ODE TO A SECRET SUPERSTAR
He was a tanner ba’ kid from Falkirk who fought for Italy in World War One. He then became a football hero in his homeland but spurned fame for an Argyll chippy and a local pub team. Now the story of Johnny Moscardini has been preserved in prose to eulogi
THERE’S a man works down the chip shop thinks he’s Messi. There have been tributes to Johnny Moscardini in poetry, prose, song and stone but the strangeness, bordering on absurdity, of his life after playing for the Italian national team can surely only be captured with recourse to the lamest of lyrics.
Johnny did work in a chip shop. But only after scoring nine goals in nine internationals for Italy. He was wounded by shrapnel, loyal to his family and business and, of course, played amateur football for Campbeltown Pupils.
It is best, perhaps, to take a breath before singing his praises in verse. The first demand is to be prosaic. Johnny Moscardini was born in Falkirk in 1897 and learned to play football in the streets near his family’s café in Manor Street.
The family came from Barga in Tuscany and Johnny enlisted in the Italian Army as a machine gunner, receiving a shrapnel wound to his left arm that restricted its movement until his death in 1985.
While recovering from his injury he played football with Lucchese, Pisa and Genoa, during which time he won nine international caps, scoring seven goals. He played his last game for Italy against France on March 22, 1925, scoring twice in a 7-0 win. That year, however, he returned to Scotland to help run his uncle’s Royal Cafe in Campbeltown.
He then turned out for Campbeltown Pupils AFC — a junior side at the time — for a couple of seasons. It was the only Scottish strip he ever pulled on.
This brisk summary of an extraordinary life is given substance in stone. The football stadium in Barga — a town with strong Scottish links — is named in his honour.
There is a hymn of praise to him, too. Blair Douglas, the Scottish musician, has composed Il Saluto
di Giovanni Moscardini (Johnny Moscardini’s Salute), a reel for pipes and drums, brass band, strings, and percussion.
Now Johnny is immortalised in verse. It is fitting that O Johnny
Moscardini! should be the work of a football poet in residence, albeit a former one.
Thomas Clark, exiled Hamilton Academical supporter, was the poet at Selkirk FC before the club’s demise, contributing to matchday programmes and adding his art to special occasions at the club.
He is not alone as a Scottish fitba’ rhymer: Jim Mackintosh at St Johnstone and Stephen Watt at Dumbarton also put the verse in fitba’ versatility. All three have contributed to Mind the Time, an anthology of Scottish football poetry, that seeks to raise funds for Football Memories Scotland, the charity that helps those with dementia through recalling moments in the beautiful game.
Clark has read his poem in libraries, schools, on the pitch of the Johnny Moscardini stadium and at the Scottish Parliament.
So how did he become a football poet and why did he capture the rampaging centre-forward that was Moscardini in words?
The first question is answerable in a sort of mazy run — once a pre-requisite of a Scottish winger.
‘I have always loved poetry,’ he says. ‘Part of being a librarian is a dream of being left alone in a room full of books, though this is not the reality of being a school librarian like myself. I also love writing and have completed a Scots version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’
Thomas moved to Hawick 11 years ago from Hamilton and decided the charms of top-tier football could be resisted.
‘I wasn’t going to travel up every week to see Accies so I decided to venture into non-league football. It was a breath of fresh air.’
This bucolic tone is reinforced by Clark’s evocation of Selkirk’s ground as a haven in the Ettrick Valley with sheep bleating in the background and nature gently encroaching on to the sensibility of spectators.
Selkirk FC folded in the summer. ‘There is nothing more “Scottish football” than being the poet-inresidence of a club that doesn’t exist anymore,’ he says. ‘I hope they will come back but it may be a while.’
He adds: ‘Funnily enough, I didn’t have to write an elegy for the club because the last poem I’d written was about the Lowland League Cup final, which turned out to be Selkirk’s last match. They were one up but threw it all away.
‘I wrote a poem straight after the match called Final. It was an elegiac poem about seeming to have it all in your grasp and then losing it all. It ended up that the poem said all that I felt had to be said about Selkirk.’
When it comes to the Moscardini poem, that has its own story.
‘I used to work for the Ministry of Defence, so I spent quite a bit of time down in Campbeltown because of the base in Machrihanish,’ says Clark.
‘There is a certain culture in Campbeltown that makes it an intriguing place. I got to know the town and some people quite well. I found out there had been quite a lot of Italian immigrants. There had been this guy called Johnny Moscardini and he had been a famous football player.
‘I did not look too much into it. Then the Scottish writers’ football team was invited over to Barga to play the Italian writers as part of their Scottish weekend.’
It was the perfect moment to compose a poem. In the manner of the quintessential centre-forward, Clark decided to be in the right place at the right time and take his chance. O Johnny Moscardini! was composed in the build-up to the game and recited pre-match.
‘I started reading up on Johnny and finding out what little there is to find out. That didn’t take long in terms of research.
‘There is little in the way of eye-witness accounts in local newspapers or journals. It seems incredible that this guy, who had played at a high level and was now in a pub league, was not a figure of fascination to newspapers.’
Moscardini’s two seasons with the Pupils are largely unrecorded. This gives Clark’s imagination the chance to roam with all the energy and intent of a rampaging old-school centre-forward.
The poem is, in short, a masterful invocation of Moscardini and the country in which he was humbly bestowing his talents.
‘All the stuff in the poem is invention,’ says Clark. But its word echoes with a truth. I attempt to take two great Scottish traits and merge them.
‘The first is that we regard anything that isn’t Scottish as hugely exotic. Second, we have the talent for comic exaggeration and self-parody. I suppose we have to have that — I work in a school and none of the pupils would have been born in a time when we qualified for a World Cup.’
The inspiration, of course, was Johnny himself.
So noo they’re sayin Meredith’s the best there’s ever been; Last week it’s Alan Morton; next week it’s Dixie Dean. Ye cannae talk tae writers; but wan day, they’ll talk tae me, An ah’ll tell them — Moscardini, plays for Campbeltoon FC.
‘This is a story that can’t help but capture the imagination. The absence of any full history of him allows you to conjure up something else. For example, what did opposition players feel when they played against him?’ he says.
That question is best answered, perhaps, by the line in the poem that observes that all the teams are playing in different tops — but all have brown shorts.
Amid the sparky humour remains a worthy, invigorating tribute to a great man.
‘Imagine going into the chip shop on a Friday night and being served by a man who played in the beginnings of a great Italian team, one that went on to win a World Cup with guys Johnny played alongside,’ Clark adds. ‘While that side is coming together, Johnny’s cooking fish suppers and building up to buy his own chip shop.’
The sheer unlikelihood of the story jars the modern mind.
‘It’s as if Roberto Baggio owns a wee restaurant in Hawick and is now playing for Royal Albert,’ says Clark.
For now, Scotland must be content with Johnny Moscardini: story and poem. In truth, it is more than enough.