A Nation Bleeds <i> Azzuri</i> for a Team That Had Better Not Fail

Centuries of Italian city-states--with their imperious self-sufficiency--and hundreds of years of dogged regional insularity were meant to be erased when Giuseppe Garibaldi united Italy more than 100 years ago.

Some are still wondering when this unity is supposed to happen.

It takes something as powerful as soccer to bring Italy together--the rich North and the rural South, the tradition-rich older generation and the Vespa-riding blue-jeaned younger generation. The World Cup has done this for Italians, swept them together under one flag and with one cry, Viva Azzuri! Go Blue!

The Blue, the name Italians have given the national team, open play in Rome today against Austria. Never mind that the World Cup officially began Friday in Milan. For Italians, today is the first day of the rest of their lives.

And, if the current emotional climate is any indication, the lives of Italians will be enriched or devastated in direct proportion to the success or failure of the Italian team.

Pressure?

“The pressure is intense on these players,” said Ken Shulman, an American soccer writer based in Florence. “Everyone in Italy is talking about soccer.

“In 1970, Italy made it to the finals, which was a good showing. They lost to Brazil. When the team returned to Rome, they were pelted with tomatoes and spit on.

“The pressure on the Italian team is worse than the kind of thing you find in the States, because this is the only sport here that counts.”

Italy is a three-time World Cup champion, having last won in 1982. In a recent poll, 52% of Italians expected their team to make it to the championship game.

Italy does have a good chance to do well here, even in this year of parity. Experts say eight of the 24 teams could win the title. It won’t satisfy Italian fans to see their team merely advance past the first round. That much is expected. Italy is in the relatively weak A Group, with Austria, Czechoslovakia and the United States.

“The real pressure on the players comes from the high expectations in the country,” said Giancarlo Antonioni, a midfielder on the 1982 Italian World Cup team. “The people here, they never forget. I still find people want to talk about the 1982 games. They never forget, but they never forgive.”

Such is the pressure on a team that sits not only as one of the tournament’s favorites, but also as its host.

Things got off to a rocky start with the Italian national team. It assembled May 6 in Florence, expecting a cheering throng of supporters. What the team got was caught in the middle of an ugly Italian league controversy.

Roberto Baggio, an attacker for Fiorentina of Florence, was sold to archrival Juventus of Turin. The deal set a record price for a soccer player: $13 million.

Florence fans stormed the team’s offices in the Piazza Donatello and protested for two days and nights throughout the city. Fifty people were injured, among them Fiorentina’s general manager, who was struck on the head with a bottle.

Thus whipped up, Florentines were in no mood to embrace the national team--which included the now-hated Baggio.

Fans descended on the Italian training camp in Coverciano outside Florence. Police uncovered a plot to launch a fire-bomb attack on the camp. Baggio was given special security.

During the team’s first open practice, fans pelted the players with bricks, bottle rockets and coins. Coach Azeglio Vicini got on the public address system and called for calm. When that didn’t work, Vicini took his team to a closed field. The Blue tried an open practice the next day to the same ugly crowd response.

Vicini responded by closing the Italian training camp.

“It happened the first day, then we turned the other cheek,” he said. “Now, we have run out of cheeks.”

The team went into seclusion after the Florence incident, but for three weeks the public--fanned by media hysteria--stewed.

The nation kissed and made up with the team by the time it was officially welcomed to its training camp near Rome last week. Rome, always happy to upstage Florence, made a great show of pampering the Blue.

Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was on hand and gave the team his blessings, wished them a “good result,” and delivered a “one for the Gipper” speech.

Secure at last in the tiny resort town of Marino, the Italian team has been hard at work. First priority for Vicini was to keep his players away from the press. He has adopted a plan made famous by Georgetown basketball Coach John Thompson: isolate, intimidate, retaliate.

Despite the ban on sex for two months, imposed on the players by team officials, it hasn’t all been boot-camp tough for the Italians. They appeared on a taped television variety show this week, merrily singing around a piano and cavorting in front of the ubiquitous official Italia ’90 zeppelin-sized soccer ball.

But things figure to get tough in a hurry if the Blue doesn’t do well in the tournament.

Soccer failure is not generally tolerated here. When the 1986 Italian World Cup team lost in the second round to France, the team was immediately purged. Italy’s under-21 team was promoted and became the national team. This team, too, could be supplanted by a younger version.

“Defeat is simply not tolerated,” Shulman said. “If they lose, Vicini goes. A new trainer will come in and start from scratch with new players.”

Now that the initial fuss is over, though, there seems little doubt that Italy is largely behind the Blue, although there are pockets of support for other teams.

Italian fans would not generally cheer for Argentina, but they might in Naples, where Argentine star Diego Maradona is a demigod among fans of the Napoli club. In Florence, Italian fans will cheer for Brazil--not just because Dunga, a player on the Brazilian national team, plays for Fiorentina, but also because Brazil’s coach, Sebastiao Lazaroni, is rumored to become Fiorentina’s coach next season.

These apparent inconsistencies are not seen as defections among fans, but merely a projection of their regional loyalties.

“It is a little complicated because people are crazy,” explained Massimo Lopez Pena, a sports reporter for La Gazetta della Sport, a daily all-sports newspaper.

Gazetta is Italy’s largest newspaper, and during the World Cup, the first 22 pages of the paper will be devoted to soccer news, primarily scrutiny of the daily goings-on in the Italian training camp.

Truly, the passion Italians hold for the World Cup is a thing to behold.

Observed Ernie Walker, chief of the Scottish soccer federation:

“World Cups are governed largely by the enthusiasm of the people in the host country. Italy is the football heart of the world. We talk about being football daft at home, but here the passion for it runs right through society in a way we know nothing about.”