Match 14 - Juventus

My Juve supporting contact had told me that getting my grubby hands on a ticket would prove tough. I didn’t really imagine it’d be as difficult as he was making out, and my schedule was pretty fully-booked, as obviously with so many games to watch and with a desire to have some semblance of a life, I’d made my own mini-calendar to keep me right and make sure that come the 18th May I hadn’t forgotten anyone. The game I’d plumped for Juventus was against Fiorentina. It’s an important match, and so I figured that it’d be popular, but that getting my hands on a ticket wouldn’t be too much of a Herculean task. As it came to be, I ended up as disappointed as an Alien fan who’d had high hopes for Prometheus.

And so it was, that having checked for the date that tickets would go on general sale online, I was sat at my computer at 9.55 the Monday morning before the match, coffee in one hand and victory cigarette rolled and stowed behind my ear. Such is my intoxicatingly paradoxical blend of dedication and lack of accuracy, I’d actually been at the computer since 8.55 because I made a mistake over the time of them going on sale. Still, better to be early rather than late, as Italians never say. 

To get you in the mood, and given that Italians often tell stories in the present tense, let’s inject some drama:

As the clock ticks down to zero hour, I waggle my fingers in preparation for some nimble clicking and field-filling in. A thin bead of sweat trickles down my temple, as outside a dog barks in the early morning haze before doing a shit in my street that will again go unscooped by its owner. Somewhere else everyone else is spending their time in a more constructive way than me.

My eyes flick towards the clock on my computer.

Go time.

I figuratively leap into action (the coffee’s still in my hand, so it’s really more of a lean). 

Having selected the section I want to sit in, I put in my personal details - Name: check. Date of birth: check. Place of birth: check. Wait a second for the next page to load. But it doesn’t, it won’t - the page has crashed. 

Repeat the process. Same result.

De la Soul rapped that three’s the magic number, but rather than actually believing it, I think they just wanted to stress that there were three of them and they were good.

Unfortunately, third time’s neither lucky nor magical for me here. After going through the above process again, I’m met with the message ‘No tickets remaining’. 

A lone scream pierces the morning air when I realise that in my distracted state I’d lit the cigarette before stowing it behind my ear. Far from it being a glorious cigarette of victory, it morphs into a sad cigarette of defeat.

Ticketless, to boot. Monday, Monday, so good to me, my arse.