GIUSEPPE CULICCHIA

I discovered the beauty of football in the early Seventies, when the players’ jerseys, much more clinging and elegant that the modern version, had numbers that went from 1 to 11 plus those of the subs that went from 12 to 16. The Berlin Wall was still standing, and the world wasn’t yet in the state of confusion that it is today, so we didn’t speak of  4-4-2 or of 3-5-1or of 3-4-2-1, the so-called “Christmas tree”, but of the goalie, the right back, the left back, the centre-back, halfback, sweeper, right wing,
full-back, centre-forward, inside forward, left wing.

Since my father supported the Toro from the time he was a little boy he had seen the Great Torino at the old Filadelfia Stadium, and since for my sixth birthday, I was given the full playing rig of the Toro with the garnet red jersey, white shorts and black socks plus Valsport shoes, my first heroes of what in its native England was called the “Beautiful Game” were the then players of Torino, from Agroppi to Cereser, from Ferrini to Rampanti, and then again Fossati, Bui, Puia. That year, 1971, the Toro won the Coppa Italia with three young players, Castellini, Claudio Sala and Pulici, destined to leave an indelible sign in the history of the club. The three were in fact protagonists of the first (and for now last) championship won by the garnet red club after the tragedy of Superga, at the end of a championship, that of 1975-76.

That year the Toro trained by Gigi Radice played the most beautiful soccer that I have ever seen, with the three times top goal-scorer Paolino Pulici who game after game and goal after goal captured my heart: on the contrary to so many girls whom I got to know in the classroom during adolescence and then later at the time of university, he is still there. How many faces and how many female faces I have forgotten by now: but I remember everything about Paolino Pulici also called Pupi-Gol or Puliciclone, and even today I would still be able to recognize him simply by his way of coming onto the pitch, chest out, head high, legs champing at the bit anxious to hear the whistle go and get wild. Meantime, again regarding myths in the world of football, West Germany had become World Champions in Munich against the Holland of Cruijff. And after the Toro, they was my second team with the various Maier, Breitner, Beckenbauer, Bonhof, not to mention the top scorer Gerd Muller.

At the time I lived in a little town with nine hundred inhabitants about twenty kilometres or so from Turin, where of course you could buy the Panini Stickers (you could get them from the tobacconist who also sold newspapers, comics, copybooks, schoolbooks and foodstuffs, as well as certain mysterious magazines that were on a high shelf and that made us children curious because the adults that used to buy them were inclined to blush when they handed them to the lady behind the counter to pay for them) but where no one had Subbuteo: at the most you could see it in the advertisements in Topolino (Mickey Mouse Comics). There were however two bars with their relative Table-football.

So, when I had the red players, for me they were Torino. And if by chance I had the blue ones I pretended that they were the German national team, all wearing the jersey of Sepp Maier, the goal-keeper, instead of the traditional white shirt. Unfortunately, over the years I had developed a great aversion for nuns, because when I was sick it was always a nun who gave me injections. So, on the contrary to the others of my age, I never set a foot in the oratory: and the two table-footballs of the town, my Toro Champion of Italy and my Germany Champion of the World always inexplicably ran into bad days. What could be done about it?

The only solution, seeing as how there was also my stubborn, inflexible decision not to attend the oratory, was to get hold of one of those mysterious Subbuteo that I had seen advertised over and again between an adventure of Donald Duck and a word of advice from ‘the Junior Woodchucks’ in the pages of Topolino.
If I wasn’t great in table-football, I was bound to be better with Subbuteo.
Also because they didn’t have Subbuteo in the oratory, so I would be able to challenge anyone, including the greatest champions of the area in table-football, without having to start with a definite enormous handicap. On the eve of a 25th December of those when I already suspected that my parents were much more than simple intermediaries with Father Christmas, I made my official request.

I didn’t want any Fort Apache with the Seventh Cavalry and General Custer, and not even the umpteenth box of Atlantic soldiers in HO scale, and not even the latest Airfix model of a Second World War fighter. I wanted one thing and one thing only: Subbuteo. I still remember the anxiety with which on the morning of that Christmas, with my eyes just open after a pretty agitated sleep in whichI had continued to exercise with my thumb and middle finger in what, according to the advertisement in Topolino was the key move of Subbuteo, I went downstairs, and I threw myself onto that huge gift-wrapped parcel that awaited me under the Christmas tree. Deaf to my mother’s pleas (“Try not to tear the paper!”) I tore the gift-pack expecting to find the green pitch, the white goalposts and two teams which could only have been Torino and West Germany. But completely unexpectedly I found in my hands a strange box with written on it not Subbuteo but something different and unknown: Giocagol.

I looked at my parents bewildered and disappointed. They spread their arms. Father Christmas, or whoever on his behalf, hadn’t found Subbuteo in that little town of 900 inhabitants and twenty kilometres or little more from Turin. I was going to whine, except that by now I was eleven years old and according to my father at that age you have stopped whining for some time. So that was how the game created in 1947 by Peter Adolph, able to entertain generations of children (and not just children), dramatically escaped me. But not forever.

A short time ago, when on my fortieth birthday I finally understood that I had reached the fullest maturity of my existence, I bought my first two teams in a toyshop in Turin: Torino, which could also pass for West Ham if necessary, and West Germany, which at a push could always become Cesena (even if frankly I doubt that could ever happen). For the green pitch and the white goal posts I am waiting for next Christmas. And with these words, my wife Barbara is forewarned.