Roberto Gotta in Italy

Stadio Olympico, Torino, Italia


Last Wednesday, attendance at some of the midweek Serie A matches was so low all you could see from television highlights were empty sections. Only 670 fans bothered to buy a ticket for Siena's home match v Catania, which made for a cringeworthy 8,000 crowd once you add in season ticket holders in the small, town-centre ground, while Reggina-Livorno did not sound exotic enough to lure more than 857 souls away from their dinner tables. Juventus-Inter, though, was not one of those reruns, but it quickly gained the status of classic, as one of the best matches, if not the best match, of the season so far. The media anticipation had been so massive for a while that you had the feeling that the round of midweek matches was almost seen as a nuisance because it would obviously require newspapers and TV shows to momentarily focus on them instead of carrying on with the hype.