Having ran out of recollections of Wick encounters in the Scottish Cup, for the clubs third home match in the competition this season versus Falkirk at the end of the month I was asked to write a piece about the Coppa Italia, but I couldn’t resist comparing it with a similar ladder layout in Uruguay.
Here is my submission;
There was a perfect irony watching the draw for today’s Scottish Cup matches on the edge of the car park at Ancona railway station with my great friend Stefano, who wished Wick well ahead of the first of these three home games. The irony is, a free, unseeded draw is an alien concept in Italy. We let out a bit of an oooh collectively when Falkirk were drawn to head north, this is a big game today.
The Coppa Italia is a joke competition, only the teams from the two top divisions, plus a handful of third tier sides are involved, and the whole thing is set out like a tennis ladder,seeded to an inch of its life, where nine times out of ten, the bigger club are at home. The fans are suitably ambivalent, resulting in low crowds, as well as ridiculous some 3pm midweek kick offs thereby ensuring an even smaller crowd. You would think the sponsors, or heaven forbid, the football authorities would want a genuinely exciting product, after all, unlike some leagues in Europe, Serie A is open season and any one of 6 or 7 sides could win the league title. However, embarrassment is to be avoided in top flight Italy, they wouldn’t want a repeat of Campobasso beating Juventus at home, but of course it was two legs in those days and Juve still won through. It leaves the Coppa Italia being as predictable as the top two in the Scottish Premiership, although on second thoughts, maybe not quite that tedious!
The last Serie B team to reach the Coppa Italia Final were my boys Ancona, all the way back in 1994! I flew over to watch the first leg in Ancona, which ended 0-0 against a very impressive Sampdoria side back in the day, with Ruud Gullit and David Platt amongst the opposition. Fifty five minutes into the second game, it was still 0-0, Ancona were dreaming, but once Samp scored the first, the wheels came off the bus spectacularly as in just 35 minutes we lost 6-1! A few years later, a third tier side Alessandria made it to the semi-finals, but these moments are so rare, these are genuinely the only great stories of the Coppa from the last thirty years!
Atalanta, a side who have broken into the top echelon of Italian football these days have had a couple of recent fruitless attempts to at least add a newish name to the trophy, but they lost both times to Lazio and Juventus. Perhaps the one “unusual” winner in the recent past was Lanerossi Vicenza who won the 1997/98 edition beating Napoli. They were in the top league at the time, a purple patch in the history of the club from Veneto. Indeed, the following season they beat Chelsea in the Cup Winners Cup Semi-Final in Vicenza, 1-0, and led by the same score at the Bridge. They might have doubled that adavantage had a second not been controversially chopped off. The players lost discipline at this decision and Chelsea scored three times late to knock them out.
While I was in Italy recently I was at my first ever Coppa Italia early round match, when Spezia hosted Brescia. This was one of these ridiculous 3pm kick offs, and even more ludicrously in a period of energy costs being high, on a magnificently bright Wednesday afternoon all four floodlights were burning, madness. Spezia are for now the higher ranked side of these two and despite being largely second best on the day, they won 3-1. They will now head for Atalanta in the next round as the lower ranked side, and are highly likely to bow out at the last 16 stage. This is how it works in Italy and no one bats an eye!
Each level of football has a separate Coppa Italia below the top two divisions. The Coppa Italia C and D start off as regional matchups until the last 8. Each of the twenty regions who run separate non league league systems below D have a regional cup, and the winners all then play for a national winner. These competitions are not so seriously ranked, but the fans enthusiasm for these competitions leaves a lot to be desired until maybe the semi-finals.
Interestingly, Uruguay have just this season resurrected the Copa Uruguay after decades of mothballing. It was set out like a tennis ladder too, but unlike Italy, despite having two clubs to rival the Glasgow duo in terms of gongs and size of support, nothing is ever that straight forward down there. The innumerable smaller teams don’t have the phobia or fear as Scottish teams seem to suffer when coming up against the Old Firm. Nacional, the biggest club went out 3-0 at second tier Rampla Juniors, albeit they were more concentrating on keeping their top players fresh for a crack at clinching the league title. Penarol, the other big side, had a horror show league campaign, and won’t be involved in International competition. The Copa was an opportunity to save face, and they’d limped along to reach the semi-finals. Leading 1-0 from the first leg against La Luz (the light!), a second division side who have just completed a double promotion and will play Penarol in league games in 2023 for the first ever time. The small club from Aires Puros (pure air) barrio of the capital, Montevideo, moved the second leg to the Centenario to cash in on a bigger crowd. With the game still goalless a second half red card for La Luz should have been the end of things, but in the end, a late winner to tie the aggregate score, and a subsequent 4-2 success in the penalty shoot out, put the light out on Penarol, and the rest of Uruguay is still laughing.
La Luz will play Defensor Sporting in the final, who toiled at times to progress beyond second tier Progreso, but they came good in the end. So despite it starting out as a tennis ladder, neither of the big two made the final, and both were beaten by lower league sides, sadly something that seems just too unacceptable in Italy, and as much as I love the game there, I wish they would have a re-think on what a cup competition should look like.
Football Adventures with James Rendall 