For the first 12 months, we thought his name was Garino. That’s how Mauro introduced himself. Sitting outside the port of Calais sipping lukewarm beers, we noticed a lad eyeing us up. From his attire – training shoes, Benetton shirt and neat, side-parted hair, we’d assumed he was a fellow Merseysider – until he spoke.
“Hello, I am Garino. Is possible one beer?”
With those words a lifelong friendship began. Mauro was hitchhiking back to Turin, having thumbed it to Glasgow to see Juventus play Celtic in the 1981-82 European Cup. Liverpool were European champions and we struck up an immediate rapport. Mauro said one of his dreams was to stand on the Kop but his first visit to Liverpool in 1982 didn’t coincide with a home game. Instead, we hopped on the “ordinary” to Birmingham and queued up outside the Witton End to see Liverpool beat Aston Villa 4-2. Mauro was amazed that so many away fans travelled and loved the rough and tumble of the crowd surges whenever Liverpool attacked. More than anything, he loved the debauched atmosphere in our pubs and clubs – he thought we were “crazy”, in a good way.
My first trip to Turin in the autumn of 1984 underlined the similarities between our home cities. Each boasted rich mercantile histories – Liverpool’s built on its docks, Turin’s more recent prosperity stemming from Italy’s biggest manufacturing industry, Fiat. Both cities’ workers had strong, socialist traditions and a fierce rebellious streak but, by 1984, both were in the grip of a recession.
In the winter of 1980-81, a six-week strike against mass redundancies at Fiat’s huge Turin plant was defeated. It signalled the beginning of the end for collective bargaining in Italy and a consequent surge (particularly among the youth) towards the Colletivo Anarchisti. It was a near mirror-image of Liverpool’s accelerated decline under Thatcher and a shift, particularly among the youth, towards Militant and isolationist politics. Both Merseyside and Turin endured large-scale unemployment through the 1980s, along with its side-effects – poverty, crime and drug addiction. Football was truly, for many, an opiate.
And the Turinese love of football was on a par with anything back home. Wherever I went, taxi drivers, bar staff, old men in cafes would be pouring over La Stampa’s pale green football edition. As soon as Mauro explained my allegiances, they wanted to shake my hand, buy me a drink and thank me for Liverpool’s beating of FC Roma in the European Cup final earlier that year.
“Not so lucky when you play us, though,” winked one old boy.
It was the ultimate dream. Juventus were champions of Italy once again, and all we spoke of us was how brilliant it would be if our teams were to meet.
But when Liverpool beat Panathinaikos to set up that dream final, I had a real foreboding. That mid-80s team of ours was beating everyone, in those days. Mauro had come to love his Christmas benders in Liverpool – but would he still be our mate if we thrashed Juve three or four nil? Little was I to know that this would be the least of my worries.
In the weeks and days leading up to the final, which was to be played in the historic Heysel Stadium in Brussels, Mauro and I were on the phone constantly, making arrangements. We’d meet in the Grand-Place at 1pm, his friends and mine, and we’d all have a day in the sunshine. Our little group based itself in Ostend and, on the morning of the game, got the train up to Brussels. But, arriving in the Grand-Place, we were greeted by a raucous cacophony and a sea of red. There must have been 10,000 people packed into the old square, singing and cavorting – there was no way in the world we were going to find Mauro.
It was only once we got into the taxi, after the game, around 11pm that we began fully to understand what had happened. We’d had seats, and we’d seen the fighting on the terraces to our right – but we had no idea anyone had died. Uefa wouldn’t have let the match go ahead if there had been anything serious, would it? But, outside the ground, a young policeman warned me to hide my scarf. He said there were gangs with knives out looking for Liverpool fans and advised us to keep our heads down. We flagged a cab and the driver told us about the death toll. I felt sick. Was Mauro OK? This was a pre-mobile phones era, so there was no way of checking. Arriving at the two-star B&B that had been home for two days, the proprietor could barely look at us as she let us in. Over breakfast the next day there was silence.
I left it two days before I was able to call Mauro. The first thing he said was:
“Where you in the terrace?”
I could hear the relief in his voice when I told him I’d been in the seats.
Over the next few weeks, my friend Peter Hooton called on all his contacts in the city to arrange a friendship trip for a group of Juventus fans, led by Mauro. John Peel DJ’d an exuberant gig on the Royal Iris ferry boat but, while the clubs, hotels and restaurants of Liverpool threw open their doors, it was only Everton that invited the young Italians to their ground.
The friendship with Mauro went lukewarm for a year or two. He had become a father, but I understood the difficulty he had justifying his links to Liverpool. In Italy, in those days, our FA Cup was almost as greatly revered as the Champions League is today, and Mauro’s other big ambition was to go to the FA Cup final. (Fittingly, his first game on the Kop was versus Notts County, upon whose black and white stripes Juve’s kit is based.) His birthday is 8 April and, when a spare ticket became available for the semi-final against Nottingham Forest in 1989, I snapped it up. We persuaded Mauro to come over for a belated birthday trip and, when he opened his card on the Friday night, he just stared at the ticket before bursting into tears. Twenty-four hours later we were in tears again, safe ourselves but shattered as news of Hillsborough’s mounting death toll came through. Mauro put his arms around me.
“Now I think you know,” he said.
It seemed inevitable that, 20 years after Heysel, Liverpool should be drawn against Juventus in the Champions League. Of course Mauro came for the first leg, at Anfield. We threw a birthday party for him in a little Italian restaurant, but he seemed withdrawn. I told him that Liverpool’s supporters had organised a huge commemorative mosaic on the Kop and that Ian Rush, who had played for both clubs, was going to present Mauro with a specially commissioned plaque, on the pitch, before the game. It was only then that he explained his dilemma. The majority of Juve’s hard-core Ultras Drughi had decided to boycott any attempts at friendship, deeming it too little, too late. Mauro went on to the pitch to receive the plaque from Rush, but many Juventus supporters turned their backs on the gesture. Fair enough.
In the years since then, both clubs have endured the extremes. Managers, owners, sponsors and players will come and go, but we, the fans, will always be here. Mauro’s and mine is just one small story of one lasting friendship, but it is, in microcosm, the story of football – the people’s game. So, in Saturday’s final, I won’t be joining the love-in for Barcelona, the world’s favourite club. For me, it’s the Old Lady all the way. Forza Juve.