It’s the big-eared curse. It is the Cup that haunts the worst nightmares of the most famous team in Italy. And the real tragedy was also accompanied by the sports drama of the 7 lost finals. Lapped last year in the crowds of Piazza San Carlo in Turin, with one victim and over a thousand injured. It blew up, with a terribly similar script, on May 29, 1985 . Heysel
Stadium , now King Baudouin, Brussels. It is the third final for the bianconeri of what we now call the Champions League . The first one went badly in 1973, against Ajax at the last junction of their total football. Dream vanished even ten years later, with the mockery of Magath’s goal for Hamburg in Athens.
This time it seems to be the right occasion. It must be. It is Trapattoni ‘s Juve with Platini and Boniek, Rossi and Tardelli, Scirea and Cabrini. The opponent is the outgoing Liverpool champion, of Rush and Dalglish, of that Grobbelaar who twelve months earlier hypnotized the Roma penalty takers in the final at the Olympic stadium. Juventus
_will win that Cup with a non-existent penalty awarded by the Swiss referee Andre Daina and converted by Michel Platini. But it will be a victory that came at the end of a dramatic, violent, incredibly bloody evening with 39 dead and hundreds of wounded. The murderous fury of the English hooligans I find the complicity of the inadequacy of a dilapidated plant, of an incapable organization and of an international federation, UEFA in particular, absolutely irresponsible. Michel Platini said remembering that tragic ending: When the acrobat falls, the clowns enter. The voice of Bruno Pizzul tells millions of Italian viewers the tragedy on live television.
We publish an excerpt from the book “ Heysel, the hidden truths”(2010, Bradipo Libri) by the journalist Francesco Caremani with a preface by Walter Veltroni. Roberto Beccantini
writes in the introduction:
(…) Beyond the reimbursements, and the little or much that has been done, one must never surrender to inertia. Heysel is a burden we carry inside. We will never be able to support it anywhere. It wouldn’t even be fair. Thirty-nine died from a football match. Perhaps (also) for tickets sold in the carlona, certainly for annoying drunkenness and lack of public order. The bell of destiny sooner or later rings for everyone, but when the tolls deafen a stadium, all that remains is to rebel (…)
The words of Walter Veltroni :
(…) It happened, in Brussels, what many could have easily foreseen and avoided, and did not want to or did not know how to do it. On that day the stadium of the game becomes the stadium of death, a death broadcast live and worldwide. A death that mixes with the game of football (and for this reason it was more cruel and more hateful) that takes away the breath of life from those who would have simply wanted to applaud, win or lose with their team, with their favorites. And instead they all lost, despite the cup raised, the round of the field, despite the smiles, the ‘we didn’t know’, despite the goal. Despite the victory, they all lost, on that mournful evening at Heysel, when the heartbeat suddenly stopped for thirty-nine people. They were mostly Italian, but the obituary also lists four Belgian names, two French and one Irish. The youngest was eleven and his name was Andrea. Six hundred were the wounded (…)
Otello Lorentini and father of Roberto, a doctor from Arezzo, among the victims of that evening. He was among the first to fight on the front line to obtain justice by nailing UEFA to his responsibilities. He founded and was president of the ” Association among the families of the victims of Brussels “. Disappeared in 2014, Francesco Caremani reports his testimony of those moments:
(…) Otello Lorentini talks about what happened, what he remembers, with great clarity: “It was a deliberate tragedy, caused by the inability of the Belgian organizers, the police, the leaders of the international federation. I denounce these unforgivable gaps. It is inconceivable to break the life of a thirty-year-old man in this way. Someone has to pay. I have already paid: I have lost a son … Before the British charges began I was quite calm. At one point I saw that there were only ten policemen left in the corner. Too many people came in. The British began to fidget. More and more. I stopped a stone with the newspaper. Let’s go, I told my son and grandchildren. The British took apart the dividing net and threw everything at us: pieces of iron, cans, concrete bullets. And they uploaded for the first time. Our group began to retreat fearfully. There were women and children, no one felt like accepting the clashes. The police did not intervene. We were in the middle of the curve. I saw the wall getting closer and closer. I attached myself to the column of a sleeper. Roberto was attached to me. Let’s go, I yelled at him. Yes, he answered me. Then came another wave of fans loaded by the British. I turned around and saw that Roberto was gone. He was gone, swallowed by the crowd. The wave of people passed me by. A moment of calm followed: I threw myself towards the field. It was impossible to get everyone to safety: the only two exits were the two little doors of a meager meter, one of which only opened outwards. Under the pressure of the fleeing crowd, the concrete lintels also collapsed. I saw a free passage and I launched myself forward. Once on the pitch I started waving a scarf and calling. It was there that I saw my nephew Andrea with his hands in his hair. I approached: Roberto had remained on the steps. Dead, crushed. He had a scratch on his forehead. What was I supposed to do
Next to us was a heap of lifeless bodies. A Belgian policeman came and tried to snatch Roberto from me. They were taking the dead away. I rebelled, because I saw that they dragged them without respect. Two more policemen arrived. This and my son, I cried, let me. Then, with my grandchildren, we lifted Roberto up and we took him to the vans… Before leaving the stadium I saw the English who had fun throwing the things of the dead into the air: shoes, bags, cameras. Disgusting scenes. Then we went out, but it was impossible to find a phone, or a taxi. We stopped one almost by force and had us taken to the morgue. Here the Belgians forced us to wait more than three hours. They treated us with arrogance: a scandalous behavior. Only at three in the morning did I see my son’s body again and I noticed that he no longer had the gold chain around his neck and the wedding ring. The Belgians told us they had removed them to identify him. But it wasn’t true: the cops got it. He writes that I want to denounce the shortcomings of the whole organization, the choice of an inadequate stadium, the behavior of the Belgians. Only the Italian ambassador behaved very well with us. Someone has to pay for my son’s death ”. These words would be enough, this reconstruction would be enough, but unfortunately the pettiness in this story, the looting, the silences, the attempts to evade responsibility, to throw everything into oblivion as soon as possible and the broken promises have studded every day after that 29 May of 85. The Belgians told us they had removed them to identify him. But it wasn’t true: the cops got it. He writes that I want to denounce the shortcomings of the whole organization, the choice of an inadequate stadium, the behavior of the Belgians. Only the Italian ambassador behaved very well with us. Someone has to pay for my son’s death ”. These words would be enough, this reconstruction would be enough, but unfortunately the pettiness in this story, the looting, the silences, the attempts to evade responsibility, to throw everything into oblivion as soon as possible and the broken promises have studded every day after that 29 May of 85. The Belgians told us they had removed them to identify him. But it wasn’t true: the cops got it. He writes that I want to denounce the shortcomings of the whole organization, the choice of an inadequate stadium, the behavior of the Belgians. Only the Italian ambassador behaved very well with us. Someone has to pay for my son’s death ”. These words would be enough, this reconstruction would be enough, but unfortunately the pettiness in this story, the looting, the silences, the attempts to evade responsibility, to throw everything into oblivion as soon as possible and the broken promises have studded every day after that 29 May of 85. Write that I want to denounce the shortcomings of the whole organization, the choice of an inappropriate stadium, the behavior of the Belgians. Only the Italian ambassador behaved very well with us. Someone has to pay for my son’s death ”. These words would be enough, this reconstruction would be enough, but unfortunately the pettiness in this story, the looting, the silences, the attempts to evade responsibility, to throw everything into oblivion as soon as possible and the broken promises have studded every day after that 29 May of 85. Write that I want to denounce the shortcomings of the whole organization, the choice of an inappropriate stadium, the behavior of the Belgians. Only the Italian ambassador behaved very well with us. Someone has to pay for my son’s death ”. These words would be enough, this reconstruction would be enough, but unfortunately the pettiness in this story, the looting, the silences, the attempts to evade responsibility, to throw everything into oblivion as soon as possible and the broken promises have studded every day after that 29 May of 85.
