Hi @Marcotti@JamesHorncastle@acjimbo - I love your Golazzo podcasts and have been listening to a whole bunch of 'em. Gabi, just to correct you on something re: Calori and Famiglia Cristiana - that wasn't "3 or 4 years later" after his goal v Juve. It was the summer BEFOREHAND.
In other words, the summer following Milan snatching the title from a palpably superior Lazio and nobody quite understanding how. When the letter was published, suspicions circled around Udinese-Perugia, Perugia-Milan and possibly, Udinese-Milan.
The theory was that Udinese did Perugia a favour, then Perugia did Milan one too... though I've watched the highlights of all three games, and there's nothing obvious at all.
Calori sued (and won I think?) - and it probably wasn't him who wrote the letter at all.
Lorenzo Battaglia came under suspicion midway through 1999/2000: probably wildly unfairly too. That revolved around Nocerina v Castel di Sangro in Serie C - but it doesn't fit the letter author talking about helping a big club.
The other thing is: where is the line between playing half-heartedly and actually rigging a match? In 2000/1, four relegation strugglers played four leading sides on the last day and they ALL won - and had ALL been bookies' favourites too.
And James will remember Milan v Brescia at the end of 92/3. Frankly, if that wasn't at least informally fixed - a nod and a wink on the pitch, that sort of thing - I'm a banana. Ditto Milan-Reggiana a year later: a scandal in what it did to Piacenza.
But the thing is: they were ALL at it in one way or another. The lesson Piacenza seemed to draw from it when they returned to Serie A was "wait til late in the season when we're playing opponents who don't care... but don't draw. Win". So at Parma (for example), they did.
It was all very murky. Zeman saying Serie A was about politics, not football, was pretty close to the mark frankly. But it's also cultural. 'The system' was both formal and informal, it seemed to me. With Bari-Castel di Sangro at the end of 96/7 just another example of that.
Finally: I've always believed - and thought this at the time - that Collina playing on in Perugia suited Juve and Moggi perfectly. Because it meant his little game could continue - as he could always point to that game and say "see? We don't get any favours!"
There'd been such an incredible tumult after Cannavaro's disallowed goal that a Juve title would've had the most enormous asterisk. So we got a 'fairytale' (club bankrolled by criminal wins scudetto) instead... and Moggi could keep doing what he was doing, with no-one noticing.
That whole period under Moggi - mid-90s to mid-noughties - has so many question marks attached to it. Both in doping and in very dubious refereeing. Inter choked on the final day in 2002... but they were also robbed by absurd decisions in the run-in.
And the saddest thing of all is that whole period killed Serie A as the best league in the world; wrecked its credibility totally. Only now is it maybe, just maybe, starting to recover. But whatever Juve fans might say, I know what my eyes were telling me: from Juve-Inter '98 on.
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And if I see one more inadequate, entitled, clueless male on this website come out with pathetic, condescending beyond belief, passive aggressive bullshit like:
That one lousy England cap was as part of our worst team since 1993. The ONLY one not to qualify - and you weren't even good enough to be picked for it more than once.
In fact, you have MORE CONVICTIONS FOR VIOLENT CRIME than England caps, you absolute waste of skin.
Gary Neville can tell his grandkids about the absolutely magnificent career he had in the game.
You can tell yours about the time you stubbed a lit cigar out in a youth player's eye.
Or when you violently assaulted a teammate, leaving him unconscious with a detached retina.
Today, in the world of sensible centrist liberal media 🙄🙄🙄
1. Thomas L. Friedman is worried for the world and tries to explain what's happening to it. He explains what's happening to it by... saying THIS.
Yes folks. The difference between Dubai and Gaza isn't that one is staggeringly rich in natural resources and the other is a rock. And it isn't that one is independent and the other has been illegally occupied and blockaded for so long.
It's 'visionary leadership'.
I'll tell you one of the very many things wrong with this awful world, Tom. It's that racist Orientalists like you - utterly incapable of EVER treating Arab people as equals - get given such a high profile platform to pump out such constant ignorant beyond imagination drivel.
THREAD: Argentina. Why has this happened - and what's going to happen now?
The first thing to say about why this has happened is pretty simple. The options facing a desperate, frantic Argentinian public were APPALLING. All of them.
In August, at the primaries, the mostly centre-right Juntos por Cambio (which governed, very badly, through Mauricio Macri between 2015 and 2019) voters made a dreadful, in my view indefensible blunder.
They selected Patricia Bullrich over Horacio Rodriguez Larreta.
Bullrich is right wing. She's also maybe the most completely talentless politician I have EVER seen in this part of the world.
She's charmless, utterly unlikeable, and has made an absolutely preposterous political journey from militant leftist to now, the far right,
When the provisional IRA tried to assassinate the entire British government, the British government did not respond by carpet bombing Belfast for weeks on end.
Nor did it impose a 16-year-long siege on the island of Ireland.
Nor did it cut off electricity, water, food, fuel and communications.
In fact, much of the world - including, notably, the US - understood that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland had an entirely legitimate grievance. And were victims of an historic injustice.
UK politicians wouldn't have even dreamt of such a response. Had it been attempted, we'd have been ostracised by the entire world, maybe forever.
And in the end, peace was achieved. Draining the swamp of support for terrorism through dialogue, power-sharing and democracy.
"Research by the IJPR shows about 2% of the population of Great Britain can be characterised as “hardcore” antisemites - defined as those believing multiple anti-Jewish tropes simultaneously - whereas 70% is found to hold no anti-Jewish views at all".theguardian.com/world/2023/oct…
"A 2021 survey by the institute, conducted two months after the last war in Gaza, found that almost three-quarters of Jewish adults in the UK felt that non-Jews held them responsible for the actions of the Israeli government during the conflict..."
"More than half said that public and media criticism of Israel at the time made them feel that Jews were not welcome in the UK".
Several things here.
1. Anyone attacking or insulting British Jews for the actions of Israel is an antisemitic arsehole.