My thoughts on the ambush…

By now, unless you’ ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that some so-called “Inter tifosi” ambushed the team at Malpensa airport in the early hours yesterday morning, causing injury to Christiano Zanetti and possibly others. Originally I thought this was another one of those Inter media stories with little merit– the Italian press, when it gets bored, concocts lavish stories on a pretty regular basis about Inter because, frankly, half the time its believable. But I digress.

Anyway, this turns out to be a quite true and very sad little story, and it has little to do with Inter and really little to do with football. It has more to do with people whose lives are so misguided that they would stalk someone in the wee hours just to hurl rocks at them. In masks, no less. All these fools have done is helped promote some kind of stereotype about Italian fans that other media will glom onto. What a SHOCKER that my local paper in Chicago would run an article or that ESPN would play it up. The Guardian? They’re having a laugh too.

So now we wait with baited breath to see if another Vespa will go airborn or if petrol cocktails will be hurled at the team bus, or if the pitch will be buried in flares. Because that’s what happens at Italian football matches, right? While its happened before on RARE occasions, let’s be honest…you could attend matches your whole life and probably not see something like that. And its not something that gets perpetrated by an average fan even when it does happen. Its that rare 2% of the crowd who don’t know how to act even when they know they’re on CCTV. They’re not really watching the match and they’re probably not likely to be bothered to go to Germany this summer. But they’ll probablyl be held aloft as “Italian Soccer Fans: Exhibit A”. Very sad. And I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.