Forty years ago Roma’s 3-0 victory in the second leg of the European Cup semi-final against Dundee United
ROMA DUNDEE SEMI-FINAL – Today is April 25, 1984 and errors are no longer allowed, nor admissible, also because all those that Roma could have committed, they committed two weeks ago, on a humped and limited pitch: the “pitch” of Dundee United, in Scotland, where Di Bartolomei and his teammates were unable to develop their maneuver in the usual way and, attacked by the pressing of their willing opponents and surrounded by an enthusiastic public a few centimeters from the pitch, they found themselves two goals down in the first leg of the semi-final of the European Cup. Incredibly, unexpectedly but that’s exactly how it went and now it’s hard, very hard to think of a comeback. But the sun is out, already warm as if it were summer, and there is a clear sky as it can only be on certain days in Rome. And then there are the words of Paulo Roberto Falcão, who did not play in the first leg and who perhaps for this reason has a clearer vision of what happened in Scotland, of why Roma had to pay the price against a competitively challenging but technically demanding opponent. inferior, of an embarrassing inferiority.
It’s 3.30pm, it’s a hubbub of love. The teams enter the field following referee Vautrot; the Scots have short, tight shorts, milky white thighs and a look of concentration under the skin of their faces already red from the heat. From all the heat that falls on him. With his hand as a visor, the Mc Alpine goalkeeper, who has the expression of someone who thinks he has already understood how things will go, raises his eyes to look around: he has never seen them, all together, that sun and those colours, that wall of crowd and those twirling scarves. What happened to his stadium full of faithful with mug in hand, the thin and incessant rain that you carry in your bones, the white and very heavy ball with the “old style” stitching? Where is the fire hydrant that waters the pitch to make Roma’s dribbling difficult? Dundee United don’t feel like they’re away: they feel lost, right from the kick-off.
Minute twenty-three, at the height of Roma’s forcing: from the corner kick line under Monte Mario, south side, Bruno Conti goes to take yet another corner kick; the parabola is arched and sensitive to the point of kissing Roberto Pruzzo’s powerful take-off on the forehead, who with an almost unnatural twist of the neck sends the sphere beyond any reasonable possibility of Mc Alpine, beyond the pillars of Hercules of zero a zero. Roma are in the lead, the strength of the roar cannot be understood by anyone who has not experienced it.
Flat encephalogram due to limited technical means, Dundee do what they can now and gather in a bunch to defend and protect the two goals from the first leg, even if a century seems to have passed since that evening of hostility and provocations, not the canonical two weeks dictated by the UEFA protocol. It is precisely the now only defeatist attitude of the Scottish team that blows more wind into Roma’s sails, in addition to that with which a memorable Curva Sud makes the comeback ambitions travel.
We are in the fortieth minute now, Dundee is just a white veil, of eleven shadows, which separates Roma from the first European Cup final in their history; from the attacking midfield Agostino Di Bartolomei, with his usual elegance, launches a pass that Maldera, with his head, somehow manages to land in the center of the area: Pruzzo is controlled on sight, caught in the grip of the Scottish central defenders; yet he manages to tame the ball with his chest, protecting it, and then places the turn that writes the two-nil into the bottom corner. In the explosion of irrepressible joy, even the memory of the first leg evaporates: Roma equalized the score. Now the first half ends, rarely in a semi-final of the greatest continental event has there been such a clear gap between the two contenders. In a certain sense, Mc Neal’s men – the involuntary motivator of the Roma players, due to his arrogance and aggression – were lucky to end the first half of the game with only two goals against.
Even now, during half-time, the stadium is a basin bubbling with optimism and belief; only a small doubt creeps among the stands packed beyond belief (absolute Italian box office record): will Falcão and his teammates be able to, under this sun that seems more June than April, to sustain these rhythms, given that they are leading the maneuver, incessantly, without any pause? The answer lies in the public, in the enthusiasm that greets the Giallorossi players now that they return to the field, in the perception that no amount of effort today will make us late for the appointment with history.
It would be necessary to say that the match is starting again now, but that would be excessive: in reality it is only Roma that is starting again, their opponents are at the mercy of a sumptuous dribble, of a stadium that began to erase them before the match began, of a time that it will pass too slowly for them to think they have any hope.
Now we are at minute fifty-eight, almost two thirds of the match has gone; a dense network of passes triggers Roberto Pruzzo’s escape through the central streets; the Bomber enters the area, ball at his feet, he is about to dribble past Mc Alpine too but the latter dramatically knocks him out. Penalty. History is a chalk disk on the grass made hot by the sun. Agostino took the ball: a stadium child is now held by the hand of his captain. How strange… There are seventy thousand of us and yet we seem to hear the studs sinking into the grass, the goalkeeper’s gloves rubbing against each other.
How Vautrot’s whistle resounds in the stillness of an instant… They heard it all the way up the hill of Monte Mario, even the Madonnina seems to have her eyes on the spot. You kick, Agostino, and a belief becomes certainty; the lightning of execution is followed by the thunder of joy. Dundee United is now just a detail of what we will tell our children.
Paolo Marcacci
