"ONE, two, three, four, five ...". Half an hour before kick off at last Sunday's, Fiorentina Juventus game the Fiorentina fans were in full swing, counting out the "Hysel" chant. The collective, highly vocal count went all the way to 39 and when that number was shouted out, then the "fans" cheered with delight and applauded.
Perhaps we ought to explain this gruesome ritual. The "39" in question refers to the 39 Juventus fans killed at the Hysel Stadium in Brussels during rioting prior to the 1985 European Champions Cup final against Liverpool. You have guessed it. Fiorentina "fans" do not like their Juventus counterparts much.
Not, mind you, that all the Juventus fans at the Arturo Franchi stadium in Florence on Sunday were angels. At least one small group of them displayed a banner which read, "Hi, Jews a reference to the Jewish religion of the Cecchi Gori family, owners of Fiorentina. Nice.
Nor did Sunday's obscenity limit themselves, to chants and slogans. Sticks and stones flew and truncheons were wielded in fighting before, during and after the game which not only smashed four windows in the Juventus team bus and left 20 policemen and fans injured but also reopened the never closed debate on football hooliganism, Italian style.
The disturbances began early, exactly one hour and 40 minutes before kick off. As the Juventus team bus pulled up alongside the stadium prior to driving down the tunnel ramp to the underground car park, it was hit in a lightning attack by 15 stonethrowing, Fiorentina fans.
Emerging from behind rows of parked cars, the fans smashed the bus windows and then got away before the team's police escort, in front and behind the bus, had time to reach for their truncheons.
Fortunately, no Juventus player was hurt although star playmaker Alessandro Del Piero and goalkeepers Angelo Peruzzi and Michelangelo Rampulla, all in the direct line of "fire", were probably lucky to get off with nothing more problematic than bits of broken glass in their clothes and hair.
Nor did the violence end there. Within 40 minutes, there was small scale guerilla warfare as approximately 1,000 Fiorentina fans without tickets attempted to force their way into the ground and came into direct confrontation with the 1,200 strong police force on security duty.
After a relatively trouble free game ending in a 1-1 draw (for the record, oranges were thrown at Juventus players taking corner kicks), violence surfaced again when Fiorentina fans, waiting to stone the Juventus team bus a second time, clashed again with police in a battle of sticks, stones, bricks, bottles and even bicycle wheels. Cars and some houses in the vicinity of the stadium were damaged in the process.
Speaking after the match, the Fiorentina president, Senator Vittorio Cecchi Gori, inevitably - condemned the violence, saying:
"What happened outside the stadium before the game was ignoble. Those people are not soccer fans, they're people without flag or homeland. I told the Juventus directors that next time I'll have myself tied to the front of the bus even if I'm sure that they'll still throw the stones all the same. Those people don't care about Fiorentina, they don't care about anything."
Typically, the players tended to take things in a more laid back manner. First choice Juventus goalkeeper Peruzzi, one of those hit by flying glass during the attack on the team bus, said: "Yeah, we got a bit of a fright. You hear the bangs, you see the windows smash but it didn't last long ... and I don't want to give these guys any publicity because in the end, not that much happened.
The Rome daily La Repubblica stated:
"It's time we started thinking in terms of law, and order, as indeed already do many fathers who no longer take their children to soccer" matches ... Just when our soccer is thinking of, imitating English soccer's business methods, it wouldn't be a bad idea to try and copy their antihooligan measures and their stadium organisation ... It's important that fans realise that he who breaks the law or a window will have to pay for it."
The Milan based sports daily, Gazzetta Dello Sport, echoed those observations: "Organised thuggery masquerading as fan support is not unbeatable. In England and in Spain, the hooligans have been effectively countered. The (football) League is not there just to divide up the millions earned by television rights but also to make football stadia livable again.
While leader writers fume and while club presidents get angry, the Italian Players' Association (AIC), may well make up its own mind and mindful of an incident last week which saw four kilos of metal, including a bathroom tap, thrown at the Parma goal during a Reggiana Parma derby, call for a symbolic strike.
