INTRODUCTION BY FABRIZIO GHILARDI
I fell in love with Subbuteo in 1974 at the age of seven.
It was a blind, total love for all time. A classic case of love at first sight.
To be honest, I had already experienced the same love for the blue and white colours of Lazio.
So, 1974 was for me the year of Love, certainly not the year of divorce.
The maximum for a child of seven years of age - fall in love with Subbuteo the same year that his favourite team become the Italian Champions.
It meant loving soccer and never betraying it.
A different kind of soccer from today’s, a chivalrous soccer made up of great personages and great teams. As we used to say at the time talking about an impressive team, a “great team”.
A pity that to have my first team I had to wait nearly a year and a pity especially that my first Subbuteo team wasn’t Lazio. Through an unfortunate stroke of fate “that day” it was sold out. A good sign, I told myself, in accepting a higher Destiny. It meant that other kids were looking for the same thing that I was. After much thought among the hundreds of teams on sale in the shop (that had a really enticing name, “Casa Mia” (My Home)), who knows why, I chose a team from the provinces, of the type that you would love only if you came from that area - Lanerossi Vicenza. But through another twist of the same fate, the shop assistant, who certainly didn’t have the football expertise of a Paolo Valenti, handed me a shining less classical version of Lanerossi - a version with wonderful black shorts.
Love had blossomed and when at seven years of age the concept of ownership makes its appearance in the world of adults, those who defend and contest ownership, you aren’t too fussy. It’s as if there is a layer of glue on a child’s hands and it is hard to remove the objects that those hands hold with trembling skill.
And that’s how I took my first Subbuteo team home.
It was only when I got home that my brother – three years younger than me but much more attentive to detail – showed me that in the album of the Sacred Panini Stickers the team uniform of the Venetians was white and red striped jerseys and white shorts. But why hadn’t he spoken sooner! With the same steadfastness that had made me choose a small team of the Italian provinces, still pretty far from the brief glories that would have brought it to the limelight of great national soccer just a few years later, I fell hopelessly in love with that strange version of it. The Subbuteo catalogue showed it as Southampton, an English team that I knew nothing about at the time. But this was enough to make me swear eternal love to Southampton. And it was with this English team that I fell in love with what was Football with a capital F: English Football. The football of the fathers, of the founders, of the apostles.
In the year 2005 I celebrated, obviously privately, thirty years of love for Subbuteo. And for played football, or better still “played” exactly in its value of a past participle.
Maybe because soccer was a childhood passion; maybe because the football jerseys were better and always the same just like those hand-painted ones of the Subbuteo figures, instead of changing every season for the benefit of the sponsors that didn’t exist then; maybe because soccer really had another flavour; maybe because when a player scored he hugged his other team mates and didn’t run away not to be touched as if he didn’t want to share his joy with the others or he didn’t put on a previously thought-up strange act to be innovatory in his celebration; maybe because the players had more credible names and faces to appear in albums and on almanacs; maybe because I’m an incurable romantic of Sunday afternoons.
And of Subbuteo.
When we decided to dedicate a day and a photographic exhibition to Subbuteo (a game invented in England, that distant nation, that strange island of the north of Europe where Southampton played) a smile got printed on my face that was the same child’s smile with which I purchased hundreds of teams with my grandfather and my brother. The same smile that I have as I write.
1 - 2
|
