Action Replay: The Anglo-italian Cup
What happened when cultured Europeans faced hard-drinking, hard-kicking Englishmen? Mayhem
It’s 20 years since the Anglo-italian Cup’s final outing but the battle scars remain – in some cases, literally. FFT revisits a tournament too mad to last
It might actually have all been Ian Ure’s fault. If the Arsenal defender hadn’t made a hash of his backpass to keeper Bob Wilson in the 1969 League Cup Final, then maybe Swindon Town wouldn’t have nicked an early goal and gone on to upset the odds with a 3-1 victory after extra time. And then maybe we wouldn’t have needed the Anglo-italian Cup in the first place.
As winners, Swindon should have taken part in the following season’s Inter-cities Fairs Cup, but their lowly Division Three status meant they weren’t eligible. Mindful of the previous year’s public relations gaffe, when winners QPR were denied access to the competition for a similar reason, suits at the Football League set about brainstorming an alternative way to allow the Robins their time in the European sun.
The solution came from Gigi Peronace, an Italian based in London. Peronace was a super-agent before agents ever really existed. An imposing figure, dapper and highly intelligent, he made his name in the UK after setting up high-profile deals such as the one that took John Charles to Juventus in 1957 and Jimmy Greaves to Milan in 1961 (Greavsie, somewhat inevitably, likened the Italian to a mafia don).
Peronace had long mooted the idea of a competition involving English and Italian teams. Now suddenly the Football League were interested. As a try-out, a one-off two-legged ‘Anglo-italian League Cup Winners’ Cup’ between Swindon and Coppa Italia holders Roma was arranged for that summer. Fresh from promotion to the Second Division, plucky old Town comfortably saw off the Giallorossi, with a young Fabio Capello among their number, 4-0 on English soil.
Despite low turnouts, both in Wiltshire and the Italian capital, the games were judged a success. The Italian press was impressed with the English side. ‘Roma torn apart in Swindon’ was the Corriere dello Sport headline, while a shell-shocked Capello commented to journalists: “I can’t understand what happened. This must never be repeated.”
Peronace leafed through his contacts book to round up some teams for the inaugural tournament proper, now more pithily renamed the Anglo-italian Cup. To spice things up a bit (or, as it turned out, confuse the hell out of everyone), a point was awarded for each goal scored.
On paper the competition looked magnificently one-sided. Some of Serie A’s biggest names, including Juventus, Napoli, Fiorentina and Roma, were to play Swindon, West Bromwich Albion, Middlesbrough, Wolves, Sheffield Wednesday and Sunderland.
Granted, some of the Italian sides had their minds on other things – Juventus were particularly focused on reasserting themselves domestically – but the English teams claimed some notable scalps. Swindon carried on where they left off, beating Juve 4-0 at the County Ground and 1-0 in Turin on their way to the final, and Wednesday beat Napoli 4-3
in a Hillsborough thriller (in front of just 10,166 people), while Roma were beaten 4-0 by West Brom and 1-0 by Boro, which presumably wound up young Capello no end.
Swindon’s opponents in the final were Napoli, who qualified as the best Italian side, despite that hiccup in South Yorkshire. They had already met in the group stage, with Swindon winning 1-0 over there and Napoli winning 2-1 over here. The game was played in Naples. As Don Rogers, the former striker who now runs a sports shop in the town centre, explains, this suited the players down to the ground.
“Oh, it was great. We flew over and had a 10-day holiday, really. We stayed in Positano, along the coast from Naples. We found this bar to go to every night, there was the beach, we had games of tennis... we did some training too, of course. Not much, but some.” Suitably relaxed, Swindon lined up at the Stadio San Paolo in front of a crowd of 55,000.
The Italians had a number of key players away on international duty ahead of the World Cup in Mexico, including keeper Dino Zoff and captain Antonio Juliano, the team’s highly effective playmaker. “They were still a good team,” Rogers insists. “And we’d beaten them earlier in the tournament, so we clearly had the better of them. They couldn’t understand us, because we were attacking so much.” A Peter Noble brace either side of half-time had the visitors comfortably ahead, much to the locals’ displeasure. It was when Arthur Horsfield skipped around the keeper to score a third that it all kicked off.
The best part of half a century later, Rogers remembers what happened next with two parts chuckle, one part shudder. “It was
sometime in the second half,” he says. “I was playing out wide on the left and suddenly saw this block of concrete at my feet. I’ve never moved so quick in all my life. Suddenly I was playing more like an inside left, working my way across the pitch, just to avoid all this stuff that was being thrown. It got rather serious in the end. They did seem pretty upset. It was all something to do with politics, apparently.”
With masonry raining down from the terraces and police tear gas drifting across the pitch, the game was abandoned with 11 minutes still to play. “We were beating them easily anyway,” shrugs Rogers. “It didn’t make any difference.” Swindon manager Fred Ford lifted the cup and ran over to where the trouble was at its worst, hoping the situation would be diffused with a bit of sporting applause (yes, they truly were different times), before wisely sprinting back to the safety of the changing room. In all, 40 police and 60 fans were injured during the disturbances, with 30 arrests made. Napoli were banned from European competition for two years. “It was a nice old cup, I’ll give them that,” Rogers admits. “And I got a lovely little gold medal. It’s now on my wife’s bracelet.”
Swindon took part again the next season as holders. “Oh, I don’t remember anything about that one at all,” laughs Rogers. “Couldn’t have been very good, could it?” Possibly not, although some Blackpool fans of a certain vintage look back on it with some fondness: the Tangerines beat Bologna 2-1 in the final (left). Earlier, Crystal Palace had toppled Inter at the San Siro, while Huddersfield Town did the double over Sampdoria.
The 1973 edition finally brought the one-point-per-goal palaver to an end, but the competition was struggling to make any kind of impact. Modern-day fans will be scratching their heads at this one, but back in the day, most supporters had pretty much had their football fill by the time the tournament got underway towards the end of the season. With another World Cup looming, the Football League decided to ditch the idea altogether. Newcastle won the last trophy, beating Fiorentina 2-1 in Florence (Roma had won the 1972 final against Blackpool).
The competition had a rebirth of sorts in 1976, this time focusing on lower-league and non-league teams. The Anglo-italian Semi-professional Cup enjoyed a longer lifespan than its more high-profile predecessor, but soon suffered similar problems. There was an obvious culture clash, with the Italian clubs having a rather more conscientious approach than their English counterparts. They were big on detail, diet, technique and tactics. And it seemed gli inglesi weren’t taking any of this stuff seriously.
Journalist Emmanuele Michela, who has written a book about Lecco’s 1977 cup win, explains how some of the Italian players became seriously disorientated. “They didn’t quite get what was going on,” he tells FFT. “They were really curious about this new world, convinced they were going to play on a pitch that was like Wembley’s. It was all quite a shock for them. The Lecco team turned up for a game at Redditch an hour and a half before kick-off. No one was there. One of the players told me that 10 minutes before the game was due to start, they saw these guys walking towards them, smoking and carrying plastic shopping bags. He suddenly realised they were members of the opposing team, with their boots in their bags.” Redditch were 2-0 up within 20 minutes.
Lecco eventually went on to win the cup, but you won’t find it anywhere in the club’s trophy room. “In 2002, Lecco had financial problems and were declared bankrupt,” explains Michela. “The cup went missing and has never been found. There were rumours that it was sold to a jewellers, but what actually happened to the trophy remains a mystery to this day.”
Time was eventually called on this latest incarnation of the competition in 1986, in part due to UEFA’S banning of English clubs following events at Heysel. The Full Members Cup was introduced as an extra domestic competition to keep teams busy during their indefinite European exclusion. When the ban was lifted in 1990, the already unloved tournament duly nosedived. Step forward the Anglo-italian Cup to save the day.
It sort of made sense. English clubs were keen to measure themselves against European opposition again, teams were generally evenly matched, a new, cuddlier post-italia 90 football landscape was forming, and there was the treat of a day out at Wembley for the finalists.
It all started well enough, despite some rather tortuous preliminary rounds. In 1993 Cremonese won the first final, against Derby, in front of a decent crowd of 37,024. There were glamorous names, from Fiorentina and Genoa to Gabriel Batistuta and Gheorghe Hagi, and press coverage was pretty positive. Sadly, it wasn’t to last. By 1995, in the brave new world of the Champions League, the tournament was starting to look a tad primitive.
Barry Fry probably didn’t help. In November of that year, his Birmingham City team flew to Ancona for a group stage match. Welshman John Lloyd was the referee. He recalls to FFT: “I did one the year before, Piacenza vs Derby. I think there were 13 bookings and one sending-off. So I did anticipate what might happen. It was a nice three-day trip to Italy, interrupted by 90 minutes of total chaos.” Played on a Wednesday afternoon in front of a crowd of just under 1,000 (of whom 100 or so had travelled over from the Midlands), the game sparked into life around the 20-minute mark when Blues midfielder Paul Tait stuck a reducer on a member of the home team.
“It wasn’t really a bad tackle, but the Ancona manager ran onto the pitch to argue,” Lloyd remembers. “So that was the start of that. In the end, I was giving fouls that weren’t fouls, just to stop the game, trying to calm everyone down. I must have given about 50 free-kicks. And then, about 20 seconds from the end, the ball bounced into the Birmingham dugout and Barry Fry, the staff and the substitutes began to pass the ball along beneath the seats. They were winning 2-1 at the time. The Ancona manager went to get the ball back and there was a bit of a scuffle.”
Lloyd played exactly one second of time added on, before attempting a sharp exit. The players continued to squabble. Massimo Cacciatori, the Ancona coach, was incensed by what he saw as rough tactics by City. “There was a running track around the ground,” Lloyd continues. “To get to the changing rooms, you had to go down these steps and through a little tunnel – about 20 yards. I was going down the steps and the Ancona manager was waiting to have a go at some of the Birmingham people. But he picked on the wrong ones: Liam Daish and David Howell, Fry’s assistant, who was a big lad.”
It’s alleged that Daish punched Cacciatori, something he has always denied. The Italian suffered an eye injury and fractured cheekbone during the incident. Lloyd was still back on the steps, so didn’t actually see anything, but he had problems of his own. “I put out my hand to stop players behind me getting past and broke my middle finger. The doctor told me to go to hospital. When we got there, there were 200 people waiting – mostly press and TV crews. I had my hand in a bag of ice and everyone thought I was the one who did the manager!”
‘The Battle of Ancona’ has gone down in Brum folklore, with both clubs threatening to sue and counter-sue amid accusations of intimidation and racism, though claims that Daish and Howell still face arrest if they ever return to Italy are probably exaggerated, given Cacciatori was back the following weekend for a game at Bologna. “Whenever I see Barry Fry now, he always has a laugh about it,” says Lloyd. “He was in his element, really.”
On March 17, 1996, Genoa won the last ever Anglo-italian Cup, beating Port Vale 5-2 with 13,000 fans rattling around the old Wembley Stadium. Italian footballers were on strike that weekend so Genoa found themselves the centre of attention back home, despite the competition usually being off the radar. Gennaro Ruotolo, who scored a hat-trick, beamed afterwards: “Who knows? Maybe one day, in a little corner of the Wembley museum, they might find space for my photo.” It hasn’t happened yet, Gennaro.
Twenty years after that final game, the Anglo-italian Cup remains a much-maligned curio; rarely credible, never financially viable, beset by press negativity and supporter apathy.
It still has its champions, though. Just last year, there was talk in Italy of broadening things out to include teams from Germany’s second division. A response from England still awaits. Surely it can’t make another comeback? After all, who really wants to travel all the way to Sicily for some midweek dead rubber? Who wants to watch the likes of Rochdale and Lecce kicking lumps out of each other? Who wants to see Phil Brown or Kevin Nolan getting in almighty barneys on touchlines in Rimini or Foggia?
What’s that? Yeah, us too.
“The Italians arrived an hour and a half before kick-o ; Redditch, 10 minutes – and smoking”