EUROPA LEAGUE FOR ARSENE
ARSENAL defender Per Mertesacker says the players are focused on winning the Europa League as well as their four remaining Premier League games to give manager Arsene Wenger the perfect send-off. Wenger announced on Friday he would leave Arsenal at the end of the season, bringing an end to his near 22-year reign during which they won three Premier League titles and seven FA Cups. European success eluded Arsenal under Wenger but they take on Atletico Madrid in the first leg of the Europa League semifinals tomorrow. “He made it very clear to us that this is his clear target now, to win the Europa League and every match we are going to face now. Now we can come together and let him leave in style...,” Mertesacker told reporters. “The team responded to his announcement fairly quickly. We had an atmosphere that, we want to do it for you to send you off in the best possible way.” Arsenal, currently sixth in the league, have yet to name a successor to Wenger, who Mertesacker said had been the “best possible fit” for the side. “Now we have to find another good fit to start a new era,” the German added.
“We could hear the fans outside whistling – Rome was an intimidating place to be. But that was us.
We were telling them: “We’re not scared and we really don’t give a sh*t where we are or what you can throw at us, because we’re going to win this game.’”
Trouble was waiting on the streets for the 15,000 Liverpudlians that had made the journey. Upon arrival at Termini, the main train station, there were riot police carrying machine guns and CS gas. Roma were champions of Italy and, having not won a European trophy before, felt a sense of destiny that it would happen for the first time in their own city.
Liverpool had questioned the logic of Two Tribes.
La Republica the English,’ Il Corriere dello Sport reported, ‘The aftermath of the match brought a night of vile, blind violence that disappointment cannot justify,’ and Il Tiempo said, ‘This could have been an occasion to demonstrate civility. Instead, the usual group of fans with knives, bottles and sticks went on an odious manhunt,’
‘The festering resentment towards Italian ultras played a significant role in the build-up to Heysel,’ Evans insists.
Heysel would happen 12 months later. Thirty-nine people, mostly Juventus fans, died in Brussels when a wall collapsed as they tried to escape from a riot.
Tragically, there is a feeling that Rome ’84 had another victim. On 30 May 1994, 10 years to the day after the final, Agostino Di Bartolomei, the Roma captain, took his own life on the balcony of his villa, shooting himself once through the heart with a .38 Smith and Wesson pistol. Only a note in his pocket, which had been torn into 32 pieces, gave indication of di Bartolomei’s torment.
Financially, there had been problems but he had also struggled to find space ‘in the world of football,’ following retirement.
‘The date he chose to take his life could not have been a coincidence,’ John Foot suggests in Calcio. ‘He could have been the player – the captain – who had lifted the European Cup in his own city.’
Di Bartolomei had described the final as “the game of my life.” – The Independent