JUVENTUS OPEN NEW STADIUM WITH FAKE ZEBRA GIRAFFES
They could have invited Barcelona, Real Madrid or Manchester United to inaugurate their fine new stadium. Instead a great Italian institution summoned the club standing 12th in the third tier of English football to join Thursday's opening ceremony and, if there has been a more elegant gesture in the history of football, it would be good to hear of it.
For it was Notts County, in 1903, who answered the call of a Juventus member, an Englishman named John Savage, to send a set of the club's black and white striped shirts to replace the pink numbers worn by the players of the Italian club since their founding by a group of students six years earlier. Thus did Notts, who were then midway through a spell in the old First Division, save Juventus from a century of being confused with pink-shirted Palermo.
Themselves founded in 1862, Notts are the world's oldest football club who are currently professional and, when their chief executive, Jim Rodwell, contacted Juventus with a tentative invitation to visit Nottingham for a match to celebrate next year's 150th anniversary, the response was more than he could have imagined. Juventus's young president, Andrea Agnelli, immediately called Ray Trew, Notts' owner, to suggest that they might become the first visitors to the new ground, which is built on the site of the unloved Stadio delle Alpi in Turin's northern suburbs. Notts have a league match against Walsall on Saturday but could hardly turn down such a request.
This was the night when their 200 travelling fans in the 41,000 crowd could watch Neal Bishop, Lee Hughes and Ricky Ravenhill rubbing shoulders with Alessandro Del Piero, Gigi Buffon and Andrea Pirlo – not to mention Dino Zoff, Giampiero Boniperti, Luis Del Sol, Fabio Capello, Marcello Lippi, Claudio Gentile, Roberto Bettega, Ciro Ferrara, Angelo Di Livio, Edgar Davids, Paolo Montero and Fabrizio Ravanelli, who joined the pre-match parade to represent earlier generations. The future embraced its history, and vice versa, in a marvellous football occasion hosted by Agnelli, the fourth member of his family to hold the presidency.
Two and a half hours before kick-off the Notts squad made their way on to the pitch. They had been flown to Turin on a plane chartered by their hosts and been put up at a five-star hotel, receiving a police escort to and from Juventus's training ground. They looked around in awe, taking photographs of the stadium, which is steep-sided, with no running track, rather like a half-size Camp Nou in black and white.
The brilliantly staged gala featured a brass band, speeches, fireworks, a diva on stilts, film clips of Omar Sivori and John Charles on giant screens, the mass singing of Juve, Storia Di Un Grande Amore, huge replicas of the club's trophies, Agnelli cutting a ribbon with golden scissors handed to him by a Monica Bellucci lookalike, dancers dressed as zebras – Notts may be the Magpies, but Juve are Le Zebre – and a quietly devastating parade of 39 white-clad children representing the Heysel dead. And, eventually, a decent game of football.
Could Del Piero, in his 678th game, score his 285th goal and Juve's first in their new home? A Nottingham bookmaker was taking bets on Hughes beating him to it, after the veteran striker became the first Notts player to amass 30 goals in a season since Tommy Lawton. But Notts' manager, Martin Allen, withheld his top scorer until the second half, probably with an eye on the Walsall match rather than out of a desire not to steal the Juve captain's thunder.
The nearest Del Piero came in his 45 minutes on the pitch was with a shot over the bar from the edge of the area. Robert Burch, the Notts goalkeeper, made a couple of fine blocks in the first half, and eight minutes after the interval he saved a penalty from Fabio Quagliarella after Ravenhill had handled the ball but Luca Toni slid the rebound home, putting an end to the only real suspense of a genial occasion.
Three minutes from time Hughes had the satisfaction of becoming the first man to score a goal for a visiting side when he rammed the ball home from two yards after a free-kick had squirmed out of the hands of Alex Manninger, Juve's second substitute goalkeeper. Notts had been good value for their 1-1. Now back to Meadow Lane.
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