Perugia were not exactly setting standards in other areas. In January 2004, they were at home to Roma. In the second half, with Roma 1–0 up, Bothroyd burst into the penalty area between two Roma central defenders, one of whom clearly held him across the chest. Bothroyd tried to stay on his feet but he was unbalanced and his shot was weak. No penalty was given. Manager Serse Cosmi went crazy near the bench, not for the first time. Strangely, the target of his ranting was not the referee, but Bothroyd. ‘Go down, go down, why didn’t you go down,’ he screamed. Later, Cosmi repeated his comments, and added that ‘Bothroyd should have gone to ground. Then the referee would have given a penalty.’ Was Cosmi therefore angry with the ‘fair’ Englishman because he hadn’t dived? The reality was more complex. Bothroyd should have ‘allowed himself to fall’ so as to ‘make the referee’s decision inevitable’. His ‘not falling’ had led the referee to make an error. Cosmi was bitter about the praise for Bothroyd’s desire not to sprawl in the area. ‘I expect they will build a monument to him,’ he quipped, bitterly, and added that only the ‘professional moralists’ had criticized his stance. Cosmi had spoken to Bothroyd afterwards, telling him that a player should ‘stay on his feet’ in such cases ‘only if he is sure that he will score. He should have gone down. It was a clear penalty.’ Cosmi went further, in a post-match interview. Bothroyd had been ‘naïve’ to not go down in the area. ‘A normal player, not a diver, falls down in that kind of situation. There are lots of campaigns against divers, let’s have one against heroes as well.’ No wonder the task of referees was so difficult in Italy, if such things were said openly, and almost with pride, by some of the leading figures in the game.
Breaking the Mould? Pierluigi Collina
‘The bourgeoisie sees its historical development like a sporting competition, with its own referee and its own rules which need to be followed’
ANTONIO GRAMSCI
‘It is very sad to think that referees are seen as puppets whose strings are pulled by someone…’
PIERLUIGI COLLINA
In the 1990s a referee emerged from within the Italian game to become one of the most famous figures in the world of sport. Pierluigi Collina set new trends in many ways. He was the first referee to become a superstar, instantly recognizable, in part because of his shiny bald head, a result of the nervous disease alopecia which he has suffered from since his twenties. Collina was also much in demand for lucrative advertising contracts and the author of a best-selling and muchtranslated autobiography.31 Few referees in Italian football’s short history have become famous in their own right, or at least, not for respectable reasons. Concetto Lo Bello was famous, but only in Italy, and he was both loved and hated in equal measure. Sergio Gonella refereed a World Cup final in 1978 but he is a forgotten figure today. It is often said that referees should not be famous, they should not stand out. Collina is different, and he argues that ‘the best referee is not the one who is not noticed…the referee is a protagonist…it’s difficult not to be noticed if you take important decisions’.32 You notice him, and he is very good – refereeing, almost without incident, a World Cup final and numerous international matches. Teams, whole nations even, demanded that their games be given to Collina, to ensure a ‘fair’ match.
Collina did things which no other referee had ever done, on the pitch. In 1997 he apologized to a manager, during a game, for a decision he had changed after consulting a linesman. Collina gave a goal and then disallowed it, before running over to the bench to explain his decision to the Inter manager, Roy Hodgson. The referee and the manager then shook hands. Times had changed. In 1981, Paolo Casarin, one of the most interesting referees of the 1970s and 1980s, spoke to both managers after a game (in private) to explain a decision. He was severely reprimanded by the referees’ association. On another occasion Collina stopped a game until the authorities had removed an offensive fan banner. Collina also ordered two teams to change ends to protect a goalkeeper from hostile missiles from the crowd.
Domestically, Collina was a remarkable rarity – a referee who would not bow to the power of the big clubs, an official who adhered only to the rules. Such an attitude represented something of a revolution in the Italian game. On the last day of the 1999–2000 season, Juventus needed just a draw, away to Perugia, to clinch a championship playoff. The ground was covered in water after a biblical downpour during half-time, with the score at 0–0. Juve called for the game to be called off, but Collina refused to budge. On a number of occasions, he went out onto the field, bouncing a ball to see if the match could continue. In the end, 71 minutes later, the game re-started. Perugia won 1–0 and Lazio were champions. The referee was given top marks in the newspapers for his decision: ‘I was pleased’, he later wrote, ‘that all the “neutrals” who were there shared my decision to wait and see’.33
That particular game had been preceded a week earlier by a curious incident that became infamous as a failed attempt at a ‘great theft’. Referee Massimo De Santis disallowed a perfectly good goal by Fabio Cannavaro, who was then playing for Parma, against Juventus. His last-minute header would have led to a 1–1 draw. De Santis claimed to have blown for a foul before the ball entered the goal, but the slow-motion replay showed that he had lied. There had been no foul, and he had blown after the goal had been scored. De Santis had tried too hard to favour his ‘masters’ but the mask had slipped, revealing a rather grotesque form of ‘psychological slavery’. In Rome Lazio’s fans went crazy. Collina ‘the neutral’ was thus given Juventus’s last game of the season at Perugia. Since then, Collina has been viewed with some suspicion by Juventus – who have rarely done well when he has been officiating. It was possible, in exceptional circumstances, to simply apply the rules of the game, without recourse to political calculation, plotting and conspiracy theories. In this simple way, Pierluigi Collina was a pioneer, a hero of his time, a paragon of truth in a world of lies. His only weak spot was his most famous feature – his hair, or lack of it. After a TV joke about alopecia he once stormed out of a studio. He advised young referees to ‘work hard, be courageous and always “decide”’.34
But Collina was, without doubt, an exception. He was ‘protected’ by his own fame, and his own reputation. When Collina was in charge, the rules were applied in an even-handed way. He had created for himself the power and the space to be able to referee fairly. Most other top referees do not have this leeway, and are forced into difficult balancing acts between the top clubs, whilst adhering to the traditional ‘psychological slavery’ that has always penalized smaller teams. Outside of the professional game, life for the rest of Italy’s 26,000 referees was very different, light years away from the glamour, the wealth and above all the respect enjoyed by The Greatest, Pierluigi Collina. Yet, Collina’s career was to come to a brutal end. After a special ruling had been passed to allow him to officiate for another year in Italy, despite the fact that he had already reached ‘pensionable’ age, the best referee in the world found himself dragged down into the murky world of smear and innuendo, and the affair was in part of his own making. In the summer of 2005, Collina signed a lucrative contract with Opel. He discussed this with his peers in the referees’ association. However, Opel were also the sponsors of Milan. Once this news went public, Collina was suspended from Serie A fixtures. On the first day of the season, he found himself refereeing a match between Pavia and Bari in Serie B, a far cry from the World Cup final just four years earlier. At the end of August, Collina gave an emotional press conference, and resigned from the referees’ list. ‘A referee