreigners like Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidan, and Andriy Shevchenko.

Foot also vigorously challenges one of the most potent charges the detractors of Italian football often wave against it: its obsession with the defensive mode. Foot berates it for the blatant misrepresentation it is and mounts a strong defence against this frivolous viewpoint: “Italian teams have not been defensive. They have, quite simply, been much better at defending than other European teams. Italian defenders can all trap the ball, dribble and pass. [They] are also, usually, faster and more tactically aware than defenders in other countries”. One would be hard pressed to argue that Foot does not have a strong case here - at least to the extent that Italian defenders are generally more competent and capable than their counterparts, and that there is more to defensive football than a cynical desire to take the steam out of the game and subject the spectators to endless agony. Anyone who has watched Claudio Gentile, the “Butcher of Turin”, effectively neutralize many a steamrolling striker (the way he dealt with Maradona in the World Cup of 1982 was a formidable display of man-marking and hard tackling. He added insult to injury by famously quipping after the game, “Football is not for ballerinas”), or witnessed Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini straddling the field is bound to agree with Foot’s contention. Nevertheless, Foot’s impassioned arguments in favour of the brilliance of the Italian defensive style only partially address the criticism levelled against the Italian game. He does not quite succeed in arguing away the crux of the critics’ reason behind labelling the Italian game as often lifeless and uninspiring – the paucity of goals that routinely characterize it. A more sophisticated and seasoned estimation of the game may not treat supply of goals in abundance as the absolute benchmark, but the lowest common denominator that provides the game with its raison d'être may contest that perspective. And one glaring statistic appears to bear out the critics’ position: the all-time top scorer for Italy in international games is Gigi Riva, and his tally of 35 goals from 42 games compares disastrously against that of the leading scorers of other major, and even some minor, footballing nations. To cite just two examples: Gerd Mueller of West Germany has scored 68 goals in 62 games; Ferenc Puskas has netted 84 goals for Hungary from 85 appearances.

The starry-eyed way in which John Foot predominantly views Italian football does not lead him to gloss over its darker side. In fact, the book is also peppered with accounts of numerous scandals and misdemeanours, some of which have had devastating impact on the integrity of the game itself. Foot often laments how the very popularity and high stakes the game is associated with in Italy have often led it down the murky and dingy lanes of match-fixing and corruption. He draws special attention to the Moggipoli scandal that came to light immediately before the 2006 World Cup that Italy, incidentally, went on to win. The infamous affair, in which Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and others were implicated for conspiring with referees in order to win favourable decision for their teams, took much of the shine off Italy’s thoroughly deserved World Cup victory and led to Juventus being relegated from the top flight of Italian football for the 2006-07 season. According to Foot, what was most depressing about the scandal was that it was so typical of the scandal-ridden world of Italian football. In fact, Moggippoli was only the latest in a string of infamies that has come to symbolize the corroded Italian football apparatus. Scintillating and beautiful the game itself may remain, the passion of the fans is still undiminished, but those who have been assigned the responsibility of running the game have often let it down with their greed and hubris. Though almost overpowered by disenchantment and dismay at the state of affairs, Foot winds down with a decision to keep his faith in Italian football. He is too much in awe of the finer aspects of the Italian game to entirely give up on it. He is convinced that the “beautiful game” will ultimately triumph:

“Despite everything, millions of fans kept their faith. Calcio was in deep trouble, but it still had the ability to anger and move people, to make them laugh, to unite and divide, to inspire like no other game”.

 

On by-elections and talking heads

The announcement of the results of by-elections held in three assembly constituencies in Kerala – Alappuzha, Ernakulam and Kannur – was predictably followed by the airwaves being filled with endless repartee between the talking heads of Kerala’s two predominant political outfits. Political chutzpah and punditry were on full display on all networks. TV audience was treated to the sight of commentators after commentators analyzing and scrutinising the verdict to the point of exhaustion. That, even after a harrowing campaign in which allegations of foul play flew thick and fast and barrages of accusations verging on paranoia abounded, politicians could still muster sufficient vigor to offer highly charged analytical acumen, confounded the polity to no end. People of Kerala can rest assured that, at least when it comes talking the talk, their politicians are a reliable breed. Never mind that most of the rhetoric amounted to nothing more than exercises in verbal one-upmanship and would not stand up to scrutiny or common sense.

The UDF stalwarts interpreted the setback suffered by the LDF as yet another illustration of the organization’s withering electoral fortunes, a trend set in motion with the drubbing it received at the parliamentary polls earlier this year. However, the LDF partisans made sure that reduced majorities of the victors were not lost sight of, and they laid emphatic stress on it as a testament to the Left’s resurgence. While M.M. Hassan, his grated voice increasingly resembling that of a hippo with a bad throat ache, donned the role of the chief UDF spokesperson, LDF fielded an array of experts to make the art of scurrying for cover look respectable. Barbs and insults were traded with élan, and both parties ensured that mimicry artists would not run out of material at least until the next election cycle. Hassan Sahib kept reminding those who voted for the Congress how they had contributed to an epoch-making event and graciously offered his LDF colleagues a crash course in how to avoid shrinking into complete irrelevance in Kerala’s political landscape. M. V. Govindan Master and Prakashan Master of CPI (M) started their rebuttals sensibly enough, but inevitably resorted to what they do best even at the best of times, i.e., sounding shrill and self-righteous.

Veliyam Bharghavan once again demonstrated that his descent into senility has reached a point of no-return, as he mumbled his way through press conferences and interviews (but did not come close enough to topping that gem he uttered at the height CPI-CPM feud regarding the Ponnani Lok Sabha seat – the one about CPI winning most of the seats in the elections that followed the split of 1964, an observation that V.S. Achuthanandan took strong exception to). Rajmohan Unnithan reveled in his characteristic grandstanding and once again offered clues as to why Malayalees were largely spared the impact of Navajot Singh Sidhu’s protracted absence from the national scene. He also earned the immense gratitude of Malayalees for volunteering to fulfill every society’s need to periodically exorcise its lingering, atavistic elements of nuttiness. Bhasurendra Babu threw in everything from economic determinism to neo-Marxism but still managed to sound totally incomprehensible, and stood as a shining embodiment of everything the Left should be keeping at bay if it holds any desire to connect with the rising generation of voters.

Also awaited with bated breaths was K.E.N Kunhahammad offering some kind of insight along the lines of how the vulgarity displayed by the electorate in snubbing the LDF provided a rich cultural milieu for the Party to tap into and capitalize on in the future (or some other absurdity of similar kind). Alas, that never came. Well, one should be thankful for small mercies

Vladimir Mayakovsky: The 'raging bull' and the 'whipped dog'

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s literary genius was not always confined to Agitprop poster propaganda and homages to the ideals of the Revolution. It occasionally trod tortuous and tormented personal trails as well, when he let slip the revolutionary fervor and offered a glimpse into the vexed abyss of his self – manifested morbidly yet movingly in this unfinished poem penned on the day he took his own life:

Past one o’clock. You're probably in bed.
The Milky Way is like Oka of silver
No need for me to rush. I have no reasons left
to stir you with the lightnings of my cable ferver.
And so they say, the incident dissolved.
The Love Boat smashed up on the dreary routine.
We’re even. There’s no use in keeping the score
of mutual hurts, affliction and spleen.
Look here, the world exudes an eerie calm.
The sky bequeathed to us its constellations.
In periods like this I’d like to be the one
with ages, history and the creation.

Unlike most writers who have sworn allegiance to a political ideology or movement, Mayakovsky’s artistic vision, in its heyday, seldom betrayed any perceptible tussle between irreconcilable impulses. The image of conflicting loyalties engaged in ceaseless battle to gain ascendancy was never a hallmark of his poetic vision. The intriguing picture of the artistic conscience torn apart by the act of subordinating his art to political objectives did not fit Mayakovsky. Ardent revolutionary was in harmony with the thwarted lover, at times overlapping but mostly inhabiting separate spheres. Raw exhortations to the proletariat coexisted effortlessly with the avant-garde finesse of futurism. Official recognition and public adulation followed, and the infinite variety and experimental verve were feted by the establishment as long as the Trotskyite axiom of Party not commanding the “domain of art” held sway. But the onset of high Stalinism, with its intolerance towards any real or perceived deviation from the dogma of socialist realism, rang the death knell for Soviet avant-garde art.

The shift in the milieu and its dreadful aftermath did not set Mayakovosky on any course of realignment vis-à-vis how his poetry would relate to the Revolution. There is scant evidence of any expressed desire to renege on his political ideals either. His poetic destiny, or at the very least its political manifestation, would continue to be linked inextricably to the sentiment he had expressed long ago, as a budding poet striving to reaffirm his commitment in the frenzy of the Revolution:

“To accept or not to accept? There was no question for me….My Revolution"
(I Myself)

However, the Stalinist assault on the ‘decadent’ formalist tendencies in Mayakovsky’s work did make a dent in his exalted status as the leading exponent of the Soviet art. The sense of disillusionment that beset him in his later life left its scars on him. The constant scrutiny and hounding by Stalinist apparatchiks took its toll on his creativity, and may have contributed to his decision to end his own life. In a gripping article in The Haaretz newspaper, Dalia karpel strikes at the heart of the troubled poet’s unresolved, and ultimately fatal, predicament: “Mayakovsky, the ‘raging bull of Russian poetry …..is also the ‘whipped dog’, in pain and tormented…”

On laissez-faire and charlatans

The Economist's review of two recently published works on Ayn Rand (Ayn rand and the World She Made, Anne Heller, Nan A. Talese; Goddess of the Market: Ayn rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns, OUP) displays a sitting-on-the-fence approach quite uncharacteristic of a publication proud of its 'advocacy journalism'. This aberration is puzzling in more ways than one. Given the subject matter of the review is one of last century's preeminent champions of laissez faire capitalism, a cause zealously promoted by the magazine, one would normally expect a glowing piece of panegyric. But, as even the readers most resistant to what 'The Observer' viewed as the publication's refusal to see "any political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation" would concede, it always backs up its pronouncements with considerable gravitas and rigorous analysis. We can pooh-pooh the stodgy arguments as pretentious, wring our hands over the unwavering allegiance to its version of 'economic liberty', but dare we dismiss them as loosely argued or inadequately thought-through. Also legendary is its intolerance towards intellectual quackery of any hue. So, one would also expect it to steer clear of imparting legitimacy to tall claims made on behalf of a low-brow pretender to the 'hallowed legacy' of Adam Smith, whose 'cult status' has been rightly diagnosed by Johann Hari to be the result of "drilling into the basest human instincts" (that Alan Greenspan and Jimmy wales feature among Rand's so-called acolytes is a conundrum I am at loss to delineate, and a sad commentary on a section of American intelligentsia's occasional baffling failure to distinguish between genuine scholarship and charlatanism). One would hope it to expose the intellectual impostor lurking behind the pseudo-profound economic philosopher. But, sadly the review leaves these expectations in tatters and one feels horribly let down.

The vacillation is discernible at the outset itself, when the reviewer marvels at Rand's abiding popular appeal even as the short shrift that she has received from the intellectual establishment, even from those of the 'right' side of the political divide, is touched upon. That her works appeal to a huge chunk of 'Middle America' despite the virulent ways in which critics and political theorists flayed her "cardboard characters and tabloid style" strikes the reviewer as a phenomenal enigma that it is constantly invoked as if it was the 'riddle of the century' (Of course, the mediocrity/popularity equation is a no-brainer for reasons too obvious to be enumerated). However, the review offers one refreshing insight as it examines how America's alleged shift to the left, embodied by Barack Obama's elevation to presidency last year, has given Rand's ideas a new lease of life and reinstated her "at the heart of the political debate".

"Conservative protesters carry posters asking 'who is John Galt?', referring to one of Rand's heroes. Conservative polemicists suggest that Mr. Obama, by stepping in to rescue the banks and industrial behemoths such as General Motors, is ushering in the collective dystopia that Rand gave warning against. Sales of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" have surged."

Interestingly, Jennifer Burns' hypothesis on Rand's influence on the American right is an idea that received one of the above-mentioned short shrifts in a well-received book co-authored by none other than the present editor-in-chief of The Economist, John Micklethwait. In that insightful study of the American right, titled "The Right Nation", Micklethwait and fellow Economist correspondent Adrian woolridge dwell on the fringe right-wing movements that held brief sway over the public imagination during the 'red scare', and thrived on paranoia and conspiracy-theories. The major examples they cite - The John Birch Society and, wait for it, Ayn rand and her disciples.

After dithering its way through attempts to resolve the central dilemma of whether to offer Rand a paean as the herald of supply-side economics or to subscribe to the overwhelmingly damning mainstream critical view, the review concludes by throwing in a face-saving reflection on how Rand's ideas are gaining currency in free market's fledgling but fertile new breeding grounds, India and China in particular.

"Her insight in 'Atlas shrugged'–that society cannot thrive unless it is willing to give freedom to its entrepreneurs and innovators–has proved to be prescient. ...John Galt is back in business in China and India"

What is conspicuous by its absence in an otherwise laborious process to throw light on Rand's ideology is the telling fact that her vigor in championing the virtue of the individual, entrepreneurial creed over the collectivist nightmare did not extend to other pressing concerns of the era that coincided with the time of her active intellectual involvement, such as civil rights for blacks, women's rights, etc. In this sense at least she is a true forerunner of the free market miracle workers who hold the magic wand of "the invisible hand" and proclaims it to be the ultimate panacea. Of course, nobody said it was gonna be easy. For the path to paradise, at least for the underlings, is fraught with bumps and ditches ...Subprime mortgage, SEZs...