Again to whom it may concern

Whoever rehearses in my LJ the media lies about the Church I am honoured to belong to will be deleted and banned. If you want to wallow in that kind of filth, go to the New Jerk Times or Newsweak or other purveyors of packaged lies and ignorant prejudice; but stay away from this blog.

Italy goes out, outkicked and outpushed by a team of well-trained cynics.

I had expected it, as you may remember, but it still makes me sick. The Slovaks put in so many kicks and shoves - each carefully weighed not to place the player in danger of being carded - that the Italians were soon physically shrinking from contact. They tried to make up for it by superior passing, keeping the ball away from the opponents and in constant movement, but in the end, given the constant Slovak pressure, that was not enough. It was not a great game, in spite of the four goals, and not what one would like to see in football. It has always been said that one of the reasons why Association Football is so universally popular is that any physical type can play it, but this sort of thing makes you doubt it. Other sports, beginning with tennis, have been ruined by the prevalence of enormous and hugely muscled players; tennis at present ought to be played with weight categories, like boxing. I don't want soccer to head in that direction.

The funny thing is that probably the best way to neutralize brutal playing of the Slovak kind lies in the bad, old, negative catenaccio strategy of sixties Italian teams, that journalists hated so much. Hammer them early on, score a goal or two, and then shut down in a choking defensive phalanx, with ten players behind the ball and the striker having a relaxing time alone in mid-field. In 1973, Rivera's Milan met the ultimate butcher team, Leeds United as it was then, in the final of the Cupwinners' Cup in Thessaloniki, scored at the sixth minute and then defended ferociously for the remaining eighty-four and let Billy Bremner and his fellow SS rejects fuming at the unmanliness of it all. Unfortunately, Italians have taken the criticism of foreign journalists seriously and would now no longer be able to produce a really murderous catenaccio, which, let us remember, was a style of play designed to equalize the chances between the small and sometimes downright starved products of Italy's lean postwar period (Gianni Rivera, the greatest player Italy ever produced and the closest thing the game ever had to pure genius, was a positive weed with no stamina whatever, who really committed himself only twenty minutes per game) against beefy and brutal characters from places like Germany or Leeds. And, yes, Slovakia.

The proper reaction to Italy's performance...

...would be to get good and drunk. But one of the privileges that go with Italian birth (especially if you are fortunate enough to be a citizen of the great cities Milan and Rome both) is that you can go straight to the singing stage without need to get stoned first, thus getting the best of the deal without need of after-effects.