While convicted, Loris, a brother and a great friend of mine, asked me: “How is it going with the terraces?” It wasn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. In fact, this question sounded more or less like, “How’s mummy?”
A mother: a big water melon slice made of cement is like a mother to us.

A motherly arc where, everyday, the bodies of those who stay together all their lives swarm. If you live in a big city and you support a great team, you cannot possibly understand what a fan of Cosenza or Ancona feels like. Everything is wide in great cities, even supporters groups.


And that’s the big deal. I couldn’t lie to Loris, I had to tell him the truth. Our group had become a crowd of small groups. The greatness of the 1980s was just a memory. Nuclei Sconvolti didn’t exist anymore and you could feel it, especially when we played away. I read Valerio’s book. He explains the phenomenon clearly. Marchi often goes to the UK. He was one of the first to describe the firm phenomenon, and what happened in the 1980s, when supporters began to understand that it was necessary to disguise themselves. No more picturesque looks, no more chants, no more choreographed parades.

I knew about this before reading Valerio’s book, but I just couldn’t believe it. It sounded like fiction to me. But when I heard about the death of Vincenzo Claudio Spagnolo, who was stabbed by Milanese supporters traveling incognito with another group, I felt chills down my back and I thought: “Disguising sucks. The day I stop wearing my colors I won’t be a supporter anymore’.

One February morning, in a Naples railway station waiting room, I began to change my mind. There was a bobby. She must have had serious sexual problems with her husband. She was sharp and sour as alcoholic piss. Her eyes were deeply marked – much worse than mine, and I had just finished two days of long partying. She was holding her CB like a broken dildo, moving it back and forth in front of my eyes threateningly.

“You’re not going anywhere: give me your documents,” she shouted.

“I’ll give you my documents, but I need to take a leak,” I replied. “Just let me get out of here and go to the toilet.”

“Shut up or you’ll just get out of here to go to the polfer office (Italian railway police),” was her final say on the matter.

What was going on? What has been going on just before I found myself locked up in that fucking waiting room? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Police simply got to know that Cosenza’s supporters were coming in from the north. They just wanted to identify us and keep us locked up in the waiting room. I couldn’t stop thinking: “I’m 30 and I must ask this bitch to go to the toilet.” It was just a few of us following the club for an away match. But we were having fun. We laughed a lot from the beginning to the end. What we enjoyed most was going back home still wearing the club colors, dirty and sleepy on Monday morning when everyone goes to work. The fun was still in our minds.

A month later, I chose not to wear my scarf outside Cosenza anymore. We were back in Naples, playing at San Paolo’s. We were in the railway station subway, waiting for buses. At the front were some boys, cursing towards the police. At the end, the police started beating us up. The young boys run away. Just 5 or 6 of us stayed, trying talk to the police: “Calm down! Nothing’s happening!” They beat us up badly. It was bad. It took a morning-long operation to get back the way I am.

From then on, I started believing our group didn’t exist anymore. Police beat us up and we don’t have the strength to react. I’ll disguise too; staying among my brothers. It worked. I finally had the chance to see places and cities as well as the football ground. There are still risks: you can easily meet opposing fans and you might feel lonely or get harmed. However, it’s a less brutal experience than being beaten up by the police. In Naples, police laughed at me bleeding on the ground. When you move from your city, police try to make you different from the rest of the people. If supporters are normal people there’s no need for repression. But it is even better when fans disappear. A policeman recently said: “The real problems are supporters like Cosenza’s. You never know how many of them will travel, what time they will leave or what time they’ll arrive. They appear abruptly and they never pay for tickets.”

By Claudio Dionesalvi
Source:UnitedFans

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