Post by Salem6 on May 5, 2006 19:48:03 GMT
Published by Ebury Press, priced ?10.99, out 4th May
Love them or loathe them, the football world wouldn't quite be the same without the Italians. Fiercely patriotic, excessively emotional and, at times, entertainingly self-destructive, their approach to football - and life itself - is a barrage of fanaticism and fervour.
Contrast this with a spit 'n' sawdust, naive and somewhat perplexed Irishman - Paddy Agnew - who touched down in Rome in 1986 equipped only with a reporter's pad and an Italian phrasebook.
His subsequent journey through the political panache of Italian football makes fascinating reading in 'Forza Italia'.
He mirrors society to football, yet peers back through the glass to witness a complex contradiction.
Not completely unlike England, here politics fails to inspire the majority of the nation, yet those same would-be voters will consciously lay out soapboxes to allow footballers the opportunity to become the real orators of the country.
It seems Silvio Berlusconi's spin doctors were far advanced from Mr Blair's when they matched these two forces.
And where foreign goods were all but impossible to find on Italian high streets in the 1980's, supporters would comfortably idolise the Brady's, Zico's and Maradona's that arrived from other shores.
But deeper than this, it is the sleaze, scandal and occasional triumph, merged with repeated and deplored failure that makes the countrymen what they are, and this a superb insight into two decades of Italian football.
www.alchemyworx.com/skysports/ezine/may_06/wk61/lp/extra1.htm