Footy - Italian Style
Calcio - aka footy style. Last year I went to a footy match here with a couple of colleagues and enjoyed it. Siena AC is really a village club. Tiny little stadium (c. 20k people) right in the middle of town. The adverts are so village - all local adverts for local people and local bakeries and tyre shops. Except for one notable exception - an advert for Playboy stating "always with you" - classic - gotta love the italians for that, super tight and upright but no shame about having porn adverts in their footy club, in fact, there are some adverts fro real porn stars on billboards here - replete with norks n all.
Last season Siena were in Serie B. They got promoted and are now in Serie A. This has prompted me to buy a season ticket - abbonamento - and at €180 who can go wrong.
Have seen a few games so far, not spectacular and in fact the players don't seem very talented, and pretty lazy. Saw Juve at the beginning of the season which was a dire 1-0 loss - thought it was going to be a bad season, however, Juve are now flying high on top of the Serie A and it seems that Siena were just reeled in that day. In fact, since then they have done well and have sneaked into the top half of the league into 9th place. They are even getting a little press coverage after getting nothing at the beginning of the year.
Of course, like anything else in Siena they would be stuffed without the bank Monte dei Paschi propping them up - but then that goes the same for anything in Siena.
In fact, last weekend Siena won 4-1 - we savoured that as I am sure it will be rare - Italians being the specialists of 1-0 football after all.
Also, it is still freaking hot. In the afternoon sun it is down to t-shirt weather again, despite being very cold in the mornings and evenings. Unfortunately the Irish Pub is closed prior to match, but there are bars to have a beer after.
Another fun thing is the arrival of the scooters - when the game is on, the square by the side of the footy ground gets with 1000s of scooters as in the photo.
However, the most amusing thing was a stand off between Siena and Cesena two weeks ago. A handful of Siena fans - maybe 30 stood at one end of a street and maybe 15 Cesena fans at the other end. There was no fear - the Siena lads looked about as hard as my gran, and with wobbly fatness which is unusual for Italians who are normally very slender indeed.
Could be a great season - over n out.
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