US Triestina are a famous old Italian club, although its best years were a good number of decades ago now. That said, with a magnificent stadium to host matches in the city, at the 32,454 capacity Nereo Rocco Stadio, as well as being the only “big” team in a Greater Trieste area with a population of around 450,000, by rights they should be a bigger club than distant “local” rivals Udinese. Football does not work that way as we know, you have to earn your place, and as they stabilise in Serie C following “wilderness” years in the 4th Tier, Serie D, the hope will be that Triestina can once again grace the upper tiers of the Italian game shortly.
Smaller well run clubs have shown that you can prosper in Italy, with Sassuolo the best exponents, but Cittadella and now Sud Tirol as well as Feralpisalo are invading the traditional club spaces in the second tier. There seems to be a tendency for some to “over extend”, and in 2006, and 2012 Triestina suffered those all to familiar “Bankruptcy issues”.(One day I will write an article on my beloved Italy that does not include the word Bankruptcy, it is an ambition!) They were quickly back in Serie B for the 2008/09 campaign after the first bankruptcy, but a hopeless season saw relegation only averted by virtue of my charges Ancona going through a second of a small heap of Bankruptcy tales! The lessons weren’t learned and in 2011 they were relegated to the third tier and soon thereafter declared bankrupt and wound up! Unione Triestina were temporarily born, but promotion back into the league set up was only achieved in 2016/17 and even then only via the Inter-regionale Play off system which oddly brings no guarantee of promotion, but saw the return of the “US” prefix at the start of the club name, now fully title Unione Sportiva Triestina Calcio 1918. In winning the play offs they needn’t have fretted about not stepping up as equally “big” clubs like Mantova, Como, and Messina had all digressed in some form or other financially and were demoted, joined shortly after the start of the season by Modena who went out of business in September 2017 with all results expunged. They’ll end up starting from the Emilia Romagna regional structure next season! Vicenza have been docked 6 points this season, Arezzo 9 deducted, as well as a handful of smaller point penalties handed out, but when will all these financial issues end in Italy?!
Now here’s a curious thing, the 1918 founding of Triestina was a year prior to Trieste becoming part of Italy, and they were the second team in the city after ASD Ponziana who were founded in 1912! A bit like the city, Triestina has had a fascinating history, and by 1924 they were in the Italian second tier. Things were set to get even better, as in 1929 when Serie A started life, “Unione” as Triestina are known were one of the founder members, and they proudly stayed in the top flight until 1956! Nereo Rocco played for Triestina in the ’30’s and was the first player from the club to play for Italy in 1934. Nereo was to later become the manager, when in 1947/48 he took them to the runners up spot, a magnificent achievement! You can see why he is such a big hero of Triestina, and forever remembered by virtue of the stadium name, but an old saying in football about never going back to a club is true for Nereo. As the “vintage” years were starting to run out, he had returned to the club to try to reverse the fortunes of just dodging relegation year on year but was sacked after just 21 games. In his second spell at the club a more famous name was making his debut at the club, Cesare Maldini! When relegation finally arrived in 1956 they bounced straight back the following season, only to go down immediately again. Those who witnessed those turbulent yo-yo seasons would never have thought I am sure it would be the last time the “Alabardati”, another name for the club taken from the spearhead crest of the team and the city, would grace Serie A.
It might be no coincidence that Triestina’s historic second placed finish in Serie A in 1947/48 arrived at the time when something quite extraordinary was happening in the city. After the War, Trieste was involved in a tug of war between Tito’s Yugoslavia and Italy. Tito had swept along the northern Adriatic coast and set up camp at Susak, essentially a suburb of what was Fiume in Italy, just across the river. US Fuimana had reach the upper echelon of the Italian game and graced football stadiums around northern Italy doing battle with the likes of Juventus and Torino in the ’20’s. The bridge between the two was temporarily the border, but as the war was coming to an end, he crossed in to Fiume, now known as Rijeka, and kept going, arriving in Trieste, almost at the same time as a troop of liberating New Zealanders!
A post war stand off ensued, with Trieste declared a free port. Tito had discovered the benefits football brought in terms of bringing the diverse areas of Yugoslavia together. He was mighty keen on having Trieste as another major port for the country. So in 1946, despite the Yugoslavian top flight having already started, it was announced that a “guest” side ASD Ponziana Trieste (photo below) were to be included in the league. Ponziana was a working class side from the vast port area, where in the struggling economic days after the war, many favoured siding with Tito, rather face the embarrassment of being tarred as supporters of the fascists. Remarkably Trieste started playing host to the elite sides of both Italy and Yugoslavia, with the modest surroundings of Ponziana’s port side stadium welcoming Partizan and Hajduk amongst others, with the Split side beaten 1-0 on one of the clubs visits to Trieste. Whether this new rivalry drove Triestina on to greater feats is anyone’s guess, but in that inaugural season Ponziana weren’t very good and finished last. However they were spared relegation, such was Tito’s desire to win the hearts and minds in Trieste. Money was pumped into the club from Yugoslavia, but in the clubs second campaign they just survived the relegation places as Triestina celebrated their runners-up spot in Serie A. Was money being thrown at l’Unione from the Italian side as a counter measure? Or it just coincidence that the clubs greatest league placing came at the height of Tito trying to prize the city away from Italy into Yugoslavia. By the end of the ’48/49 campaign it was obvious that Tito had lost this particular battle, and as the funding was withdrawn from Ponziana, it thereby signalled the end of the clubs moment in the sun, as they sloped back into the Italian league system. They still exist to this day, now known as Chiarbola Ponziana playing down in the regional leagues in the 7th tier.
My visit to Trieste was organised to coincide with the visit of league leaders Padova, and the local press were portraying the fixture as the “return of a classic”. These two clubs had been Serie A foes in their heyday, as well as for an isolated city like Trieste, almost a local derby, albeit with an opponent from three hours west!! There may be other names that connect the two clubs but Bela Guttman, the Hungarian player, and subsequently more famous manager cut his Italian coaching teeth first at Padova and then Triestina. He would go on to manage more famous clubs like AC Milan, and especially Benfica, where he oversaw the Eagles of Lisbon becoming the first club outside Real Madrid to lift the European Cup, not once, but twice in back to back successes in the early ’60’s. His tenure at both Padova and Triestina lasted only one season, and they both almost mirrored how his career went at a number of clubs, initially getting the best out of the squad, but through fatigue or in fighting, the season’s fizzled out to near calamity!
When Ancona went bust yet again in the summer of 2017, I decided to take out an online season ticket for Triestina for their return to Serie C, as well as being the clubs Centenary. Both Ancona and Triestina play in red and white, and both cities are proper working port cities, something I love, making the whole thing seem logical to me! I had seen Triestina play, just once back in June 1988 at Brescia when the famous Franco Causio was playing the penultimate game of his illustrious career! It was by no means a vintage Triestina then, they lost that day, but Francesco De Falco stood out for me, and he became a little bit of a hero as I kept an eye on Triestina’s results. He was still involved at the club in 2006 when the first bankruptcy issue was ongoing, and via a court order he ended up as Club Chairman briefly!
When you are in Trieste, aside from down by the waters edge, one thing that strikes you is the lack on flat land! The stadium is an astonishingly long way from the centre (see getting there!) but its beautiful architecture and construction are a feat of engineering brilliance with the surrounding streets akin to any sloping roads that would make San Francisco proud! The area has obviously been “deemed” the sporting zone as it sits beside another stadium, Stadio Grezar (Triestina’s old home revamped), a stadium with four floodlights, a sizeable stand and a football pitch, but with a running track. A Sports hall is next door, where I suspect the local basketball side play! The Nereo Rocco stadium opened in 1992 and it will have hosted Serie B Triestina matches, but to date rarely will the local club have challenged its astonishingly high 32,454 capacity, with only Lecce having a bigger stadium in the third tier! The Azzuri have played occasionally here, and unusually Juventus also hosted some matches a few years ago in Trieste, sadly all with bigger crowds than Triestina can pull in presently. That said, with around 10,000 in the stadium for the visit of Padova, it was a big crowd for Serie C and a cracking atmosphere. I have been in a few of the big stadiums in Italy, but the Nereo Rocco ranks amongst the best stadiums I have ever watched football, and not just in Italy! Having seen them toil from my online vantage point, on an increasingly bare surface at the Rocco, I was pleasantly surprised that a mixture of spring growth and groundsman magic had brought the grass back to life. The stadium is 26 years old now but you would never know, I didn’t see graffiti anywhere, and it all looks immaculate.
The Padova fans were here in good numbers, doubtlessly hoping for another three points on the charge back to Serie B. With the visiting fans sporting predominantly white shirts and carrying essentially the St George Cross flag, albeit with Italian messages on the red bar, it had the curious feeling of watching England play! In some ways it was an “International”, as the Padovan tifosi occassionally taunted the home fans with chants of “Italia, Italia”, a topic picked up more in the City Guide, but suffice to say, Trieste’s colourful history perhaps has them cast as “outsiders” in this distant corner, and as a relative “newcomer” to Italy! As can often be the case at an Italian game, the atmosphere is better than the game being served up in front of you. I guess being the home team, and still harbouring ambitions of having a run at the convoluted third tier play offs, Triestina were first to show, and they passed the ball around neatly, pulling Padova one way and the other without causing too many scares for the goalkeeper, but the corner count was going up. The deadlock was broken on the half hour mark with a stunning free kick by Tommaso Coletti. With the ball lined up just outside the box, straight in front of goal, he curled the ball up and over the wall, and outwith the reach of the despairing dive from the keeper, 1-0! The home fans rightly went wild. Coletti was a January signing from Foggia and he had only played a handful of matches for Triestina, but this turned out to be the match winner, a goal worthy to win any game, and a nice way to endear him to the Curva Furlani faithful behind the “home” goal. If Rocco Nereo is remembered fondly in the stadium name, Stefano Furlan is the chosen name of the Curva where the home fans stand and sing. He was a twenty year old lad who never made it home from a rare Friulia Venezia-Giulia derby, Triestina v Udinese Coppa Italia clash in 1984 sadly killed amid clashes with police.
Padova were wearing a sort of black and silver kit, and they certainly were second best, offering only a few glimpses of why they are top, and they rarely caused stress among the home fans. They will have better days before the season ends, and will have strengthened the squad to give Serie B a good run next term. The game itself petered out in a sad niggly way, with time wasting, substitutions and “injuries” frustrating the flow, but if the result is all that counts, it was three precious points for Triestina, whose players pleasingly, a bit like in Germany, stay around on the field and join in the singing, and taking the applause of the Curva especially. It was a wonderful place to watch football, and Triestina having negotiated a lengthy play off fixture list last May/June, might be handily placed to have a crack at Serie B from the 26 teams that get involved at the seasons end, and if not, I’ll see lots of them with another online season ticket next term!!
Football Adventures with James Rendall 