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Tuesday 18 February 2014

Match 10: Lazio



Lazio’s home stand is the Curva Nord of the Olimpico, and according to research by the newspaper, La Repubblica, they are the sixth-most supported team in the country. Their most famous Ultras group is gli irriducibili Lazio, and so as is normal, in the weeks before the match I set out to find myself some fans to interview. Going about this in my normal way, a quick Google search found me some forums to join. Joining them, however, was not as easy as liberating confectionary from infants as it 

normally is. Now, normally, in order to sign up for a forum you need to fill in an online form with your details, before the final step in which you need to write a randomly-generated code that pops up on screen. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. The Lazio forums, I guess, get trolled quite frequently and/or they’re deeply paranoid. This manifests itself in requiring aspiring forum members to answer a very specifically Lazio-themed test as the final step, rather than the typing-of-the-random-code norm.

So, on one of the forums, after filling in my username etc, I was presented with the statement:

Giorgio Chinaglia è: ………..
(Giorgio Chinaglia is: ………..)

Who he was exactly, we’ll come to soon, but in reality, he is only one thing: dead. Without wanting to be a pedant (but really, I spent days trying to find out the answer, so I’m going to be a bloody a pedant about this), there is only one possible and correct answer. But the computer refused to accept that ‘dead’ was it. Philosophically speaking, at least for me, all that we are ceases to be when we shuffle off to wherever and whatever’s next. Unless, in an effort to psychologically shield themselves, the Lazio fans deny the reality of Giorgio Chinaglia’s death. Either that or they’ve interred him somewhere in a Schrodinger’s Cat-style experiment (which, as they arranged his corpse into the box, I imagine would still have hammered home the fact of his passing), but nonetheless, the correct answer to the question remains: dead.


After a few days of repeatedly trying various adjectives, nicknames and things of that nature, all that I was able to achieve was to get myself locked out of the site for exceeding the number of permissible incorrect answers in single sessions. I was almost at the point of investigating all of the various idioms in Italian for ‘dead’, à la the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, when a friend came through for me with the answer! Eureka! (There’s that Greek-influence again). I won’t tell you what it is so as to preserve their much-valued privacy, but needless to say, it was something that only a laziale would know. And it had bugger all to do with death.

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