The Italian Football Thread

He's back....



\o/

It was never in doubt. He'll out-live us all.

Fantastic to see him back after all the hard work he'd have put in.

Bollocks, last minute Sassuolo equaliser. Even though it's Juve-Napoli tonight so one or maybe both will drop points, still incredibly deflating, that.

Who's watching Juve-Napoli then?

Juve ahead after just a minute. - Llorente

Two quickfire goals from Pirlo and Pogba have finished off Napoli, 3-0 Juve.

Both goals were stunners.

I did.

Insigne looked good for Napoli

Pogba has all the qualities to become the best midfielder in the world, maybe even the best footballer at any position.



Dat goal.

Milan are so poor, baffles me how Allegri is still in a job - unless Galliani and Berlusconi are happy to accept mediocrity. Balotelli missed another penalty.

Napoli have gone off a bit too lately.

The rumour is that Milan are waiting for Prandelli. Or at least that was the rumour a month or two ago.

The rumour goes that Allegri will switch jobs with Prandelli, iirc.

The only thing that has got going for the former is a Serie A title, which looks increasingly like a fluke.

Good news Milan fans! Uncle Fester is stepping down!

By the sounds of it Stapleface will hand over the control of the club to Barbara by the summer as well. It's going to be interesting to see how that changes things.

At it's heart the big issue of Milan is the fact that they don't have as much money to spend as the clubs they want to compete with, that clearly isn't going to change by having a different Berlusconi in charge.

Juve had their curva closed due to their fans chants (regional insults against Napoli etc are treated the same as rascist chants) and rather than having an empty stand they invited 12,000 kids to fill it.

Now they've been hit with a 5k fine after the kids spent an entire half (or the whole game, stories differ) going "ooooooooooo Merda!" Every time the Udinese keeper kicked or threw the ball out.

To be honest, if clubs are going to start being fined for stuff like "ooooo merda!! that then there's not much hope left.....I've heard it plenty of times before watching games in Italy and I've heard "ooooo...you fat bastard!" hundreds of times whilst watching Rovers or other English games on TV.

Yeah, that's pretty damned pathetic.

Borja Valero deserves a Spain call up from del Bosque.

Yeah, his game against Bologna yesterday was just ridiculous.

Milan-Roma last night was a really good game, particularly the second half.

11 wins and 5 draws but still 5 points behind that lot, annoying.

It's pretty ridiculous how dominant Juve are in Italy. Them dropping out of the CL certainly isn't going to help end that either.

Gennaro Gattuso and Christian Brocchi have been questioned by police regarding suspected match fixing.

Italy love cheating.

The 30 games suspected of having been fixed.


Yeah, just like the Finns, Hungarians, Norwegians, Germans, Czechs, Turks, Swedes and the English.

Asian betting syndicates have fixers more or less everywhere.

Italy love it way more than the others though.

Not really, there are probably other nations that have much more widespread footballing corruption than Italy, but only the Italians make the headlines due to their prominence in world football.

These days Italy isn't much worse than other leagues, the main difference is they have the infrastructure and ability (wiretaps etc) to investigate fixing that other countries don't.

Poe does have a point though, when you look at it historically Italian football's often had fixing/doping scandals and incidents cropping up. Credit where it's due, some of the more recent doping stories are due to players being caught taking stuff while in Italy that they'd been on elsewhere, Stam for example.

This recent fixing case isn't really about cheating either.

Taking money from betting syndicates to influence your team's results negatively is absolutely reprehensible and criminal, but it doesn't fall under any definition of cheating that I know.

wat

R.I.P Ascoli.

Juve 1-0 Roma Vidal