Yesterday the UEFA trophy came home to Rome in the finale of a competition that had been postponed from last year because of the pandemic.  The scene of the bus carrying the winning team and making its snail’s pace way through the lovely Via del Tritone from President Mattarella’s palace at the Quirinale to the Prime Ministers’ residence at the Palazzo Chigi was lined with joyful, wonderfully well-disciplined citizens remembering to wear face masks and attempting some social distancing.  The RAI commentators remarked on these points.

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This morning I read the freebie newspaper ‘The Metro’ and find that much of its content comes down heavily on racist abuse, hooligan-style behaviour and appallingly poor security at Wembley Stadium where loads of gate-crashers took advantage of the small number of staff on duty. Again the RAI commentators were shocked that a country that loves to distinguish its disciplined queuing techniques against the chaos prevailing in Italy (although thanks to the Pandemic Italians have more than learned to queue – they impose the requirement on everyone else) should have become so disorganised, especially for such an important event.

So there we are once more – back to memories of the shameful era when UEFA banned English football clubs from competing in Europe for five years following the death of thirty-nine Italian and Belgian football fans at Brussels’ Heysel Stadium in a riot caused by English football hooligans at 1985’s UEFA final. At least at Wembley there were no deaths thanks largely to the new stadium’s design.

The England team on the other hand preserved the dignity of the country they were representing – although the discarding of the medals given to them for participating in the finale was so petty and disrespectful! It goes completely against the assertion of the Olympic Games founder Pierre de Coubertin that “the important thing is not to win, it is to take part”.

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I always thought that de Coubertin’s statement together with the phrase ‘good losers’ was especially English. Not anymore it seems.

In theory neither team lost (or said another way, both won) although in practice every match has to have its loser. The final team-playing score, 1 – 1, required a penalty shootout which is certainly not a team effort but, in effect, a different game – rather like playing Russian roulette when a duel remains unresolved.

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One of my FB friends wrote “I never thought I would say this, but God bless the Italians. An English victory would have been insufferable”.

Indeed! Can you imagine how that victory would have charged the Doris ammo of lies and contra-lies: Britain’s 2021 ‘V for Victory’ year of triumph over the pandemic with mass vaccine roll-out (in a country with the highest Covid-19 death rate in Europe), triumph over the EU’s Brussels bureaucrats (with ever more bureaucracy now in the UK), triumph in new trade deals (with a service sector shrunk by more than £110,000,000,000 since Brexit dug its fangs into the British economy at the start of this year).

I am not interested in pronouncing cosmic symbolic patterns but the fact that Italy won in ‘enemy country’ with hostile crowds booing them (even during Italy’s National Anthem), with characteristic London rain aiding their used-to-it opponents (when was the last time I remember it rained on an Italian football pitch?), in a country that has own-goaled itself out of Europe and during the tenure of one of the most xenophobic government regimes the UK has known leads so many of us to consider an element of divine intervention in Italy’s victory. (Though I am sure Pope Francis would disagree…)

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