Close your eyes. Go on, trust me.
Close your eyes and think of the happiest you’ve been watching football this year. Now open them. Are you smiling? Do you have an image, still transplanted before your eyes of players, of fans; of magic?
When I close my eyes and I see rain. I see screaming fans. I see Taranto fans struggling to smile, to accept a result – there will be no signing in this rain. Unless of course, you were ‘Vercellese’ – as I was that day.
If you’ve been cosying up inbedwithMaradona since last August, you may have stumbled across a
piece
I wrote, introducing the idea of following an Italian football club, Pro Vercelli, to try and improve my Italian language skills. I ran a series of teams through ever changing criteria, before settling on what some might refer to as a sleeping giant. Sleeping? How about, dead – for that is what they were. Pro Vercelli are club that, through bankruptcy, were forced to hand over their history and heritage to another side that simply shared the same postcode. What once was is now no longer. It has been 90 years since they won their last Scudetto ...
