Free The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones

standing on the terraces next to Ciccio who, like most Juventus supporters, is from the south, about a thousand miles from Turin. He’s very short, coming up to chest height, but makes up for it with his aggressive defence of anyone in a Juventus shirt. We are drinking slugs of the coffee liqueur sold underneath the stands, enjoying the partisan banter of the terraces. All around us fans are lighting up large spliffs, doubtless another reason for the rampant paranoia surrounding Italian football. It’s an incredible scene: smoke mixing with coloured flares, flags flapping between banners, the weak winter sunshine of a Parma January. A lot of southerners from Sicily and Puglia are in bomber jackets supporting the team from Turin. Most of them, students from Parma university, have bought tickets for the terrace for home fans and so mingle with the sedate, muted Parma crowd who are dressed as if they were going to the opera.
    ‘Listen, it’s all a fix,’ I say to Ciccio before kick-off, repeating what I’ve heard for months on television debates about football-fixing; ‘everyone knows that the referee will have been given a script by Juventus …’
    ‘Why do you have to show your lack of intelligence speaking like that?’ says Ciccio, smiling. He will never admit it, but he knows that the Old Lady of Italian football simply has a greater chance of winning than Parma, and not simply because of who’s on the pitch. Juventus seems quite literally to have all the luck,which is related to the immense power it has off the pitch. ‘Being cynical’ in British football means being able to decide a game with a well-taken goal against the odds. In Italy, being ‘cynical’ in football implies having a ‘society’ (a club structure) that brings pressure to bear on everyone involved in the sport. The more one watches football in Italy, the more one suspects that the real game is not on the grass, but in the boardrooms, corridors and presidential suites. The more powerful the president (Berlusconi, Agnelli etc), the more chance you have of winning.
    Juventus are duly gifted a penalty (the Parma defender is sent off). Ciccio wants no talk of a stitch-up. Alessandro Del Piero steps up and slots home the penalty. ‘You see, Zio Tobia, you seem like a sore and stupid loser when you talk like that!’ He’s laughing, jumping up and down celebrating the goal as he slaps me on the back.
    ‘Better a sore loser than a crooked winner.’
    ‘You really are so naïve. You’re simply up against a better team.’
    ‘Right, starting with Agnelli,’ says an old Parmigiano in front of us, turning round to scrutinise the southerner. He’s banging his blue and yellow cushion on his knees in despair.
    The strange thing, and it might just be an impression, is that the longer the game goes on, the more desperate the referee appears to seal the result. Having already awarded a penalty, the referee then sent off another Parma player, reducing the yellow-blues to nine men. The second player to be sent off, Dino Baggio, makes his feelings perfectly clear as a red card is raised above his head: he rubs his fingers and thumbs together, an obvious enough sign that he thinks the referee had been bought (a gesture for which he would subsequently serve a lengthy suspension). The accumulation of injustices (not just sendings-off but bizarre offsides, non-existent corners) is so relentless that it’s hard not to detect a conspiracy, especially where Juventus is concerned. On this occasion, though, Parma somehow pull a result out of the bag. The last minute of the game: a through ball to Hernan Crespo, who feints and then fires with his famous left foot. The stadium goes berserk, the Parma coach, in his cashmere overcoat,rushes onto the pitch and throws himself on top of the now prostrate Crespo. Delirium: nine men against eleven, and Parma manage to pull off a draw. ‘Bet that wasn’t in the script,’ I whisper to Ciccio, who by now is on the verge