Of Pancrazio Anfuso
Fifty years ago the dream of all Lazio fans came to fruition: on 12 May 1974 Giorgio Chinaglia kicked the ball into the goal with all his strength which ended the dispute with Foggia, the former team of Tommaso Maestrelli, the magnificent Biancoceleste coach and the greatest architect of the enterprise.
The story began with a disastrous fall, the relegation that came at the end of the ’70/71 season, with the picturesque Juan Carlos Lorenzo on the bench, and some quality players on the field, from Chinaglia to Morrone, to Massa, to Governato, to Wilson, to Ferruccio Mazzola, shady younger brother of the more famous Sandro, talented sons of the champion Valentino, who perished in Superga with the strongest Italian team of all time, Grande Torino.
A season ended with a promise of redemption, because Lazio, led by Roberto Lovati, under the eyes of the new coach, Tommaso Maestrelli, former partisan, former captain of Roma relegated to Serie B for the first time, just relegated in turn with Foggia, freshly appointed and already on the verge of contestation, won the Alpine Cup.
Chinaglia led his teammates to win the minor trophy which was, however, a starting point for a summer of reconstruction, which laid the foundations for an immediate return to Serie A, with a quiet second place.
Since that summer of ’71 Lazio never made a single mistake again. Antonio Sbardella, DS with an important refereeing past, and Maestrelli built a technical mosaic of the highest quality: Frustalupi, an international level playmaker, arrived from Inter, around whom Maestrelli set up the team, sacrificing on the market the elf Giuseppe Massa, Chinaglia’s deadly sidekick in the uphill championship, and obtaining the means to set up the rest of the team.
King Cecconi arrived from Foggia, already under the orders of Maestrelli. Some unknown players were taken from the transfer market and proved to be fundamental: Felice Pulici, Novara’s goalkeeper, and Renzo Garlaschelli, Como’s winger. Never was the market more successful: with just a few pennies, a team capable of fighting for the Scudetto was set up, with an airtight defense and the attack entrusted to the ram, Giorgio Chinaglia, a sort of popular hero who took it upon himself to drag the rest of the team troop towards glory.
In ’72/73 the scudetto faded on the last day, in a three-way sprint with Milan and Juventus, who won the title in an afternoon full of twists and turns, followed by allegations and controversies, which lasted for years, about a “softening of ” of Rome and Naples, playing against Juventus and Lazio respectively.
In reality, the title was thrown away by Milan, who were unable to manage a one-point lead in the standings and collapsed in Verona, after having won the Cup Winners’ Cup on a fiery Wednesday in Thessaloniki, against Leeds.
The following year Maestrelli’s team, boosted by the creativity of Vincenzo D’Amico, a magnificent product of the youth sector, tried to do the feat again, this time succeeding, with an unstoppable gallop, punctuated by goals from Giorgio Chinaglia, supported by a collective capable of interpreting football in a modern way, according to the dictates, then in vogue, of the total Dutch game.
The long tug-of-war with Juventus, the defending champion, ended on that sunny May 12th: a giant scudetto rose to the sky, hanging from a cloud of balloons, and the fans, including myself, happily poured into the streets of Rome .
The man-symbol of the triumph was Chinaglia, laden with the laurels that belong to the Homeric hero. He was credited, not without reason, with the redemption of the Lazio fans, at the end of a tormented decade, characterized by relegations, in a city climate in which the neighboring Giallorossi were the masters, albeit in a context of mediocre results.
Chinaglia put things right, claiming for Lazio the city primacy sanctioned by football’s primogeniture, according to the slogan, repeated to this day like a mantra, “Those who brought football to Rome”.
However, let’s talk in retrospect, because the climate in the 70s was less toxic. There wasn’t the incessant seething of the Roman radios, many of which were dedicated exclusively to football, often focused on one team or the other.
The Biancoceleste hero restored pride and dignity to the Lazio fans, but it is a football story, a beautiful sporting story like many others are told: Riva’s Cagliari, Bagnoli’s Verona, Pulici and Graziani’s Turin , Falcao’s Roma, De Sisti’s Fiorentina, Mancini’s Sampdoria, Maradona’s Napoli.
Possible stories with the football of the time, revived by the adventure of Spalletti’s Napoli last year. Stories that tell great teams that have to do something extraordinary to escape the excessive power of the three great “streaks”, Juventus, Inter and Milan, which catalyze money and, say the evil ones, attention and subservience of the Palace, equal to the boasted economic strength.
The parable of Maestrelli’s Lazio lasted from ’71 to ’75, from the advent of the Pisan coach to the announcement of the illness that cost him his life, which coincided with a terrible home defeat against Torino, a 5-1 that Sandro Ciotti on the radio, perhaps out of respect, he spoke only with summary updates of the score, after the match had taken its final turn.
Lazio boasts, among its supporters, a large group of important writers. Several Strega prizes: Edoardo Albinati, Emanuele Trevi, Alessandro Piperno, Giorgio Montefoschi, to which are added Giancarlo Governi, Marco Lodoli, Carlo D’Amicis, Alessandro Portelli, and many other important Italian pens that I will not mention, apologizing for the omission .
This testifies to a taste for storytelling that Lazio fans, with the advent of social media and the possibility of publishing editorial products with ease, have made their own, producing an infinite mass of written testimonies on the ’74 scudetto. Dozens and dozens of publications, many of which came out in recent months.
It is difficult to understand the reasons for so much one-sided commitment, given that the Biancoceleste team has experienced, from the 90s onwards, a long series of prestigious victories: the second scudetto, culmination of Sergio Cragnotti’s Lazio epic, the Cups, the European Super Cup and the many national trophies also won by Claudio Lotito’s Lazio.
It is difficult to say what leads Lazio people to tell themselves the same story in dozens and dozens of different versions, made up of the same anecdotes and often told with the same words.
With the story of the handful of footballers who argue during the week and then unite in a single body on Sunday, after having played at being gunslingers and playboys under the watchful and paternal gaze, no less severe, of Maestrelli, she ventured even people who don’t support Lazio, even with excellent results: Le Canaglie, by Angelo Carotenuto, published by Sellerio, is one of the most successful (a little fictionalized) stories, also with the attempt to (re)construct a language that refers to the Rome of the 70s.
The rest is an avalanche of large and small publications, more or less qualitative, which want to affirm a myth that goes beyond the football field, while using it here and there to magnify the qualities of that team.
The shocking episode of the reversal of the result in the home match against Verona, with the interval spent on the pitch waiting for the opponents who had ended the first half in the lead, from 1-2 to 4-2, is the most popular, together with a long series of off-field events. But the strength of that team was expressed on the pitch, and it is diminished by a story made only of recklessness and apparent madness, which paints the group as a picaresque group of reckless madmen kept at bay by a wise man.
It is a story which, albeit unintentionally, highlights secondary values, negligible compared to the technical value of that team, which then, to rebalance the imbalance, is also narrated with some touches of imagination, given the fact that memory, after 50 years old, it has certainly weakened and bends to the taste of the epic tale.
There is, on the part of the people of Lazio, a continuous attempt to establish a historical hierarchy of the city which involves the massive work of reconstructing the origins of the glorious Lazio association.
Further large-scale journalistic production concerns the first decades of the history of Lazio, with documentary reconstructions and refutations of the events narrated by official historiography, which refers to the successful “Lazio Patria Nostra” by the late Mario Pennacchia, who joins the large group of Lazio writers.
On the other side of the Tiber it is difficult to reconstruct a historical foundation, given the well-known story of the birth of Roma from the merger of various Roman teams from which Lazio escaped in 1927, despite the will of the fascist regime to provide only one team for Rome .
Events that are dear to all Lazio fans, who know by heart the deeds of Luigi Bigiarelli, founder, of Sante Ancherani, first champion, of Fortunato Ballerini, the president who made the club great and led it by the hand to professionalism , and then by Fulvio Bernardini, Silvio Piola, down to Chinaglia, Signori, Nesta, Immobile.
The predilection of the Lazio pens for the Lazio of the first scudetto remains, in addition to the continuous re-enactment of the dark period that followed the fall of the great team of 1974: the death of Maestrelli, that of King Cecconi, the double betting scandal, the new relegation , the risk of bankruptcy narrowly avoided, the play-offs to avoid Serie C.
A re-enactment that feeds on the daily story told by the radio, which hosts protagonists of those years and recalls anecdotes known to most, in a continuous repetition, which overlaps with the story of post-90s Lazio, ending up obscuring it.
The team, after the transition from Calleri to Cragnotti, established itself firmly in the noble ranks of Italian football, denying the cliché that always described it as being in trouble, unable to give continuity to its not rare sporting exploits.
The passing of this historical date, fifty years later, could finally consign the Lazio of ’74 to the archive of memories, shifting the focus of the story to the exploits of Lazio in 2000, which are certainly still part of the baggage of memories of all Lazio fans: a little fresher and more colourful, without ever forgetting those black and white years, but definitively consigning them to the scrapbook.
