BRIAN GLANVILLE

writes for worldsoccer.com each week

THE ITALIAN JOB

16/05/06

WHY, when the filth in Italian football continues to hit the fan, do I find myself thinking of Franco Zeffirelli; internationally famous director of opera, theatre and cinema?

Largely because while he will be exulting in the belated downfall of hated Juventus, he will be concerned about the fate of his beloved Fiorentina, who have also been dragged into the scandal. It will certainly see the end, and ought surely to see the punishment, of the ineffable Luciano Moggi, long known somewhat euphemistically as “The Nice Pinocchio of Italian Football.” The publication of these damning and appalling police phone taps show that there is nothing remotely nice about him.

How apt that this ex-station master, who bribed and browbeat his way through Italian football, threatened referees and officials, even once locked an unfortunate referee in his dressing room after Juventus had lost a match to Reggiana, should have been the pupil of the late, hardly lamented Italo Allodi, the executive who first at Inter (who ironically enough don’t seem to be impugned and involved) sent the refugee Hungarian referee Deso Solti round Europe bribing or attempting to bribe referees. Most of them played ball. Two didn’t.

In 1973, the honest telephone engineer from Lisbon, Francisco Marques Lobo, refused a bribe from Solti to bend the return European Cup semi final against Derby County at the Old Baseball ground. He blew the whistle on it, you might say, but a fiasco of a UEFA sub committee inquiry in a Zurich hotel didn’t even confront the two principals involved and Juve slithered off the hook.

Around a year later, we at the Sunday Times got a “cough” about it and investigated. My friend and colleague Keith Botsford flew to Lisbon to interview Lobo who confirmed the whole story. We ran it in the paper, to howls of outraged protest in the Italian press. Slimy Gianni Brera, allegedly the conscience of Italian football, who, I had expected, would be outraged by it all, did nothing, other than spitefully insult me in a weekly paper which he thought and hoped I would never see. I did and I wrote to him, appalled that in Munich during the 1974 World Cup he had smiled and shaken hands with me: “Gianni, you are a whore!” Later, he was killed in a motor accident.

My paper sent me to Turin to talk to the then president of Juve, Giampiero Boniperti, former captain and star of Italian soccer. He listened in silence to what I told him then commented only: “Brian, if there are these madmen going around!”

Needless to say, palsied UEFA did nothing about the scandal. My own view is that the power of the late Gianni Agnelli, then the club ‘s patron, and boss of Fiat, was too much for UEFA to defy.

Botsford and I continued our investigation into what we called The Years Of The Golden Fix. Inter, we established, were a great deal guiltier than Juve. It had long been rumoured that they had fixed the referees of two successive second leg semi finals at San Siro; versus Borussia Dortmund in 1964, Liverpool in 1965. But we had heard that in 1966, when Real Madrid were the opposition, a brave Hungarian referee Gyorgy Vadas had defied Inter and refereed impeccably.

Alas, unlike Lobo, he had never gone public with the story. Nor when we traced him down at Radio Budapest would he talk to us; or eventually agree to come to London to do so. Only when an enterprising young Hungarian journalist called Peter Borenich persuaded him to talk did the full rancid tale emerge. Vadas and his linesmen had been taken up by Solti to see Inter’s millionaire president Angelo Moratti and offered the kingdoms of this earth. They had sturdily refused all bribes, Real did not lose; Vadas, like Lob, never got another international game.

It was many years after the Lobo-Solti scandal broke that Zeffirelli asked me for my help. He was being sued by Juventus for accusing them of bribing referees, at the expense of Fiorentina. Unfortunately, he had no proof, had simply gone by television clips which may have seen wrong refereeing decisions being made, but proved nothing venal. Incidentally, Botsford and I never got a single writ; though Allodi volleyed and thundered.

To add insult to injury, Franco, whom I visited soon after in Puglia on the set of his film of the opera Otello, had called Boniperti “a Mafioso who chews monkey nuts.” He was eventually fined £20,000 for libel.

Allodi carried on. He was even, ludicrously, made general manager of the Italy team which contested the 1974 World Cup in Germany, then even more disputably, not to say despicably, made chief of the Italian coaching centre in Florence.

It was there that he accrued enough bits and pieces of information to create a bizarre scenario. Asked in an interview how he felt about my continuing to pursue him, he replied that this distressed him, since years ago, when I was ill in Florence, he had sent me money so that I could stay in Italy.

That was in 1954 and I didn’t stay in Italy. I was obliged to go back to London overnight for operations on my back. Nor did I ever meet Allodi till May 1973, when I found myself sitting next to him while he gambled at the Hotel Yugoslavia in Belgrade, before Juventus played Ajax in the European Cup Final. Fully four years later, in the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, hours before the European Final between Borussia Monchengladbach and Liverpool, Allodi strode across the vestibule, seized my hand before I could withdraw it, and said, “We’ve never met, but my name is Italo Allodi and I want to talk to you.” It never happened.

When confronted with my denial that he ever sent me money, his reply was that perhaps I had forgotten my friend the Tuscan soccer coach, Mauro Franceschini. Well, it was through him that he and others had sent me money. Mauro alas was in no position to deny it; he had disappeared mysteriously years earlier from his car beside the Arno, the rumour being that he had been killed by a group of young Poles at the behest of his Polish wife; now dead herself just before she could inherit his Pisan farm, on the end of the ten year period which followed his tragic disappearance.

Plainly enough Allodi had talked to the friends I had left in Coverciano, and shamelessly concocted his story. Lying came so easily to him. A stroke condemned him to an invalid’s existence for the last twelve years of his life. But he had the perfect pupil and successor in The Nice Pinocchio Luciano Moggi.

Yes, we’re stuck, Heaven help us, with Steve McClaren as the new manager of England.

Was it not said that a camel was a horse drawn by a committee? The one scant consolation, that he could hardly be worse than Graham Taylor – now shouting the odds shamelessly about the importance of coaching when his long ball Watford team poisoned the wells of English football is scant consolation.

Middlesbrough’s pathetic 4-0 collapse in the UEFA Cup Final against Seville was an ominous end to McClaren’s career at Middlesbrough; where according to his captain Gareth Southgate, he simply lost the plot under pressure early this year. What will happen if and when he is under pressure with England? With the inept Brian Barwick in charge, and a sub selection committee composed largely of deadbeats, briefly influenced by David Dein (not even an original member) I suppose we could expect no better. As for Sven Goran Eriksson picking a 17-year-old not even deemed mature enough to play for his club…The defence rests. Why not West Ham’s Dean Ashton?

I’m more convinced than ever that the clumsy Premiership should have seen to it that West Ham’s game against ailing Spurs, who may or may not have been subject to one of those Malaysian plots, was postponed.

Just to tell Spurs they could do so without guaranteeing freedom from draconian punishment was not remotely enough. Players’ lives could even have been put at risk.

Of course Glenn Roeder should manager Newcastle. Is Alex (objecting) Ferguson soccer’s Ruth Kelly?

A new revised edition of Brian Glanville's definitive World Cup book, The Story of the World Cup, has just been published and is available from all good bookshops.

Subscribe to World Soccer - The essential football magazine