I am sure I am not alone in becoming interested in certain clubs courtesy of that bastion of yesteryear, the Subbuteo team catalogue! The 1974 World Cup Final kits were purchased in the flick to kick wobbly base style, but somehow West Germany v The Netherlands (or Holland as we knew them back in the day) soon became a dull encounter. Hereford v Blackpool was another possible match up with the same teams, or if you were drawn to the more exotic sounding clubs at the bottom of each listing like me, names that meant nothing at the time, Cesena v Volendam was even better! This was long before the Internet could not only bring you chat about these clubs, or immediate minute by minute updates on the score, but potentially a live feed of action. The legacy of those innocent Subbuteo days has left a lasting enthusiasm for Cesena and Volendam, and while I got to Cesena for the first of five games there as early as June 1987, I only made an inaugural trip to the much nearer Dutch fishing port in July 2018.
I plotted Cesena’s struggles on a weekly basis via Guerin Sportivo which arrived in my hands from an International Newsagent in Edinburgh’s High Street, but the information was already around 10 days out of date. However, in June 1987 I finally fulfilled my dream of seeing a game at the Stadio Dino Manuzzi. It was a real cliffhanger of a first game abroad too, with a whole heap of possible permutations riding on the outcome, it made sure the ground was full to over capacity, back when rules were more laxed. Cesena’s 2,1 win over Catania didn’t get them immediate promotion, but sent them into a three way play off for one spot with Cremonese and Lecce. They ultimately were successful in going up, but the day after the Catania game something happened that started to alter the course of my allegiances!
It was a wet Monday that greeted the post Cesena celebrations, no weather for our beach resort just south of Rimini. We decided to take the train down the coast to Ancona. The rain abated and gradually the clouds broke allowing the sun to greet the view of the city across the bay as we left nearby Falconara. The city immediately started to strike a chord with me, and that reached a crescendo high above the port at the Duomo, the city’s main church. I was travelling with my then girlfriend and while we’d been together for some time it wasn’t working. A conversation up at the Duomo brought it all to an ultimatum; were we working our way towards a life together, or nearing the end. I looked out over the working port of Ancona and beyond, I was only 22, I hadn’t seen the world. It was a pivotal point, there would be no turning back, and in its own quiet way, the unassuming capital of Marche had helped me decide! Ancona chose me, if that makes any sense.
Upon returning to Scotland I found myself searching back through old Guerin Sportivo magazines chartering Ancona’s footballing escapades, and when the start of the 1987/88 came around they had been added to my small roster of teams. It was a fabulous season to get onboard as for the first time since 1950/51 Ancona stepped up to the second tier following a sell out 3-0 success over Livorno, but the week before at tiny Cento the promotion was assured following a 2-0 win versus Centese. I was already dreaming of being on the Curva Nord at Stadio Dorico, the club’s city centre ground. Somewhere in the next year Guerin Sportivo’s “pen pal” section had an advert from a lad in Ancona wishing to exchange with fans of a certain Scottish team! Okay it wasn’t my club, but in those days who in Italy would have known about Meadowbank Thistle, but Stefano was from the city that had become dear to me and so I decided to write. I don’t think anyone else wrote, but thinking about it, how many Scots were buying this publication?! Anyway, 31 years on I can report that one of life’s great friendships is alive and well. Many a letter, programme, pennant, book and football shirt has been dispatched from either end, let alone the inordinate number of trips in either direction as well as seeing our respective nations both play on the Faroe Islands within a matter of days in 2007. Yet it might have ended before it ever got started. My second correspondence including some programmes somehow ripped apart in the early moments of the postal journey. As luck would have it, the local Post depot boss was a Meadowbank fan, and seeing his sides programmes in the destroyed package made him read the letter and he realised I was the writer, and so at the very next home game I was given my parcel back to try again!
If Subbuteo had chosen Cesena for me, and being in the city of Como when Italy won the World Cup had put these teams on my roster, both were blown out of the water to an extent by Ancona choosing me. It is perhaps slightly macabre but for years it was always viewed as a city that had set me free, and the decisions made back in June 1987 have never been regretted, neither was the journey that Ancona Calcio would take the biancorossi fans and me on for the next decade or so, these would become days to remember.
Ancona is the capital of the Marche region with a population of 102,000. It is a city that hugs the eastern seaboard of Italy halfway between Emilia Romagna’s beaches and Abruzzo. The city was founded by Greeks in 387 BC, and it has witnessed a ton of turmoil and history since. It isn’t necessarily on everyone’s tourist map, but if you like a real life Italian feel with a huge working port, Ancona is worth checking out. It has some absolute gems of architecture in the Arch of Trajan or il Porta di Ancona down in the docklands. Il Passetto a stunning war memorial on the far side of the city centre as well as some cracking piazzas, the obligatory Piazza Cavour, but especially Piazza Del Plebiscito, a square that became a venue for a Richard Ashcroft concert one night when I was there. Visitors shuffle through the city as Ancona is the gateway to Split in Croatia and further south towards Greece, as well as being an avenue for an extraordinary number of Turkish and Albanian trucks to board these vessels. I have always been drawn to port cities, a legacy of a grandfather who was a lighthouse keeper and his fascination with dock life rubbed off on me. I would regularly accompany him on his walk around Leith docks in his retirement, it had a profound effect on me, and this was one of the reasons why Ancona struck an immediate cord. I can’t walk out to the end of the harbour wall in Ancona by all the fishing boats, ferries and the shipyard without the Simple Minds song “Real Life” playing in my mind! The city has buffed itself up immeasurably in the last three decades, none more so than the Opera Theatre, now a magnificent auditorium looking resplendent away from its previously shabby chic facade. Such alterations came at a time of a greater sense of civic pride which seemed to correlate in line with the rise of the local football teams fortunes on the pitch.
After a year of exchanging letters and programmes with Stefano, by April 1990 I was back in Ancona for the first time since ‘87 and about to get my first taste of Stadio Dorico. The letters describing the action, the paper clippings and accompanying photos had added not just a sense of wonder about the stadium, but the Curva Nord and its fans were already legends to me. Dorico still exists, sadly only as a facility for minor games, but the essentials of the old stadium are there, and it was both amazing and nostalgic to walk as close to the old Curva as we could on my last visit in 2016. The close proximity of the apartment blocks must have been fabulous for biancorossi tifosi to wake up and see the stadium, or better still, get your mates round for an eagle eye view of proceedings, and believe me many did. When I see some of the older stadiums when watching Serie C online these days; Reggina way down in Reggio Calabria, Biscegliese or Paganese always reminds me of those cherished Dorico days in Ancona with balconies overlooking the action.
On an Easter Saturday and a home fixture with Reggiana from Reggio Emilia, I made my Dorico debut. Both teams were going well in Serie B and both were close to the promotion places, so a big crowd was on hand to witness an entertaining 1-1 joust. It is a game forever burned into my mind by an horrendous miss by opposition striker Andrea Silenzi, “burro, burro” was the unforgiving and passionate Anconetani chant every time he went near the ball thereafter, although he had given his side the lead before the unlikely scorer of my first ever Ancona goal from Alessandro Chiodini who headed us level. Having researched clips on youtube to remind me of the occasion, Silenzi’s miss was equalled by a Franco Ermini header in front of the packed Curva Nord that should have won it for Ancona. Ironically, if anyone asks me who was my favourite Ancona player, Franco was without doubt my biancorossi hero. A draw was no use for either, and Ancona in particular, who in finishing 5th were just three points behind fourth placed Parma in the last promotion place, a club who were about to go on their very own remarkable journey.
Easter is a big thing in Italy, and being invited to eat with Stefano, his parents, his sister and husband with the couple’s very young daughter was a great honour. It was the most magnificent Easter spread I have ever enjoyed to this day, in the company of a truly close knit and wonderful family. The entire weekend acted as yet another stepping stone of our amazing friendship. That particular two week holiday saw my Ancona visit sandwiched in the middle of keeping my eye in with Cesena, as you never abandon your first love! I watched Massimo Agostini (who would go on to star for Ancona a few years later!) score at the San Siro in a 1-1 draw against a full Inter Milan team, complete with Mattheus, Brehme and Klinsmann. The post Ancona trip took me back north to Genoa for Cesena’s visit to Sampdoria, where Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli were firing blanks, including a missed rigore in a 0-0 draw. It was a treasured point for Cesena in the fight to survive in Serie A but as the players were walking off the pitch the corner electronic scoreboard flashed up Verona 1-0 AC Milan, and players fell to their knees in disbelief. It meant that Cesena would need to beat Hellas at home to stay up. That man Agostini bagged the crucial goal the following week to save them with a 1-0 win, a result confirmed by a phone call to Cesena from Edinburgh with a gleeful punch of the air, as I wasn’t willing to wait 10 days to learn of their fate! Changed days indeed! What I didn’t know then was that the Sampdoria game would be the last time I watched Cesena away! My world was becoming Ancona in Italy.
Having finished fifth in Serie B at the end of the 1989/90 season, it was the highest league finish in the history of Ancona Calcio at that point. Vincenzo Guerrini had arrived as the coach at the start of that season, a Lombardian by birth, who played and coached at Brescia amongst others, but if his appointment was considered low key in Ancona at the time, little did we know Vincenzo was about to become a legend in the Marche capital. He slowly set about putting in place a consistent line up full of all the necessary defensive qualities as well as skillful midfielders, wingers and that all important ingredient, the dangerous centre forward. Franco Ermini was joined at the club by Alessandro Nista in goal, Massimo Gadda in the midfield, and Sandro Tovalieri arrived as the main goal getter.
I was back in Ancona 13 months after the Reggiana game for a vital derby with arch rivals Ascoli. Everyone will be familiar with the big city derbies in Italy, with the Roma version perhaps the highest security alert game of them all, but the lesser known derbies have rivalries than run deep and are always high police alert fixtures; Livorno v Pisa and Atalanta v Brescia are renown, less known but equally angst ridden is Triestina v Udinese, where a Trieste lad died amid one of their clashes sadly; Bologna v Cesena is a rivalry of yesteryear certainly, and calcio fans might remember the farcical chaos surrounding Salernitana v Nocerina a few years. Indeed, I could keep listing feisty wee derbies, but I am making a note to myself on this subject, there could be merit in getting behind the facade of some of these rivalries and writing about it! Ancona v Ascoli falls into that “feisty” category, a fixture that hasn’t been played that much at all, indeed these ‘90/91 clashes were the first league encounters between the two since 1953/54, but oh boy that doesn’t matter, when these two clash it’s a spicy occasion and it was a privilege to be there.
Stadio Dorico has probably rarely rocked as much as it did that May afternoon when Ascoli came to town. Both clubs were vying for the promotion places, and with just five games to go it was without doubt the most important Marche derby in history. The first game in Ascoli Piceno just ahead of the Christmas break had seen a share of the spoils, with big Brazilian centre forward Casagrande thumping home a penalty for Ascoli before Sandro Tovalieri rescued a point for the biancorossi fifteen minutes from time. Five months later with the Ancona fans displaying magnificent banner choreography as the teams took to the field, the Ancona players surely couldn’t have helped be inspired by the passion and noise. If any of them had any doubts what this game meant, the pre-game atmosphere would have doubled down on coach Guerini’s words of inspiration in the dressing room. The Curva Nord, a solid concrete terrace, was shaking and it rarely let up.
Casagrande and Cvetkovic were the big threats for Ascoli but Fontana and Bruniera coped admirably in a full blooded, never dull encounter. Right on half time, Signore Luci, il arbitro awarded Ancona a free kick just outside the penalty box, right in front of the Curva Nord. Massimo Gadda, the mercurial midfielder with a magical touch set his sights and whipped a wonderfully swerving shot up and over the Ascoli wall with speed and accuracy, it was flying in, we could see it. Celebrations started almost before the ball hit the net, but it never did bulge the back of the goal as somehow the visiting keeper Lorieri had miraculously got a hand to it and kept it out, but no!! The linesman signalled that it had crossed the line and bedlam broke out, 1-0 Ancona right on half-time. That night’s TV debates were swirling on whether it had crossed the line or not, it was a brave call, long before video assistance, you just can’t tell! But we gladly took it and ran, and watching that goal on Youtube now still gives me goosebumps! Ascoli needed to get level and the game became more and more end to end. Yes we rode our luck at times in the second half, but with a minute left a lovely sweeping move from back to front through many a pass at speed, opened up the right flank for Messersi to thump home the second and lift off, Dorico went wild!
Ancona’s new stadium is well outside the city and has many negative points, especially regarding its distance from the city. However, it does have its own railway station on the route south, Ancona Stadio, meaning it is easy for the police to contain visiting fans and get them to buses or the main station without encountering the locals. At Dorico, with three sides of the stadium in tight streets surrounded by apartments, the only way to get the Ascoli fans to the station was out into one of the city’s main boulevards and walk them in the direction of the buses to transport them to the station. After this encounter some baying black and white clad Ascolani, smouldering for a fight, broke the police line which resulted in Stefano and I as well countless others running down the street trying to get away from them. Trouble inevitably broke out, it happened once too often in those days, but thankfully we didn’t get caught in it.
Having secured the win and bragging rights of Marche, it was as if the season’s high had been achieved and sadly in the remaining four fixtures only 3 points were gathered from a possible 8, as we are still in the days of two points for a win. We slipped down the table to 10th, five points off promotion by the final reckoning. The final ignominy for Ancona was that while Ascoli only managed 5 points themselves in the run-in, a seesaw 3-3 at Reggiana on the final day, coupled with a surprising home loss by Padova 2,1 to Lucchese, meant that Ascoli slipped into 4th spot and got the final promotion place to Serie A by a point to make sure that they had the last laugh!
The narrow failures to get into the promotion slots was encouraging, Ancona had no historical right to be banging on the door of Serie A, but Guerini’s side was still a work in progress, and the dream of top flight football refused to go away. Just one major signing was brought in, Marco Pecoraro from Salernitana, testimony to the fact that the coach was content with his existing squad. By the time I was back in Ancona a week shy of a year later we were right in the mix at the right end of the table and looking good for that historic promotion. I had planned this trip to encompass three weekends, and it had been hoped that one of them might just have been the game to clinch promotion, but as history will tell, I was always just out of luck, particularly when it came to seeing Ancona win on the road. However, the first of the trio I witnessed in May 1992 versus fellow promotion hopefuls Pescara from neighbouring Abruzzo at il Dorico was one of the most bizarre games I have ever witnessed!
To the uninitiated, all seemed perfectly normal, with a fine open, even game being played out under a hot sun in front of a sizable crowd full of anticipation. Ermini put us in front, but Pescara equalised just before the break from a penalty, but no one was suggesting anything untoward at half time. It is what happened in the last ten minutes that blew the lid on the ruse. In awarding Ancona a penalty people started to mutter, something was afoot. The lack of delight at the award had been detected by the keener eyes around me. Tovalieri scored the kick, and some of us not tuned into what was going on celebrated, but the majority just sat down, and the team celebrated limply?! The teams had come to an “arranged” draw and for the next six minutes Ancona sat back and invited Pescara on, but in a kind “on you go” sort of way, and sure enough Sorbello leveled and they all shook hands on a 2-2 draw. In the days of two points as opposed to three for a win, gaining a point was on occasions in Italy considered the sensible option. Personally I didn’t get it and was furious at having witnessed such a sham. The irony was Pescara would go on to collect 5 from 6 points in the next three games and clinch promotion two weeks before the end of the season while Ancona’s bid hung in the balance.
I would witness another of these “arranged” results the very next season when my good mate Martin, an Udinese fan had joined me for that year’s diet of three weekends in Italy to see our respective teams. The trip finished in the Olympic Stadium in Roma, where AS Roma were hosting his Udinese charges on the very last night of fixtures. It was very tight at the bottom of Serie A and Udinese, who had just come up needed a point to send Fiorentina down. As Viola whacked Foggia 6-2 in Florence, at 1-1 in the capital, Andreas Carnevale swept round the Udinese goalkeeper and instead of thumping it home into an empty net he delayed allowing the keeper time to get to his feet and nick the ball off his toes. To a man the entire crowd rose and roared with a mixture of laughter and joy, this carve up was sending Fiorentina down!
The post Pescara debacle saw me trek across the country to Salerno for a few days, at that point it was the furthest south I had been in Italy. But the following weekend I was back in Ancona for the now vital game against Messina, a side who were in need of a result to stave off relegation. The Sicilians were poor and offered very little in the way of resistance, indeed just three draws from their last 7 games was enough to see them relegated by just two points, but I am sure they took comfort from knowing Palermo went down too. Lorenzini and Lupo scored in the first half for Ancona making it a routine home victory. As the pressure built towards a potential promotion you take routine wins, the points and run! What I didn’t realise at the time as we shuffled away happy with the win, was that this would be the last time I would see a game at Dorico, the club and the city both had lofty ideas for a new stadium.
Attention turned to Brescia, a side riding high and closer to a return to Serie A, but still needing more points to get over the line. It would be my first Ancona away game, but I was not travelling with the biancorossi fans, so I decided to get a ticket for the home distinti terrace area opposite the main stand. This was long before the days of allocated seats so I was in the back row as near to the away fans as possible, but given Brescia were on the cusp of promotion the seats around me quickly filled up. Brescia were always in control, and a home fan writing about this one might describe it as a “routine” 2-0 win, save for a belter of a dipping shot from Ancona that crashed off the crossbar and rumbled my perceived “neutral” stance as I was instinctively on my feet believing we’d scored!
So Ancona had collected three points from a possible six during my trip and with three games to go it was still in our hands, but what ultimately helped was the chasing trio of Cosenza, Pisa and Reggiana all spluttering. In the third last game of the season, one of those chasers Cosenza came to Ancona and a nervous 0-0 draw might not have helped the visitors’ cause, but it meant a mere point at Bologna the following weekend would see Ancona into Serie A. Bologna needed a point to be safe from the drop, but they were in absolute freefall. When Turklimaz put them in front at Stadio Renata Dall’Ara it was their first goal in five games and it was their last of the season!
In the modern world, certainly pre Covid, getting on a plane from Edinburgh to Bologna for the weekend to witness this momentous game would always have been possible, but having just come back from a fortnight in Italy and no direct flights to Bologna back in 1992, it wasn’t as easy as it would be now to go. However, on a damp Bologna afternoon, with only 10,000 home fans having bothered to come along, they were matched by a similar number in attendance from Ancona. It was the club’s biggest ever away support. They had come for just one thing, to see Ancona over the line, and with the last game at home to Udinese who would need to win to guarantee promotion, we couldn’t let it go down to the wire. For me it was so fitting that my favourite player Franco Ermini tucked the ball home just ahead of half-time and the entire team jumped over advertising hoardings and ran the lengthy distance of the curve behind the goal to the fence to celebrate with the delirious visiting fans. The second half was probably another of these “ a point suits us both fine” occasions but no one was complaining, 86 years on from being founded Ancona calcio would grace Italy’s top flight for the first ever time. Heroes were forged, history was made “falla re, falla ra, Ancona Serie A” as the song went at the time!
If ever proof of a tight bond and team spirit was needed, 11 of the squad that won Ancona promotion played 32 of the 38 games or more, 4 just missed two games, the goalkeeper missed just one, and Stefano Fontana a quiet unassuming, but brilliant defender had played in every single game. Guerini would decide to seriously tinker with the squad for the challenges ahead but not before a record crowd turned up for the last game of the season, a party atmosphere punctured immediately by a quick goal by Udinese, who sealed the win late on to claim the 4th promotion place alongside Ancona in 3rd, Pescara finishing second and Champions Brescia. 40,000 turned up for the celebrations in the city centre, lauding the heroes of the 1991/92 promotion team, the manager Vincenzo Guerini and Edoardo Longarini, the lovable president of the club, whose name will feature more later!
The Serie A adventure was challenging right from the start for Ancona. The old gang had been broken up, with top scorer Sandro Tovalieri being the big casualty, perhaps not deemed top flight material, he moved on to Bari. For the first time non Italian players were added to the mix, Hungarian Laros Detari was brought in to score, while famous Argentine defender Oscar Ruggeri and his lesser known compatriot Sergio Zarate also arrived as well as Czech defender Milos Glonek. Massimo Agostini, my hero at Cesena, joined too with a view to get amongst the goals. There was undoubted fire power in the squad, but keeping the back door shut proved to be our downfall. The bedding in, getting used to new systems and the style of play meant that instead of hitting the ground running we were running up a hill backwards. Three defeats conceding 14 in the process was not the start that was hoped for, including a 7,1 thrashing in Firenze to a team who would end up going down by the season’s end. A subsequent home 1-1 draw with Napoli and a crazy 4-4 away point versus Genoa put points on the board but Parma won 3-0 and Juve 5-1, and with just two points from 14 available, and having conceded 27, all sorts of records were going to be broken, but not in a good way.
What had made Guerini go all gung ho? Who knows, but with a start as poor as you’ve just read, something fundamental had altered. Yes the calibre of opponent was up a notch, but had the different cultures added to the dressing room unsettled what had been a band of brothers? It wasn’t all doom and gloom however, the very next game after losing 5-1 at Juve, saw Agostini bag a hat-trick as Ancona whacked Brescia by exactly the same score, creating a little morsel of history with the clubs first ever Serie A win on the 8th November 1992. Three weeks later the curtain came down on the grand old Dorico stadium with Cagliari retreating back to Sardegna with the points following a 1,0 win.
If losing the last ever game at Dorico was a sad end, the very next week in torrential rain Inter Milan were the opposition at the new Stadio Conero. The ground wasn’t complete, but enough was built to allow a bigger crowd than could be housed at Dorico. The missing area at the new ground was the Curva Nord, meaning for a couple of season’s at least the hardcore support had to endure being in a Curva Sud! It must have been touch and go as to whether the debut at Conero would take place, but the drainage was well and truly tested, and despite water splashing up at times, it passed with flying colours as did the team. Inter were cast aside 3,0 in the signature win of an otherwise disappointing campaign. Detari had us 1-0 up before Walter Zenga received his marching orders, and while playing 10 men doubtlessly helped, the Hungarian scored again and then Lupo grabbed the third to cap a famous win. After the floods of Inter, the first game of 1993 back at Conero saw a snow covered pitch and an orange ball as we hosted Lazio. This time the elements didn’t help and the 3-0 Inter success was reversed and the points headed back across the country to Roma.
My Udinese supporting chum Martin and I decided to do our fortnight in Italy together for the final three games of the season. As luck would have it, the penultimate round of fixtures saw our respective clubs clash in Udine. By the time we arrived in Italy Ancona were long sunk and Udinese were on the verge of joining us. My first ever game at Conero was however a goal fest against Pescara again, this time no one was helping anyone, other than to goals! Agostini bagged another triple and Franco Ermini scored a fabulous late fifth to win this corker 5-3. A moment in time that has stayed with Martin and I was the following morning as we set off from the train station north towards Udine, Stefano apologised for the quality of the game the day before! He has never been allowed to forget that ever since, with 8 goals and a missed penalty, a better afternoon’s entertainment I couldn’t imagine.
Similar to the last game of the season before, Udinese needed to win and they duly did the following week in a 2-0 win over a doomed Ancona. As mentioned previously Udinese then drew with Roma, a result that did relegate Fiorentina courtesy of the complicated countback of results when three clubs are level. That meant Udinese had to play off with Brescia, with the Friulians winning 3-1. Having finished 4th the season before, Udinese were the only one of the promoted quartet to stay up. Ancona ended the season second bottom, two points better off than Pescara, and having conceded two goals less than them too with a crazy 73 to 75 against, numbers not usually seen in the goals against column of Italian league tables at that point in life. That 5-3 win had proven vital for those little moments of victory avoiding the wooden spoon and that record goals against figure!
Football Adventures with James Rendall 