Calciopoli or Morattopoli.. inter fake orgasm (35 Viewers)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/sports/soccer/17iht-soccer.html
Global Soccer
In Italy, a Disgraced Man Hits Back
By ROB HUGHES
Published: February 16, 2010
The 50,000 home crowd is at fever pitch; the ball touches the arm of a Napoli defender, and the referee, the top arbitro in Italy, ignores the penalty claims of the visiting Inter Milan team.
A clear penalty denied? A strong referee who deemed it an unavoidable contact, with the ball striking the arm rather than defender Salvatore Aronica deliberately seeking an illegal advantage?
Short of World Cup referee Roberto Rosetti’s breaking his silence, we may never know.
All this is like a passing breeze. A contest that was pulsating, though goalless, leaves Inter as clear leader of Serie A and leaves Napoli unbeaten for the season in front of its intimidating own supporters.
And it leaves the ref as the butt of endless television replays.
Rosetti, a hospital director when he is not in the middle of all this mayhem, can take the heat. He probably expected it. Before the match, scores of spectators had made their own demonstration against a former colleague of his, now the main adviser to Italy’s refereeing association, Pierluigi Collina.
The man with the bald pate and staring eyes, once the most recognized match official in the world, Collina is still being blamed for things that go wrong on Italian fields long after he retired. The Neapolitans held pictures of Collina as masks as they protested calls that had gone against their players the previous weekend.
Into this ritual fervor betwixt fans and officialdom steps Luciano Moggi.
Remember him? How could we forget Lucky Luciano, the alleged fixer of referees down the years and the former Juventus director who was banned from soccer for five years after the 2006 scandal known as Calciopoli.
Moggi was subsequently sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment over a player agency that allegedly physically and mentally “persuaded” top players to join it. He has yet to serve a day and is playing, as he quipped on the steps of the court, his “golden goal” appeal time.
But Moggi is on a comeback of sorts. He is courted by the media, which value his experience and his taste for notoriety.
So there’s controversy down in Naples? Call Luciano, ask his opinion about the arbitration. “All these mistakes by refs,” he said on Gold Sport, “this affirms that soccer has always remained the same. There were never any corrupt referees, and there aren’t any now.” Then, with barely a pause and no discernable irony in his voice, Moggi said what the broadcasters knew, and probably hoped, he would say: “Look at what has happened in the last three years, and you will see what Calciopoli was built upon.”
There never were any corrupt referees, and Calciopoli — the supposed manipulation of match referees in Serie A — never happened.
In which case, Moggi was terribly wronged, and the club he ran, Juventus, was victimized. It had to give up two Serie A titles won in 2005 and 2006, just before the World Cup that Italy won — with Juve players at the heart of the team and a former Juventus coach in charge.
The media in Italy, like anywhere else, is a magnet to controversialists. Signor Moggi is not just controversial; there is often a grain of truth in what he tells them. But there is also spin.
Calciopoli, he said a month ago on Radio Kiss Kiss, never existed. It was an invention to bring down Juventus. The case was built on tapped telephone conversations between Moggi and the chief administrator of referees in Italy — calls in which Moggi had called for the removal of two referees in particular.
They happened to be Collina and Rosetti.
The worst that Moggi claimed against the two referees was that they were “too objective.” That, and many ambiguities in the case, led to Juventus’s being demoted to Serie B and to a criminal trial against Moggi, his son Alessandro and Davide Lippi, the son of the national team coach, Marcello Lippi.
They and others were accused of “private violence” to coerce players to join the agency GEA, run by the Moggi family. In the way of Italian justice, the accused are now well into their protracted extra-time period of contesting the verdicts.
While the legal process goes on, there can be no closure on the 2006 scandal. The country that owns the World Cup, and is preparing to defend it in South Africa, finds it hard to move on because the matter is still being contested.
Moggi, now 72, is in demand for three reasons: He is never short of words, he is willing to say what others merely suspect — and he knows soccer better than those who have replaced him.
Bigger men, in terms of office, fell after the Calciopoli — for example, Franco Carraro, the former president of Italy’s soccer federation.
It isn’t just refereeing standards that Moggi denounces. In recent weeks, he has been Mr. Rent-a-Quote on the state of Italian soccer (poor in Moggi’s eyes), on Juventus (lamentable) and on justice (a travesty).
On Juventus, where Moggi rose after starting his working life as a rail station caretaker, he says that those who failed to defend him, and thus led to his downfall, are not competent to lead the club as he once did.
“They condemned us publicly and even hit our families,” he said. “But they destroyed a side which was among the best in the world. What goes around comes around, and with this management, it will be impossible to restore the normality which is suitable for a great club like Juve.”
Juventus without Moggi, he implies, is second rate. With a wider brush, he forecasts that Italy’s shortcomings in calcio, or soccer, are about to be exposed once again.
“The Champions League returns this week,” Moggi says. “We will see that calcio is not competitive on the international stage. “We will be lucky if one side makes it through to the next round.”
Italian soccer, he adds, has gone downhill compared to England and Spain.
He criticizes Milan’s signings of substandard players after the sale of Kaká, and Lazio’s president for signing the wrong coach and selling its striker Goran Pandev.
His judgment is no less withering on the national squad. He gives it zero chance of holding on to the World Cup.
The rantings of a spiteful, scorned old man? Or the barbs of a cunning administrator who, even in disgrace, is firing darts containing unpalatable truths on the state of Italian soccer?
Global Soccer
In Italy, a Disgraced Man Hits Back
By ROB HUGHES
Published: February 16, 2010
The 50,000 home crowd is at fever pitch; the ball touches the arm of a Napoli defender, and the referee, the top arbitro in Italy, ignores the penalty claims of the visiting Inter Milan team.
A clear penalty denied? A strong referee who deemed it an unavoidable contact, with the ball striking the arm rather than defender Salvatore Aronica deliberately seeking an illegal advantage?
Short of World Cup referee Roberto Rosetti’s breaking his silence, we may never know.
All this is like a passing breeze. A contest that was pulsating, though goalless, leaves Inter as clear leader of Serie A and leaves Napoli unbeaten for the season in front of its intimidating own supporters.
And it leaves the ref as the butt of endless television replays.
Rosetti, a hospital director when he is not in the middle of all this mayhem, can take the heat. He probably expected it. Before the match, scores of spectators had made their own demonstration against a former colleague of his, now the main adviser to Italy’s refereeing association, Pierluigi Collina.
The man with the bald pate and staring eyes, once the most recognized match official in the world, Collina is still being blamed for things that go wrong on Italian fields long after he retired. The Neapolitans held pictures of Collina as masks as they protested calls that had gone against their players the previous weekend.
Into this ritual fervor betwixt fans and officialdom steps Luciano Moggi.
Remember him? How could we forget Lucky Luciano, the alleged fixer of referees down the years and the former Juventus director who was banned from soccer for five years after the 2006 scandal known as Calciopoli.
Moggi was subsequently sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment over a player agency that allegedly physically and mentally “persuaded” top players to join it. He has yet to serve a day and is playing, as he quipped on the steps of the court, his “golden goal” appeal time.
But Moggi is on a comeback of sorts. He is courted by the media, which value his experience and his taste for notoriety.
So there’s controversy down in Naples? Call Luciano, ask his opinion about the arbitration. “All these mistakes by refs,” he said on Gold Sport, “this affirms that soccer has always remained the same. There were never any corrupt referees, and there aren’t any now.” Then, with barely a pause and no discernable irony in his voice, Moggi said what the broadcasters knew, and probably hoped, he would say: “Look at what has happened in the last three years, and you will see what Calciopoli was built upon.”
There never were any corrupt referees, and Calciopoli — the supposed manipulation of match referees in Serie A — never happened.
In which case, Moggi was terribly wronged, and the club he ran, Juventus, was victimized. It had to give up two Serie A titles won in 2005 and 2006, just before the World Cup that Italy won — with Juve players at the heart of the team and a former Juventus coach in charge.
The media in Italy, like anywhere else, is a magnet to controversialists. Signor Moggi is not just controversial; there is often a grain of truth in what he tells them. But there is also spin.
Calciopoli, he said a month ago on Radio Kiss Kiss, never existed. It was an invention to bring down Juventus. The case was built on tapped telephone conversations between Moggi and the chief administrator of referees in Italy — calls in which Moggi had called for the removal of two referees in particular.
They happened to be Collina and Rosetti.
The worst that Moggi claimed against the two referees was that they were “too objective.” That, and many ambiguities in the case, led to Juventus’s being demoted to Serie B and to a criminal trial against Moggi, his son Alessandro and Davide Lippi, the son of the national team coach, Marcello Lippi.
They and others were accused of “private violence” to coerce players to join the agency GEA, run by the Moggi family. In the way of Italian justice, the accused are now well into their protracted extra-time period of contesting the verdicts.
While the legal process goes on, there can be no closure on the 2006 scandal. The country that owns the World Cup, and is preparing to defend it in South Africa, finds it hard to move on because the matter is still being contested.
Moggi, now 72, is in demand for three reasons: He is never short of words, he is willing to say what others merely suspect — and he knows soccer better than those who have replaced him.
Bigger men, in terms of office, fell after the Calciopoli — for example, Franco Carraro, the former president of Italy’s soccer federation.
It isn’t just refereeing standards that Moggi denounces. In recent weeks, he has been Mr. Rent-a-Quote on the state of Italian soccer (poor in Moggi’s eyes), on Juventus (lamentable) and on justice (a travesty).
On Juventus, where Moggi rose after starting his working life as a rail station caretaker, he says that those who failed to defend him, and thus led to his downfall, are not competent to lead the club as he once did.
“They condemned us publicly and even hit our families,” he said. “But they destroyed a side which was among the best in the world. What goes around comes around, and with this management, it will be impossible to restore the normality which is suitable for a great club like Juve.”
Juventus without Moggi, he implies, is second rate. With a wider brush, he forecasts that Italy’s shortcomings in calcio, or soccer, are about to be exposed once again.
“The Champions League returns this week,” Moggi says. “We will see that calcio is not competitive on the international stage. “We will be lucky if one side makes it through to the next round.”
Italian soccer, he adds, has gone downhill compared to England and Spain.
He criticizes Milan’s signings of substandard players after the sale of Kaká, and Lazio’s president for signing the wrong coach and selling its striker Goran Pandev.
His judgment is no less withering on the national squad. He gives it zero chance of holding on to the World Cup.
The rantings of a spiteful, scorned old man? Or the barbs of a cunning administrator who, even in disgrace, is firing darts containing unpalatable truths on the state of Italian soccer?
