Un viaggio Italiano

Just back from Italy. What was a pleasure trip (if you can call watching Ireland play football pleasure) turned into a bit of work as well. I landed in Bologna on Tuesday, headed for San Marino on Wednesday and watched in silence as our eleven Premiership prima donnas struggled against the part-timers.
I still can't believe that we won, because in all honesty San Marino deserved a draw. 2-1 it finished thanks to a Stephen Ireland goal five minutes into injury time. And our muppets celebrated as if they had just beaten Brazil.
Remember the days when it meant something to wear that green jersey? The days before £50k-a-week salaries? There are several Ireland first teamers who need to go do something else with their time. I'd rather watch a bunch of u-21s with passion, pride and determination than lads like Robbie Keane and John O'Shea who feel that international football is all a bit of an annoyance really. It gets in the way of their sports cars and big houses. Awful hindrance.
And as for Stephen Staunton? Our "world class" manager . . . . the guy looks increasingly like Fr Dougal Maguire, except he doesn't have a Fr Ted to lean on. Stunningly inept is an understatement. He was a solid defender in his day, but he's so out of his depth now as manager it's beyond a joke.
In the end, I was so wound up I bought a San Marino jersey and wore it on the bus back to Bologna. You have to laugh sometimes. The trouble is, at the moment everyone is laughing at us.
Anyway, the next day came a call from the foreign desk at work. As luck would have it they needed someone to go to Milan to cover the football stadium story that had gripped Italy. I jumped on the next train and was in Milan two hours later.
It was an ideal story to work on - I speak pretty decent Italian now and have followed Serie A football since I was a kid. (Liam Brady made it in that league when I was a schoolboy and he was my hero).
The game in Italy is more than a sport, it's a way of life. But despite winning the World Cup last year, attendances are down. The reason? The rise in strength of a hard-core group of fans known as 'ultras'. Each club has them, some are perfectly law-abiding, others are not.
Last week's killing of police officer Filippo Raciti in Sicily plunged Italian football into a fresh crisis. Instead of cracking down hard on the clubs and forcing them to take stadium security more seriously, the government stuttered. Milan carried out some frantic development work and suddenly they were allowed to have 37,000 season ticketholders in the ground for Sunday's match with Livorno. We were live outside on Saturday evening and throughout Sunday. Alessandra Bocci from the respected Gazzetta dello Sport was a superb guest, as was Milan-based football writer Kevin Buckley.
I had a ticket for the game, but there was never going to be any prospect of that coming to fruition. I ran into a Polish student who had travelled all the way to Milan only to be turned away at the gate. He had bought a match ticket weeks earlier, but still couldn't get in. I gave him mine and in he went, no questions asked. That says it all about Italian clubs' attitudes to security really. Every ticket was supposed to have been checked against a form of ID. In fact, Milan had only one turnstile working.
People often criticise English football, but it's light years ahead of Italy. The difference is that in England there was a drive to change for the better. If anything, Italy is going backwards. And that's a shame because Italian football at its best is the most beautiful sight there is in the world game.