....And on the first day there was Il Toro

Buongiorno chums!

As you may know, I fancy writing a book about fitba'. I also don't fancy writing a blog today, but thought you might fancy reading the provisional first chapter. Eccolo qua sotto:

Torino v Sassuolo, 25/8/13, Stadio Olimpico, Turin

Kilometres covered: Genova to Turin = 170km x four trips = 680km

Euros spent: 115 euros

The first stop on my magical mystery tour of calcio was Turin, to watch Torino play newly-promoted Sassuolo. Previous to last season, I'd never heard of the visitors, and had to look them up on a map, and I'm still not much the wiser. Somewhere near Modena seems to be the conclusion. Getting there won't be much fun as it'll involve three different trains, but that will be a pain in the arse for another day.

So, Il Toro was pick number one to get me started. When Italy was formed in 1871, Turin was the first capital, and so from a historical point of view, I reasoned it would be a good place to start. In reality, the reason I chose Turin was because I thought it'd be the least maddeningly hot city to start in in late August. The heat, it would later turn out, was not to be an issue.

Another bonus of Turin is that it's quite near my base in Genoa, so I could ease myself into the waters of football travelling and watching quite easily and without spending a lot of time or money to get there. That's dedication for you!

Originally formed in 1887 as a football and cricket club, it wasn't until 19 years later that the team that is recognised today as 'Il Toro' was created. The symbol is a bull (hence 'Il Toro'), while another sobriquet they have is 'I Granata', after the claret strips they wear. The majority of supporters of many teams would claim theirs to be one of the most important or storied clubs in the country, and while many of these would be guilty of rose-tinting in the name of their passion, the Torino supporters may have a point. The joint-fifth most successful club based on championship wins, they were a force to be reckoned with in the past. Their last glimpse of glory (excluding promotions) was in 1992 when they reached the UEFA Cup final, only to be bested by cleaning products' Ajax who scrubbed up better over two legs.

The greatest era of Torino Calcio was undoubtedly that of 'Il Grande Torino', the legendary five-in-a-row champions of Serie A between 1942 and 1949 (the seasons 1943-44 and '44-'45 were not recognised as being official Italian Football Association competitions). This period ended tragically when the plane that was carrying them from a friendly against Benfica crashed into the Superga hill near Turin, killing all 31 people on board. Only three squad members who had not made the flight remained.

On a more anglicised note, Il Toro were the club where Denis Law and Joe Baker used to lay their hats; Graeme Souness sat in the big comfy managers chair for 4 months in 1997 (so on second thoughts maybe it wasn't comfy enough); and for connoiseurs of shin-kicking, Pasquale Bruno hatchet-manned for them for three seasons following Italia '90.

But back to the story.

I set off on the Saturday to buy my ticket and proceeded to get lost in the centre of Turin. Even using Google maps, my innate sense of direction was intuitively pointing me in various wrong directions, and I couldn't find many landmarks to orientate myself with. Essentially, the centre of Turin is a collection of very long, very straight roads, which served to bamboozle and infuriate me in a muggy blanket of heat and irritation. Once I'd sorted my backside from my elbow, I wanted to go and have a look at 'Il Museo del Grande Torino' that seemed like a better place to learn about the team than Wikipedia. Unfortunately, my map once again foiled my good intentions, as it was not the 3 centimetres away from the centre that it had teased me with. It turned out to be several kilometres, and, after having walked about half the way there (but always on the same street) I turned back to get my train under some fairly cantankerous looking skies. Wikipedia it is, then.

Given that this tour is probably going to cost me a fair whack of cash, I was dead happy to know that the ticket in the prole sections of the ground cost only 20 euros. Not bad to watch a Serie A match, even if the standard isn't what it once was.

I went back to Turin the day after, full of a heady cocktail of one part hangover, one part excitement and two parts nervousness (better to be neither shaken nor stirred for fear of embarrassing accidents). Would I find people who would speak to me (I'm not that desperate for company, I wanted to interview locals about their team)? Would I be able to find the stadium following yesterday's farce? And more importantly, would I get mugged in the shady-looking part of town that my hotel was in? Thankfully, the answers to all those questions were not uniform.

I'd been told to hang about at the bar near the Maratona, the Ultra's stand of the stadium, if I wanted to talk to fans. It took me nary 20 minutes of looking pensive and alone to catch my first. This might not be so hard, I thought. Turns out he only wanted to know if I was smoking drugs or a cigarette. He seemed quite disappointed with my answer, and he didn't seem all that enthused with my questions, so I left him on his way. In order to not look like an undercover policeman (being alone, trying to speak to people, not wearing the ubiquitous claret t-shirt, and refusing offers of joints) I obliged myself to a beer or two. It's an ugly job, but someone has to do it.

Unfortunately, I'd found out the day before that all of the tickets for the Maratona had been sold out, so I made my way round to the other side of the stadium to watch the game. My first impressions were soured when the security guard took my lighter off me. My intricate fireworks routine thus scuppered, I concentrated instead on the stadium and atmosphere, and was surprised by how small the Olimpico is. Two pretty small teirs encircle (but it's really more of an oval..... enoval?) a running track and the pitch. What's more, everyone was sitting on their seats in my stand. This is quite different from my previous football experiences in Italy, as I had been under the impression that seats in Italian stadiums were for standing on and kicking when you conceded a goal. Maybe folk in Turin are more civilised? Or maybe I was just in a more gentrified stand.

The curse of British pre-game festivities – the latest entries on the hit parade - has made its way over here, and so while I was trying to soak up some atmosphere and badger the locals about the whys and wherefores of their fandom, we were treated to the same God awful music you could hear if you so pleased on the car radio on the way to the stadium. Just much louder. Thankfully, this was interrupted by sections of the stand singing abuse about a player whose mooted signing had been in the paper in the previous days. Now, I'm not condoning abusing players, but if said player had previously played for your city rivals and had mocked your team during a goal celebration in a derby some years earlier, well, what would you expect? As it was, given the option of pop or abuse, I much preferred the renditions of: “Maresca, gobbo di merda, gobbo di meeeeeeeerda”, which would more or less be: “Maresca, shitty hunchback, shiiiiiiiiiity hunchback” (Maresca, being Enzo Maresca, hunchback referring to the loving nickname of all things Juventus). It added a little local colour, if nothing else. It was a little after this that I decided that I'd much rather have been sitting/standing in the Maratona, because it looked like a pretty rocking place to be. Packed to the rafters and moving as if caught up in a tide, it was illuminated by occasional flares. Looking at them, then looking at the swathes of empty rows around me, I promised myself that for future trips I'd get a ticket in the hardcore stands. One bone of contention with the songs though, was that the effort to squeeze 'gobbo di merda' into as many chants as possible sometimes led to a lot of creative licence being taken with the number of syllables, which while I admire their dedication, from a musical perspective felt a bit jammed in and one track minded.

When the game itself kicked off, it wasn't much to speak of. The small band of Sassuolo supporters who had made the trip from, well, Sassuolo (but who knows where that is really) tried to get something going, but sadly for them their team couldn't reciprocate the feeling. A pretty bitty first half was enlivened by nominative determinism's bete noir, Ciro Immobile, when he set up an 18-yard strike into the bottom corner by Matteo Brighi. 1-0 to the Toro. For the rest of the game Immobile did what I'd understood him to be capable of from watching him play for Genoa last season: run about a lot and look lively, then when the inevitable chance crops up that his movement creates, fall on his arse. Oh, Ciro!

Just to prove that the Maratona wasn't the only place where people could have fun while watching an average game, a man behind me had an entertaining line of beseechments for his beloved Toro, or at least they were for me. He would frequently urge his players to remove something from their posteriors, and then for them to forcibly insert it into the collective 'sedere' of Sassuolo. Pretty standard fair for football stadiums perhaps, but the range of voices he used in doing this suggested that moon lighting as an impressionist might not be such a bad idea in these times of financial crisis. We might not have been in the party stand, but he knew how to have a good time. This was in marked contrast to the teenage couples who were sitting in front of me, some of whom alternated between dramatically covering their eyes, waving their arms, and screeching when Toro lost the ball. Their girlfriends weren't too impressed with it all either.

The second half was more of the same: a limited Sassuolo side getting a bit of the ball but as much as they huffed and puffed, couldn't quite create any clear chances. Torino were happy to get the ball back and try to hit them on the break, and added to their first half goal when Alessio Cerci charged across the defence and pinged a shot into the net. 2-0. He stood out as being the most gifted player on the pitch, but just don't ask him to move his car while he's eating.

With this cushion, the Torino players started to make themselves more comfortable, and the game fizzled out. The same could not be said of the weather, as at half-time I had started to see lightning in the distant sky. For the final fifteen minutes, I didn't really concentrate on the game and instead hoped that the rain would pass us by, or at least hold off until I'd got back to my hotel, but it was not to be. As the game approached the final whistle, so Jupiter approached the stadium with arms full of rain, thunder and lightning to throw down on us poor mortals. It started hosing down in a way that just doesn't happen back home in Scotland. It was like standing in a power shower turned up to eleven, with the added bonus of being fully dressed. Many people had brought ponchos that, while aesthetically unsatisfying, looked to be functionally solid. I, on the other hand was wearing shorts and T-shirt. The only even remotely satisfying aspect of all of this was that some supporters started singing a song to the tune of “Raindrops keep falling on my head”. Although it made me smile, it wouldn't keep me dry, so after the game had ended I hung about under cover before finally giving up on waiting out the storm and making a very wet dash for it. Predictably, I got lost on the way back to my hotel. By the time I had crossed some rivers that I'm sure hadn't been there four hours before, and had made it back, even my bones were soaked through. Next time I'm going to buy a poncho.