Gazzetta Football Italia
Golazoooooooooooooooooooooooo!
How many of you used to watch Gazzetta Football Italia on Channel 4 in the 90s? I did – and I miss it, even now! I miss everything from the cheesy intro music, to James Richardson, updating the world from a café. Updates on football nowadays are too official, proper, and stiff; there isn’t much space for humour and fun in the modern game. All you tend to find are commentators with cheap quips and pointless facts, or pundits that comment as badly as they played as professionals. I mean, when did football commentary become more about melodrama and unnecessary, unhelpful statistics? Better not get me started there!
I don’t just miss Gazzetta Football Italia, though – I miss Italian football from the 90’s. Juventus are trying to bring it back, and hopefully they’ll succeed, but that era was simply untouchable for football. The best players in the world all played in Italy at that time, and Serie A was the absolute epitome of class. I remember watching it with my dad, and because I was a kid then, we had to have our own teams there. At that time, my team was AS Roma, and his was Parma. You can imagine how I’ve rubbed it in his face since then!
Seriously, though – think of all of the outstanding footballers that used to adorn Italian screens! Del Piero, Inzaghi, Zidane, Paulo Sousa, Batistuta, Rui Costa, Pagliuca, Peruzzi, Toldo, Maldini, Costacurta, Kluivert, Totti, Zanetti, Ronaldo, Salas, Casiraghi, Ravanelli, Weah, Baggio, Nakata, Ortega, Nesta – the list just goes on, and on! People try to tell me that the English Premier League is currently the best league in the world, but it’s hard to believe that when it can’t come close to Serie A of the 90’s.
If you get chance, I implore you to trawl YouTube, ignore the bad graphics, and dig out some compilations of goals from Serie A in the 90’s. Sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy football when it was about being classy.
P.S. I surely can’t have been the only one that thought for many years that the intro music included the shout of “go Laziooooooooooo”, can I? Nor to have wondered why the show was biased toward them?!