In an extract from his new book, Forza Italia, Irish Times Rome correspondent Paddy Agnew reflects on how football reporting in Italy, unlike England, sticks with onfield matters

For better or for worse, the tabloid school of journalism has largely bypassed Italian football reporting. Gazzetta Dello Sport in Milan, Corriere Dello Sport in Rome and Tutto Sport in Turin are broadsheet sports dailies, usually featuring up to 30 pages and 70 per cent football. Gazzetta Dello Sport's circulation stands at around 450,000 to 500,000, making it one of the most popular dailies in Italy.

These papers offer match reports, interviews, profiles and general coverage of just about every aspect of Italian and, to a lesser extent, European and world football.

With regard to Serie A, every player's performance the previous weekend is not only analysed, but is also given a pagella or mark in which the impossible score for a performance of total perfection would be 10. The reporting, however, remains very much football-oriented. A player will be endlessly questioned as to why, just at that moment, he opted to hit a square pass to his left when there was a completely unmarked team-mate on his right. He will not be asked (or certainly not formally and in print) if he was the player seen entering a certain local nightclub at three in the morning, in the company of two glamorous ladies of the night.

In my early years in Italy, there was an incident which emphatically underlined the radically different modus operandi of the Italian and British sports media. When he first arrived at AC Milan, Dutch footballer Ruud Gullit struck up a relationship with a colleague of mine, Licia Granello, who in those days covered AC Milan for Rome-based daily La Repubblica. Like a lot of other newly-arrived players in Italian football, Gullit was a bit lost in a strange new environment and, at first, he spoke no Italian.

Licia was good-looking, smart and spoke English, making her one of the few reporters with whom Gullit could communicate. To cut a long story short, the pair had an affair, which was soon well known to some in the football media. Yet, remarkably, no TV channel, radio or newspaper discussed the issue, which only became public after the affair had ended. In a British context - if a female reporter from the Daily Mirror were to have an affair with David Beckham, for example - this silence would be hard to imagine.

In Italy, so long as a player is "doing the business" on the pitch, his private life remains his own affair. Sometimes, as in the case of Maradona at Napoli, too much leeway is extended. The omertà that reigned over Maradona's extra-mural activities in Naples, in the end, probably did him no good. Yet he was, in every sense, an extreme case in a very special context.

When I first arrived in Italy, I was forcibly struck by two aspects of the football industry. Not only did the media eschew the tabloid penchant for reporting players' private lives, but football reporting was deadly, upmarketedly serious, enjoying a cross-class, cross-party, cross-gender following. In the Ireland and Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, football was a hugely popular sport but not many perceived it as "sexy", "cool" or "fashionable". It still had a strongly working class, anti-intellectual, down-to-earth aspect about it.

In the mid-1980s, it was the quality more than the quantity of football reporting that surprised me. I had expected wall-to-wall TV and radio coverage as well as the huge volume of words turned out by the sports dailies. What I had not expected was the level of detailed, technical analysis carried especially by the print press.

In those days, the guru of football writers was the late Gianni Brera. His observations and his elegantly written columns were considered compulsory reading for everyone, from heart surgeon to ordinary football fan. His words seemed to command more respect than those of cabinet ministers or university professors.

Even today, I find it hard to believe there is a better football daily in the world than Gazzetta Dello Sport. Certainly, Paris-based L'Equipe is a broader-based sports paper and one with an admirable campaigning bent when it comes to the issue of doping in sport, yet it is not as consistently insightful or stimulating with regard to football. Likewise, there are few more original, literate or engaging football writers anywhere than my colleague Gianni Mura of La Repubblica. I should also add that throughout 20 years of football reporting in Italy, my Italian colleagues, from a whole variety of papers, have been unfailingly helpful.

These days I get the impression that perceptions of football have changed greatly in the Anglo-Saxon world. During the Mantova Festival of Literature recently, I found myself sitting in a little square not far from the town's celebrated Palazzo Ducale in the company of family friend, the novelist Colm Tóibín, and two of his colleagues, novelist Roddy Doyle and poet Carl Phillips.

Over a late-night drink, much of the chat was about football. Carl was especially curious to know how the former Arsenal player Patrick Vieira was getting on at Juventus. Likewise, he told a fascinating story of a recent visit to Ghana where he had sat in a bar along with young Ghanaians watching the Premiership on TV, noting how they knew more about all the Premiership stars than about their own local teams.

Doyle, for his part, was able to give me a sharp and detailed account of Ireland's recent 1-0 World Cup defeat in Dublin by France. It struck me forcibly that in the post-Nick Hornby, sexy-Beckham, millionaire-monied Abramovich era, the Anglo-Saxon football-loving intellectual no longer has to hide his Fever Pitch football interests. In Italy, in contrast, you take it for granted that the intellectual is football-loving in the first place.

Further proof of this theory came from the November 25th edition of Gazzetta Dello Sport which carried a front-page photograph of Daniel Harding, the conductor due to preside over the traditional Sant'Ambrogio, December 7th opening night at La Scala. The point about Harding was he was photographed sitting in La Scala's splendidly refurbished theatre wearing a Manchester United shirt. He is, for better or worse, a Man U fan. Twenty years ago he would have kept that dark secret to himself. Now that the Anglo-Saxon, football-loving intellectual is out of the closet, he is positively flaunting it.

There are still other serious differences between English and Italian views on football. Put simply, while a majority of Italian football commentators have a pretty upbeat view of English football (especially in the age of the Premiership), some of their British counterparts still tend to talk of Italian football in the manner of the late Brian Clough, who infamously commented, 'Fucking, cheating Italians', in the wake of Derby County's European Cup elimination in the 1972-3 season.

For example, the Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the intrinsically defensive nature of Italian football has always amused me, especially now that the wheel has turned full circle with the England national team, under Eriksson, and leading English Premiership sides, such as Chelsea and Liverpool, playing a very Italian-style game.

A couple of years ago, English friends and colleagues were telling me there could be nothing more boring than a Champions League final between Juventus and AC Milan. Nowadays, they may have to admit that a clash between Chelsea and Liverpool (to the neutral eye) is even more boring. After watching Liverpool versus Chelsea in the Champions League in the autumn of 2005, former Juventus and Chelsea striker Gianluca Vialli commented in a piece in Gazzetta Dello Sport:

'Once, it was an easy enough business to play against an English team. There were no surprises, the stadium was full, the atmosphere fantastic, the team played a traditional 4-4-2 and the players were tough but fair. Bit by bit, however, the arrival of foreign coaches in English football has changed things, making the English game more varied and less predictable.

"These days, Premiership managers are less involved in buying and hiring players and have more time to concentrate on training, they are more coaches and less managers, concentrating on the tactical and technical aspects of their team's football . . ."

Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benitez are two very shrewd coaches who know that in certain games, what matters above all is not to lose. That way, they transformed a game that once would have been a breathtaking, end-to-end spectacle into a game of chess.

The only thing more boring than Italian catenaccio is English catenaccio, of course.

There are thousands of examples of the unreasoning anti-Italian prejudice that used to dominate the British media, but the one that always amused me was the treatment reserved for AC Milan and Italy striker Filippo Inzaghi.

Although Inzaghi, at his best (before his recent injury problems), had a skyscraper-tall reputation in Italy, many English critics seemed not to rate him. I recall stepping into the lift at the San Siro after Inzaghi had scored a hat-trick in a vital European Championship qualifying 4-0 win over Wales in September 2003 and being amazed to hear English colleague Ian Ridley mutter about the absurdity of a "player like Inzaghi" scoring a hat-trick in such an important game.

I was genuinely surprised, partly because Ian is a thoughtful, observant and talented football writer. Mind you, that surprise was mitigated by the fact that, over the years, I had noticed Inzaghi had been singled out for unfavourable treatment by many British football commentators, a treatment that was officially sanctioned when Netherlands and former Manchester United defender Jaap Stam (ironically now his team-mate at AC Milan) wrote an autobiography in which he pointed an accusatory finger at Inzaghi, suggesting he did not always play by Marquess of Queensberry rules.

But what did such criticism make of his goal-scoring record? After all, wherever he went and at whatever level he played, Inzaghi scored goals - 21 for Italy; 47 in European club competitions; 113 in Serie A (including 24 in a single season for relegation battlers Atalanta; 15 for Piacenza in Serie B; 13 for Leffe in Serie C1).

Even if it was often easy to score goals for Juventus and AC Milan in Serie A, what about his record with Leffe, Piacenza or Atalanta, hardly world-beaters? That track record notwithstanding, English colleagues have often suggested that "SuperPippo" was nothing more than a "poacher" and a "six-yard box merchant", with a marked penchant for taking a dive to boot.

It is, of course, undeniable that Inzaghi is and was one of those opportunist strikers who lurk in and around the six-yard line, consistently playing the offside line so tight he regularly gets caught out. Yet, by the standards of the modern game, he never struck me as any more of an opportunist or a diver than many of his colleagues in the Premiership, Saint Michael Owen, Ruud van Nistelrooy or Wayne Rooney included. Diving is just part of the game, in England too, like it or not.

The point is, of course, that notwithstanding the rampant globalisation of the world game, parochial loyalties hang on in there. Critics and fans still tend to be wary of players they do not see playing regularly. Had Inzaghi moved to Arsenal or Manchester United rather than to AC Milan, then English critics would doubtless have been hailing him as the "outstanding opportunist of the modern game".

In that context, what does one say to the ardent Arsenal fan who, during a phone-in on London's TalkSport radio, asked me indignantly how anyone in his right mind could give the European Player of the Year award to Andriy Shevchenko, ahead of Arsenal's "own" Thierry Henry? I did gently reply that maybe our listener had not seen Shevchenko play.

Mention of Henry, though, is a reminder that parochial prejudices work on a worldwide basis. It reminds me of an occasion, while watching Roma play Arsenal in a Champions League tie at the Olimpico in November 2002, when a Roma stadium steward in the press box came across to ask me who was the black striker playing for Arsenal. I was amazed by the question since, then as now, Henry was one of the best-known players in world football. Indeed, that night he went on to score a memorable hat-trick in an impressive 3-1 win for Arsenal. Like Eriksson getting to know the British tabloid press, if my Roma steward was unaware of Henry before, he certainly knew all about him now.

Extract from Forza Italia, by Paddy Agnew, published by Ebury Press at £10.99.