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.
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