Hellas Verona vs Frosinone

Ground Number 197: Stadio Marc Antonio Bentegodi

Sunday 17th April 2016 

Hellas Verona 1-2 Frosinone

Serie A

Attendance: 17,791

Admission: €25

Says, I’ve never really had an enormous interest in Italian football. My preconceptions of it have always been conceived on the premise of stereotypes which in all honesty have perfectly valid foundations. After all, very few can refute that Italian football is (or has been) riddled with corruption, bribery and spoiled by overly-defensive tactical coaching, plus levels of gamesmanship and shithousery that make Braintree Town resemble the 1974 Netherlands team in terms of aesthetics. Couple this with crumbling stadia miles from the action and falling attendances, and tales of extreme over-policing, I’ve never really sought to make a footballing weekend out of Italy with many other destinations featuring higher up on the to-do list.

When I booked an £11.49 flight out to the Slovenia capital Ljubljana several months ago, I noticed that several midweek and weekend fixtures across the north of Italy would make it perfectly viable for a cross-country trip and would provide an opportunity to see if I could dispel my notions of Italian football being tediously boring. Having read Tim Parks’ excellent ‘A Season with Verona’ novel, a trip to the Bentegodi to see the famous Hellas in action would be my first point of call. I booked a flight home the following week from Genoa airport (£25 with Ryanair) so I could leave with a swansong against the giants of Inter Milan. In between, there were plenty of Serie B fixtures, enabling me to take in the delights of Como as a daytrip from Milan. With train transport being perfectly affordable for a Western European nation, this was a perfectly planned and executed trip. Nearly.

Verona was spectacular. What an awesome city with so much history, class, wonder, with seemingly every street crammed with colourful, rustic, Romanesque buildings, basicilas and cathedrals. The highlight is the Arena, a stone colosseum that has been preserved wonderfully and still evokes a sense of wonder. Other notable features include Juliet’s balcony, the supposed location of some character that a bloke called Shakespeare created, as well as the enormous clock tower, the striking feature of a beautiful city square, which provides jaw-dropping skylines views of the city. Myself and my accomplice Josh, a deluded, arrogant right-wing nutter, who firmly debunks the myth of university undergraduates being pie-in-the-sky, rose-tinted socialists, must have explored about 5 miles on foot in the preceding hours before the game.  By the time we rocked up at the Bentogodi 90 minutes before kick-off, we were already exhausted.

Purchasing tickets was a piece of piss. With Italian football, all you need to do as a Jonny Foreigner is turn up at the ticket booth with your passport. We elected to buy the cheapest available tickets on offer, which were 25€ for touchline seats on the top tier. The cheapest curva seats appeared to be reserved for the hardcore Hellas members, but even so, I thought that was perfectly reasonable price for top-flight football with seated views on the side. Even when mitigating this was a 20^th vs 19^th clash, with minnow Serie A debutant visitors Frosinone only 4 points ahead of the rock-bottom hosts, whom have only managed a paltry 3 wins in the entire season. This wasn’t billing up to a spectacle by any means.

With an hour or so until kick-off, we found refuge by a beer van that offered seating, and I felt right in the my element supping bottles of Frakinisiner in the sun at a reasonable sum of €3.50. Noticing we spoke in English, some German football groundhoppers approached us to ask us whether we knew if beer was sold in the stadium or not. I myself was oblivious to the answer, unable to help him, but we did crack on chatting about his club, Hansa Rostock. He was enormously surprised that I had heard of them, I retorted that I had hoped to have seen them when I visited Hamburg over Christmas. He responded that Hamburg was “gay” and I nervous laughed and nodded in agreement, not wanting to get picky with a skinheaded 6ft+ guy and supporter of one of the most openly known right-wing clubs in the old DDR!

Unsurprisingly, Josh's attention seeking "I support Leicester" antics attracted a bit of interest. 

After a minor language barrier infused dispute with a steward (who was unsure whether to permit Josh’s horrifically outdated 2004 Canon camera into the stadium, suspecting that the boulder-like object could be used for filming footage of the game) we entered into the stadium, and oh my, we were blown away by the quality and uniqueness of the design. A three-tiered bowl with a running track, this stadium design is unlikely to be replicated any time soon by a modern day architect, but it felt absolutely fantastic. The two lower tiers, rather oddly, are absolutely dwarfed by the size of the upper tier, which houses pretty much every single spectactor with the exception of the VIP attendees in the middle. The lower tier, not untypically for Italy, is out of use due to its decrepit nature and thus does not have a safety certificate. This only adds to the romantic feel of a relic, old-school European stadium. It felt like pretty much nothing else I’ve ever been to before. It feels absolutely huge, belying its 31,000 capacity, obviously restricted due to areas of the stadium being inactive.

Also rather pleasing was the presence of Paulaner Helles cans being sold in the concourse at €4 a pop. I wasn’t expecting to drink in view of the game, so this was an added bonus for what would develop into a fantastic opening experience of Italian football.

The opening 15 minutes of the game appeared to synchronize all negative assumptions of Italian football. The visitors seemingly intent on parading the “let’s roll around on the floor like we’ve just flopped by Martyn McGarrigle” routine, aiming to disrupt the start of the game and Hellas’s rhythm as much as possible. Bizarelly, they seem to abandon this charade somewhat when they took the lead a quarter of an hour into the game, a goal that very much came against the run of play. Hellas defenders stood as spectators from an inswinging corner, and the failure to clear the ball resulted in a white shirted player lashing the ball into the corner. Frosinone, who play in the same unique yellow and dark blue Verona colours, sent their travelling 80 (est.) supporters absolutely ballistic. A small, top-flight newbie club from the outskirts of Rome, I knew very little about them and wasn’t expecting much more than a dozen followers at the game. While these sort of numbers would be ridiculed by English fans for an all-important relegation battle, those who travelled made an astounding amount of noise and relented all game, despite the non-stop racket from the Verona curva, who responded to this set-back in even louder voices.

The enchanting atmosphere off the pitch was surprisingly complimented by an open, end-to-end contest developing on the field. As with most struggling sides, there was a notable lack of quality in the final ball or invention in the final third at times, but chances began to develop at both ends. Frosinone almost increased their lead by rattling the crossbar from a set-piece, while Hellas ought to have notched themselves, when their full-back marauded forward on a counter-attack and was put clean through, only to spoon his shot well-adrift of the post. That miss would prove costly, as it so often does when you’re struggling at the wrong end of the table.

After the break, the hosts re-entered with the fire in the belly you’d hope from your side languishing at the very bottom. Their dominance soon paid dividends as they equalised 20 minutes in, a goal that again would stem from a corner. Sometimes simplistic goals can be very aesthetically pleasing, can’t they? An inswinging corner was perfectly flicked on at the near post, leaving the ball to be stabbed home at the far post. 

Surprisingly, the goal didn’t seem to provoke too much of a raucous, deafening response as we were expecting; instead one of and urgent “that’s one back but now we desperately need to win this” from both the players and fans. With the renewed hope, energy and vigour, Hellas came agonizingly close to going ahead just moments later but somehow Luca Toni contrived to poke a glitz-edged chance from a rebound wide of the post. The evergreen striker, at the tender age of 38, was comically off the pace afternoon and appeared miles overweight. I know he’s never been the most mobile of players, but Hellas looked like they would have benefited from someone with pace to stretch a susceptible defence. His job was to hold the ball up and win headers but he barely got to a single one all afternoon. However, he clearly must still have something in him. 22 Serie A goals last season and 5 in 18 this term – the statistics outweigh my cynicism and indicate why he seemed such a cult hero among the fans.

As the game drew to a close, you could only sense that the winners in the game would be Hellas, who continued to pile the pressure on and steam forward in droves, limiting the visitors to scarce counter attacks. However, as their inability to translate their domination into a winner continued to frustrate, and they were left to rue their squandered opportunities in an agonizing manner. With gaps appearing at the back, Frosinone launched one final counter attack in added time and made full use of it. A peach of a cross delivered on the byline was met by an outstanding glancing header which flew gloriously into the side of the net. Cue absolute delirium among the visiting supporters, and having moved to an emptier area of the stand in the second half I safely managed to capture a lot of the ensuing limbs on camera. Wonderful scenes, although harshly cruel on a completely doomed Hellas, who had put in a very determined showing.

Incredibly, despite another sickening blow, Hellas fans didn’t flock the stadium in their droves, instead bellowing their voices at an even louder volume. And their defeated players didn’t even bother to go to the curva and acknowledge them for their efforts and for standing by them, even in spite of yet another huge setback in an unmitigated awful season. Poor, poor form. As I already envisaged from Parks’ literature brilliance, Hellas’s fans were fiercely passionate and unbelievable in voice. The sea of yellow/blue colour throughout the game was a fantastic sight, and at times distracting from the on field action. I’d love to see what the atmosphere is like when one of the bigger boys are in town, or their traditional foes from up the road in Venice, but knowing how constant it was, I’d wager it’s the same noise levels irrespective of opposition.

Despite feeling a genuine sense of aggrievement at Hellas’s late agony, this was a wonderful introduction to Italian football, and set high standards for what else was yet to come…..