`I got to warn the people of this Castel whatever-dever. If you value your women, keep 'em inside. 'Cause if they be goodlooking, I'm gonna f . .k 'em. And I don't care who they are. . . To score my goals, I need my pussy. . . So get ready, ladies, get ready. Your magic moment and your magic man have arrived. Robert Raku Ponnick will rake you over the coals and entertain you like you never been entertained before. And I mean on and off the pitch."
The above is taken from American writer Joe McGinniss's book, The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro, and is an extract from a press conference given by Nigerian footballer Robert Ponnick on the autumn day in 1996 when he was officially presented as the latest purchase by the small Italian Division 2 side, Castel Di Sangro. You will probably agree that Mr Ponnick strikes a racy, colloquial tone far removed from the average Match of the Day interview style of his anglophonic colleagues. Following a hilarious friendly match next day, when Robert Raku Ponnick actually managed to both fight with his new team mates and show the red card to the referee, it turned out that he had been a hoax all along. Ponnick is no footballer but rather a member of the Guastafeste Professional Acting Troupe. His "transfer" to Castel Di Sangro had been a joke in dubious taste, dreamed up by the overactive mind of Castel Di Sangro's President, Gabriele Gravina.
For Joe McGinnis, the "Ponnick" affair was just the most harmless and least serious of the disappointments he experienced during a season spent with Castel Di Sangro, a small town in Abruzzo, central Italy, which stunned the Italian football world by winning promotion to Division 2 for the 1996-97 season. McGinniss travelled to the Abruzzo, full of hope and enthusiasm, determined to tell the tale of the Castel Di Sangro ["]miracolo["].
For those who, like your correspondent, have spent the last 15 years chronicling the affairs of Italy's elite soccer league, Serie A, the Castel Di Sangro story was a curious sideline, potentially intriguing but of only shortterm interest. For Joe McGinniss, however, his year with Castel Di Sangro was a learning experience and one in which he made the not exactly earthshaking discovery that the world of professional soccer more or less exactly mirrors the society in which it flourishes.
In other words, while the majority of people Joe met on Planet Soccer were decent, courteous and honest, he also came across cheats, crooks, swindlers, con-men and more besides, both on and off the pitch. To all but wide-eyed, madly enthusiastic Joe, such a discovery would be hardly new. The average Italian 15-year-old could have told him as much.
The strength and value of this elegantly and wittily-written book, however, is that it stops us, at least momentarily, in our cynical tracks. Our Joe is a self-confessed late convert to the joys of football, someone who "simply woke one morning in late spring of 1994 suddenly overwhelmed by enthusiasm that the United States that summer would host the World Cup." With all the fervour of the recently converted, Joe claims that when Italian ace Roberto Baggio missed the vital penalty in the 1994 World Cup Final shoot-out with Brazil, he was so struck by the wrenching and poignant sight of the dejected Baggio that "for days afterward, I could scarcely eat or speak." Three months earlier, Joe could not have distinguished a free kick from a linesman. Now, he became so passionately involved in the game he was threatening to go on hunger-strike after Italy and Baggio's traumatic defeat. Whatever his failings, no-one could ever fault Joe for lack of enthusiasm.
Joe brings that enthusiasm with him to the Abruzzo only to gradually discover some of the game's grimmer realities. First, he realises that the team is controlled by a behind-the-scenes "padrone" whose suspect wealth comes from the construction business in Naples. Second, he comes to understand that the padrone and the team president both work off their own agenda, which often have little to do with the overall good of the team or its players. Then, too, comes the not surprising revelation that the team coach is a stubborn, sergeant-major-type "bulldozer", whose imaginative faculties do not stretch to innovative tactics but rather concentrate on finding ever more effective ways of humiliating his players. He learns also that many of the younger players devote time and attention to a vigorous pursuit of sex, drugs and nicotine. He finds that some soccer wives find the whole enclosed medieval world of soccer too difficult to handle and break down or go home to their parents. He discovers that transfer deals are shamefully manipulated in the interests of everyone except the player involved.
Joe, furthermore, experiences anger and righteous indignation when he discovers that Castel Di Sangro's last match of the season is fixed (Castel Di Sangro had already avoided Serie B relegation while their opponents, Bari, badly needed the points to win promotion to Serie A). Surprise, surprise, Joe. JOE is further stunned when a Castel Di Sangro player and his wife are arrested on charges related to smuggling $25 million dollars worth of cocaine into Italy. There is the unsavoury but unsubstantiated suspicion that others connected to the club may have been involved in the drugs-trafficking. As the plot thickens, Joe's enthusiasm wanes. By the end of his stay in Castel Di Sangro, he is being threatened by team President Gravina who is clearly worried that Joe intends to tell the full story, warts and all. It is to his credit that he seems to have ignored the threats, telling a story that is sure to cause waves in Italian soccer.
It is also to his credit that this book encapsulates something of the football fan's semi-lunatic mind, a condition well described by Uruguyan novelist Edoardo Galeano in a quote in this book where he speaks of the end of a soccer match as the moment when the "melancholy I who had been we returns to his solitude". Given the sort of welcome they might be now be preparing for him in Castel Di Sangro, Joe McGinniss would do well to stick to his solitude.