A Tuscan View - from Umbria

La vecchia donna

With the football season just kicking off here, and without any English football to watch, I have decided that it's time to get myself an Italian team to support. Also, I've been told on more than one occasion that a man in Italy isn't fully dressed without the 'pink paper' under his arm and, at 1 euro, it represents a very affordable fashion statement.

Where I spent my first few years, in Malta (a tiny island 50 miles south of Sicily) everyone supported Juventus - I'm not sure why. Perhaps there was a certain magic or mystique or simply a natural appeal to one of the oldest clubs in Italy, set up by a bunch of English, Italian and Swiss lads who used the latin word for 'youth' to name their team and played in their, now legendary, black and white vertical stripes. I remember my brother and I collecting the stickers for our Panini football albums, always happiest when unpeeling a Juventus player. Their first Championship winning team in 1905 was, apparently, made up of a mixture of painters, poets and factory workers - wow, that's my kind of team!

However, living in Italy (but not in Turin where Juventus are based) it won't be easy to become one of the 'juventini' as all over the rest of Italy there exist a vast majority of 'anti-juventini'  who have no time at all for 'la Vecchia Donna' (the old lady) of Italian football.

So, after a lot of soul-searching, I have decided to turn instead to my 'local' team, Siena, who have come good in the last few years and play in the top division. The advantage is that they are a smallish team who play in a smallish stadium near the city, less than an hour from here, and so I might be able to get a ticket to a game.

The other advantage is that they also play in black and white vertical stripes, so I can buy the shirt, wear it and yet continue to secretly still support Juventus, on the inside. You see, there is a saying in football which goes something like, '...you can change your job, your car, your name, your religion, your partner, even your sex, but you can't change your football team...'

The stupidest thing I did today;
Probably deciding to get involved in the murky world of Italian football - great players, financial corruption, violent fans, drugs, the Mafia, the World Cup. It's an opera played out every weekend and the obsession of every Italian.

Sopranome

27th May 2008
 
 Football is a funny old game and, at my level it is full of funny old players. So it is with my team mates at San Fatucchio. They are a typical mix of men from various walks of life and the game is  all the better for that; some with a love of the game because of their skills, some with a love of the game despite their skills, some who feign injury week after week, some who don’t mind being so much better than everyone else. Some who shoot rather than pass, some who spend most of the game rearranging their hair and jewellery.
There is always argument and plenty of shouting, always a pizza afterwards and plenty of laughing.


But no-one had prepared me for the arrival of Jesus.

His real name is Simone. He has long hair and a beard which I assumed was the reason for his ‘sopranome’, but the other players also wanted to impress on me that he also plays as well as Jesus.

(Italians seem to enjoy the assumption that, had he lived in Italy, Jesus would have played football like Totti.)

Simone  holds the ball, never loses it, always has time to look, never speaks, is calm, assured and a pleasure to play with, unless of course he’s not on your team.

That was when I made my big mistake. I have one talent in football, and only one. It’s not much to speak of but it tends to upset the opposition and so I use it whenever possible. The ‘nutmeg’ or, as Italians call it, the ‘tunnel’. You simply pass the ball between the opposition players legs and he is left rooted to the ground, humiliated and  unable to turn and chase you.

At school you use to have to shout out ‘NUTS!’ or ‘MEGS!’ just before you did it, to add to the humiliation.

So, to cut a long story short, I managed to nutmeg Jesus, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

But then, you see, there is an unwritten law in football that you won’t find in the Rule book. If you can nutmeg the person who nutmegged you, then you, by definition ‘un-nutmeg’ yourself and can stand proud once more. That was all Jesus wanted to do. He had the skill, and the motivation to spend the next hour and a half humiliating me, nutmegging me, not once but 5 times.

He didn’t need to score, although he did, the game was all about revenge.

The stupidest thing I did today;

See below


Can’t really believe I was suckered into this one. Their names are ‘Maybe-Melven’ and ‘Mitzy-Mittens’.
Yes, two kittens who have leapt off their chocolate box and into the arms of our speechless children.
But, perhaps, not as speechless as the vet will be when I try to explain those names...

A hollow victory on Armistice Day

11th November 2007

There are games in football where there is only one possible outcome; (save for the occasional freak giant-killing) where one team is so much stronger, cleverer and well resourced and the other is small, weak and craves only a little peanut butter or cheese. Such was the case with me and the mice.

Problem is that, whenever I watch a game like that, I instinctively want the little guy to win, despite the odds. Such is the case with me and the mice.

The final score seems to be 7-0 to me and yet the victory is a little hollow.

Man of the match.

So, to cheer myself I have decided to photograph the sky, as in the Autumn the skies seem to get much more interesting. I normally hate photographs of skies, clouds and sunsets etc. and, as one of my more cynical friends was quick to remind me, “So what? The sun sets all over the world, we’ve all seen a sunset”

True, but the difference for me is that, in my first few months here, it’s one of the things I have noticed most, being used to seeing the sky just directly overhead in an overheated city. So I took two yesterday and a couple the day begore, and here they are.

The stupidest thing I did today;
Well, it seems a little quiet in the house these days – no more scratching noises – and I’m sure they did a good job with those little bits of food that fell behind the oven –now I’ll have to do that bit of cleaning myself. And, one day, when they work out how to get the address of this blog, my children will call me to their bedroom for a quiet word...

The beautiful game

February 26th 2007

Went for my first 'kick about' yesterday evening, with a bunch of really friendly guys from Citta della Pieve. Or at least I thought it would be a kick about, as that's what I'm used to. This was training. Proper training, with one guy telling the rest of us what to do; jumping over bars, stretching, sprinting, stretching, shooting practice, stretching, and on and on for a good half hour before we even got to kick a ball. I was very keen to make a good impression, but fell rather short of my expectations. I am old enough to have fathered many of the other players, so I have to keep that in mind, and I must keep at it to help improve my Italian. The problem is that the 'banter' is so fast and so furious that I understand less than one word out of every twenty, so I just grin a lot and try to pass the ball carefully. I now play football with the world champions - that's enough for now.

New pitch - new rules

The stupidest thing I did yesterday;
Went to football with a ball, but without the essentials; plastic slippers, hooded dressing gown, hair drier and dictionary