Travelling story. A lesson of Lazio. (by Conn)

A lesson of Lazio

Many of you will surely remember the thread about the anecdotes by Arcadio Spinozzi, aka SPINA, during his time at Lazio. These stories were taken from a book written by Arcadio; before publishing them on Laziofever I got in touch with him to ask for the permission to translate the anecdotes. In that occasion I found out that Arcadio lives in a small town in Abruzzo, about 200 meters away from my parents’ holiday home!

Meeting Arcadio has been the highlight of my two-weeks vacation this year. He is a truly great guy, and meeting him has been a real pleasure for myself and my two brothers. We talked a lot about Lazio, the past (we got some additional anecdotes eheh) and the present. But there is more… beyond the words, there is the action!

For the very nice evening I’m going to tell you about I need to thank a bunch of guys from Rome, and strong asroma fans, who every year come to spend their holidays in this small town. We challenged them to a five-a-side football match, a derby Lazio-Rome. On the one hand, the asroma players, aged 19-24, a bunch of guys with a good experience in five a side tournaments as a team; even more worringly, all of them play football regularly during the year in 8th – 9th division. On the other side of the pitch, the Lazio players: me and my two brothers, 28, 28 and 23 (but we never play football), Spina, who is now 54, Robert, 42 (he used to play in 6th division) and Guido, 59 (who never played football).

When they saw the old-men Lazio, with Spina lighting a cigarette as soon as he arrived to the pitch, they started sensing an easy victory, with confident looks at each others. On the other hand, we were actually worried to lose badly. The asroma guys knew nothing about Arcadio, we did not tell them anything about him and this made things even more funny. Needlessly to say, Arcadio was the man of the match, scoring 4 goals and leading Lazio to victory with the final score of 5-4! All the Lazio players showed great determination, which unfortunately costed my brother Andrea a knee injury (he was the hero of the day). Conn played as goalkeeper, not the best match for him, but still a couple of decisive saves in the final part of the match. The riomanisti rosicated and, when leaving the pitch, they blamed a not great physical condition.

Arcadio was not only and by far classiest player (of course, you should have seen his touch!) but also the most determinate one, he kept shouting and calling the positions of the players all the time, he was our manager. When Guido said to my brother “we play just for fun, don’t worry too much about a mistake” Arcadio roared “What the hell are you saying! We play for the honour, is it nothing for you? We have one year of prese per il culo ahead of us against asroma, we need to win! ” And then he said “bytheway…” and he unfolded his socks showing the Lazio eagle on them. Brilliant stuff.

By our member Conn