Timesonline.co.uk
November 08, 2003
This Football Life: Moratti in a real fix over Inter’s glorious but tainted
history
By Brian Glanville
FOR Inter Milan fans, Massimo Moratti, the club president, can do nothing
right. At the San Siro they usually jeer him. While AC Milan, their eternal
city rivals, flaunt the European Cup, Inter have not won the scudetto, the
Italian title, since 1989, when they left Milan a dozen points behind. This
season, Moratti enraged the supporters by selling Hern醤 Crespo to Chelsea.
Things looked up when a feeble Arsenal team were thrashed 3-0 at Highbury,
but it proved a flash in the pan.
For the umpteenth time during Moratti’s reign, the manager, in the shape of
H閏tor C鷓er, was dismissed, and while Alberto Zaccheroni awaited his moment
to take to the bench, Inter went down 3-0 in Moscow to a modest Lokomotiv
team.
On Wednesday they failed to take their revenge on the Russians, held to a
1-1 draw after taking the lead, and the miserable attendance, just 25,000 in
that vast stadium, tells you all you need to know about how their supporters
felt. Inter, top of Champions League group B with seven points, should still
qualify, but Moratti will still be crouching beneath the shadow of his
formidable father, Angelo.
True, Moratti Jr has had bad luck, particularly in the case of Ronaldo, the
prolific Brazilian. Having paid a fortune to buy him from Barcelona, severe
knee injuries decreed that Inter would get limited use out of him and when
he did at last get fit the striker showed scant gratitude for the money that
Inter spent on his treatment and huge salary, taking off in a flurry of
recriminations to Real Madrid.
Last summer, Moratti continued to spend lavishly on new players - Kily
Gonz醠ez and Julio Cruz, of Argentina, Sabri Lamouchi, of France, Andy van
der Meyde, of Holland - but it has not worked. Perhaps the best you can say
for him is that, under his aegis, Inter have put behind them the
malefactions of his father’s years in charge.
Under the draconian managership of the flamboyant Helenio Herrera, the
European Cup was won twice, the scudetto four times. In the foyer of Inter’s
training ground stands a bust of Angelo Moratti, below it a most effusive
eulogy. But when Keith Botsford, my American colleague, and I were
investigating what we called The Years of the Golden Fix, it transpired that
Inter’s European victories of the 1960s were the fruit of bribery and
corruption in which Angelo Moratti played a crucial part in a process
implemented by two men also now dead: Dezso Solti, the Hungarian fixer, and
the serpentine Italo Allodi. Inter’s secretary, he became general manager of
Juventus when we showed them to be guilty of an abortive attempt to “buy“ a
Portuguese referee.
Three years in a row, Inter made offers to referees in the second legs of
European Cup semi-finals to be played at the San Siro and twice it worked,
in 1964 and 1965, when they went on to win the final. On the third occasion,
in 1966, Gyorgy Vadas, a brave Hungarian official, refused to be bribed.
Real Madrid held out and went on to lift the trophy.
In 1964, the sufferers were Borussia Dortmund, who had a key player sent
off. In 1965 it was Liverpool, victims of two dreadful decisions by Ortiz de
Mendibil, the Spaniard. Botsford and I knew that Vadas refused to be
tempted; getting him to talk years later was the problem.
Having flown to Budapest, we at last managed to meet him in the dim
cafeteria of Radio Budapest, where everybody involved in Hungarian football,
good guys and bad, seemed to be working. Large, good-natured, anxious, he
refused to talk; he had plainly suffered enough. Not another international
match would he get after that night. It was left to Peter Borenich, a
talented, persistent young local journalist, to get him to speak and publish
what he said in Only The Ball Has A Skin.
Solti had been with him and his linesman, Vadas said, from morning to night.
When they were alone in his hotel room, Solti offered him enough money to
buy five Mercedes if he bent the match for Inter, payable in dollars -
double if Inter won on a late penalty, five times as much were they to win
by a penalty in extra time.
On the morning of the match, Vadas and his linesman were invited to Angelo
Moratti’s villa for lunch. He at once gave each a gold watch. During the
meal he told Solti to buy them colour television sets and a host of
electrical appliances. But Vadas refereed the match impeccably. At
half-time, Solti invaded his dressing-room, ranting that he had failed to
give three penalties. At 5am the next day, Solti phoned his friend, Gyorgy
Honti, secretary of the Hungarian football federation, to tell him that
Vadas had cheated Inter out of the match. Back in Budapest, Vadas was faced
by an outraged Honti.
Yet Angelo Moratti is still revered. What is this strange Italian weakness
for the ruthless warrior, the condottiere? You sense it again in present
attempts - not least by Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy - to
whitewash Mussolini, forgetting the brutal treatment of the peasantry, the
murder of dissidents. Angelo Moratti did not murder anyone, but he seems a
strange sort of hero. |
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