Some sports stories can only be read in the contexts in which they mature. Where, in practice, sacrifice and application to the discipline bring the desired results in a well-defined framework, perhaps a high-class event such as a World Cup or an Olympics. Other stories, however, literally arise from the street. Built suddenly, almost without the pretense of truly making history, then finding themselves having to give an account to a sporting population of a heroic feat forged with jerks, kicking on a field still made of the sacred fire of passion. Perhaps little aesthetics, but certainly a greater proximity with one’s supporters, with one’s lifeblood. The 1974 Italian champions Lazio belong to this category. Taken by the hand in Serie B by Tommaso Maestrelli and taken to the top of the peaks just two years later, approximately halfway through a decade that had already given Cagliari the exceptional triumph and which, shortly thereafter, it would have consigned to the history of football Pulici’s Turin and the star’s Milan.
Maestrelli, the miracle worker
An unexpected but genuine triumph. With the economic-managerial guidance of owner Umberto Lenzini and the technical guidance of Maestrelli, Lazio quickly shook off the charm and superstitious extravagances of Juan Carlos Lorenzo, quickly climbing the steps between a B which was overcome with momentum and an A which, already a year before the triumph, it could have been conquered. A sporting miracle that Maestrelli risked turning into an ordinary sports story if it hadn’t been for Juve’s final blow at the end of the 72-73 season. Thanks to a management ability capable of creating a game ante-litteram, modern in the conception of football but, at the same time, entrusted to interpreters of human temperament, a direct daughter of the middle extraction.
“It was a great team – recalls sports journalist Massimo Ciccognani – but also a lively group. A president like Lentini who surrounded himself with people who knew about football. And there were various individualities: Pulici, the goalkeeper, was the professor, he knew how to put order in the locker room too. And then there were Chinaglia, Frustalupi, D’Amico, the latter a poem just to watch him play. It was a football that today would still be possible with certain interpreters.”
Unlucky heroes
In the years of football authenticity, still far from the anomalous wave of the Totonero of the early 1980s (which would also have dragged Lazio into the vortex), football did not yet represent the business that it would become in a short time. And the men on the field reflected the physiognomy of their times. And, perhaps, no team was more a product of its era than Lazio in 1974. Not only in the caliber of his men but in their own interpretation of history. With an intense but brief greatness, which flowed into drama for a good part of them: from Chinaglia to Frustalupi (who died in a road accident), from Pulici to D’Amico (both who died prematurely), Captain Wilson and to the emblematic figure of Ferruccio Mazzola, a talent crushed by the weight of his own name.
Up to Maestrelli himself (who passed away in ’76) and King Cecconi, heir to a peasant lineage honored by Vittorio Emanuele II, killed with a gunshot in a jewelery shop on the cold evening of 18 January 1977. An episode that would have struck a chord with fans and the club but which, in retrospect, will be interpreted as an emblem of the social climate that prevailed in Italy in the seventies, where the word was passed to arms all too easily. “There weren’t today’s means of communication – recalls former radio commentator Riccardo Cucchi – nor the possibility of calling home. Going to the stadium meant going out into the street with the awareness of being in a city like Rome, where anything could happen.”
The true essence of football
Yet, Maestrelli’s symphony was a glimpse of sporting sunshine in the darkness of terrorism that was tearing apart a country still shaken by the echo of the detonation in Piazza Fontana. Years in which sport was, perhaps, not the social reliever that it would become in ’82, when an Italy exhausted and definitively demolished by the Bologna massacre found itself, united, celebrating the World Cup triumph. But still enough to offer moments of spontaneous convivialityat least those without violent connotations.
“The Lazio of ’74 was one of the most beautiful things of those years there – Ciccognani still remembers -. There was even a little song that was sung to celebrate its heroes. And then there was the old Olympic stadium, without covers or seats, ugly and uncomfortable but passionate. After fifty years you still remember those players and this makes you understand what type of football it was. More beautiful and spontaneous, with sandwich and friarelli brought to the stadium. There was nothing fake, because those were the times. There were no cell phones, we made appointments and met up. There was, for example, a lot of sense of belonging to one’s neighborhood. Furthermore, we went to the stadium without the fear that the fans might clash.” And with the possibility, for an old Cinderella, of being able to give herself over to history in her best aspect.
