Excitement builds

I have been in Italy all week on a trip with my family. Had I been at home, I would have had more to say about the decision in the Tévez-Mascherano affair. Other clubs threatened with relegation are threatening to take legal action to try to force the FA to hit West Ham with a points deduction. Sheffield United and Wigan Athletic have been the most vocal. One letter writer to the Times suggested that Premier League clubs have agreed to take all disputes with the FA to arbitration rather than civil court, on threat of expulsion from the Prermiership if they do otherwise. So perhaps an arbitrator will hear the matter at some point.

What I think it boils down to is that ownership and management changed. Once in place, the new guard revealed the deceit of the old guard. The new guard cooperated fully with the FA's investigation into the matter. The new guard agreed to plead guilty to the charges and accepted a hefty fine, the largest in the FA's history, at least in nominal dollars. (I haven't read any suggestions that there were previous fines that would exceed West Ham's £5.5 million ($11 million) fine, but then, maybe a club was fined £100 in 1879 and that is more in today's pounds. I'm being somewhat facetious, really.) I don't believe that the deterrent effect will be lightened by this only-money penalty, because the strange set of circumstances in this case aren't likely to come up very often, if at all again.

In a few hours, I will be heading to the oldest Irish pub in Venice, Fiddler's Elbow, to watch West Ham host Bolton Wanderers. Being in a football-mad country like Italy this week has made me that much more excited about the game; not that the fevered surge by the Irons to the end of a tumultuous season wasn't enough to make me excited about this massive game. On Monday, our tour guide at the Vatican, Stéfano, made some football-related quips. Of the three guides that we have had so far, Stéfano is my favorite, not just because of the football jokes but they didn't hurt. The man from the tour company, Franco, mentioned the AC Milan-Manchester United game on Wednesday, saying that he was planning on watching the second leg of that Champions League semifinal tie from San Siro. He noted that Man U was ahead, and added in his Italian-accented English, "Because they are lucky." Unfortunately, Franco told us the wrong start time, so it was 24 minutes in and 1-0 AC Milan when I tuned in. Man U's play, however, made Franco seem correct in his bravado.

Much more interesting was watching the second leg of the Liverpool-Chelsea semifinal tie from Anfield. It was a tremendous 120 minutes but I have to say that the penalty kicks were a let-down. I wanted Liverpool to win, because a good friend is a Liverpool fan, and I don't particularly care for Chelsea anyway, but the penalty kicks did not live up to the brilliance of the play prior to them. Chelsea keeper Petr Cech didn't come close to stopping any of the shots, so there was little drama as Liverpool easily won on the seventh shot, 4 to 2.

When I return to Chicago, I'll post some of the many football-related photographs that I have snapped here in Italy. (Can I still use "snapped" even though I am using a digital camera? Are the pictures still snapshots?) I have seen the signs for the football stadiums in a few of the cities that we have been in, but I have not had the chance to see one of the grounds. As in London (or Londra, as Italians call it), the cities of Italy are filled with stands and shops selling club and national team football gear, particularly jerseys and scarves. I bought two scarves for Reggina, the Serie A side in my father's home region of Calabria, at a stand located less than the length of a pitch from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I will keep one and give the other one to the Globe to hang on their wall. In Florence, I was looking through some national side shirts at a stand while my parents were in a shop. I noticed a Materazzi shirt, a Totti, and then a bunch of Zidane shirts, probably a dozen of them. By this time, I had been looking long enough that the woman running the stand poked her head around the corner and asked me what I was looking for. I said, "I guess you don't sell many Zidane shirts, do you?" She laughed and shook her head.