FOREWORD BY 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.
1 - 2
|
