Thursday, April 19, 2007

Rinaldi shoots, Rinaldi scores

I had always hoped my son might be the first Rinaldi to score in the Premiership but no such luck. Our Brazilian cousin Douglas Rinaldi got off the mark for Watford against Blackburn on Wednesday night.

On an unrelated note entirely, well done to Roma for holding up Inter's Scudetto party. Weren't the Nerazzurro fans pathetic jeering their team after the game. How quickly they have adopted the attitude more suited to teams which win the league every year.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good goal. Worthy of a Rinaldi :0)

TT.

martinobhoy said...

Brazilian Douglas Rinaldi?

Now there's one mixed up kid!

Antonio Gurrado said...

Thanks for your visit, to you and all the Calcio Italia crew... I'm very fond of your magazine!

ginkers said...

Trent

Makes me proud.

Martino

I know, its a spooky combination.

Antonio

Di niente, se passi per la Scozia fammi sapere e possiamo discutere tutti i peccati dell'Inter!

Spangly Princess said...

ginkers, I wonder if you would be so kind as to maybe contact me with your email address, there's something I wanted to ask you about - am at spanglyprincess@gmail.com

Anonymous said...

Whilst I'm not a fan of booing your own team, unless they are blatently underperforming in every game the fans have a right to voice their opinion after paying to watch the game. After Inter's last 3 games I can certainly understand it, also the frustration to see Milan in the Semi's of CL also contributed to it I imagine. It wasn't as if they were booing the team, it was showing their dissapointment at the performance against Roma ;)

Anyway congratulations to Douglas Rinaldi :D

Anonymous said...

scott
You're joking aren't you?
Interisti really have something wrong with their minds. I'm convinced of it. There surely has to be something mentally wrong with a person, firstly for chosing to support such an historically disaster of a team, and secondly for then booing/whistling them when they're on the verge of providing you with some (rusty) silverware for the first time in 20 years and lose only their 1st match of the season to the 2nd placed team. Yeah, they should be throwing flares at their own keeper and vespas at the coach for that!

Maybe I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they realised that their "scudetto di cartone" means jack shit.

And the thing that really confuses me the most, is how can an Italian support a team which has consistently for years fielded hardly any Italians, usually 2 at most, and sometimes none at all.
If my team did that, then they would not be my team any longer, because I'm not going to support a squad of foreign primadonna mercenaries who do not represent me in any way.

Interisti, and Moratti, will take whatever they can get.

-AR

Anonymous said...

AR -

Well first of all, you can't pick and choose and change your team. As far as I'm concerned you stick by your team for the whole of your life.

As I said before, there was booing for only 1 game. The fans are dissapointed by this game, which was meant to wrap up the scudetto but saw instead their team being outplayed by a side who got thrashed 7-1 a week or so back. To show their dissapointment they boo-ed the team off the park. Now I don't think this is the right thing to do personally but the fans have just seen 3 poor performances in a row, seen their team get knocked out of the CL recently and worst of all seen their rivals make it to the Semi Finals. All this frustration was added to a poor performance in which was meant to be the crowning of the league champions. Sometimes players need a kick up the backside, I'm not sure if this booing will achieve anything but it at least shows the players that the fans aren't happy with the performance.

As for the 2nd part, well football's changed a lot since the 80's. Obviously the changing of the rules to allow more foreigners to play for a side has made these changes. The club strives to be the best, does it really matter where the majority of players are? I doubt it does if you are a winning side. The fact remains that most Italian players are either untransferrable (De Rossi, Totti, Toni?) at Milan/Juve (making it near on impossible to sign) or are not good enough and there are better foreign alternatives... Maybe in the future Inter will be more succesful in signing Italian players over Juve/Milan now that they are the top dogs :p

I don't really understand how you can say that you wouldn't support a team with no Italians. Perhaps I don't understand because I'm not Italian ;) but seriously every major club has foreigners througout their side. Ideally you would love some local boy at the heart of the team but logically this isn't smart if the best local player is way below the standard needed.

Anonymous said...

"Perhaps I don't understand because I'm not Italian".

Correct. You hit the nail on the head, my friend.

Re your description of Inter being "top dogs", you can put an asterisk (*) next to that, just as as one will be displayed next to their last two scudetti for history to remember.

Maybe they were booing because they were embarassed by Adriano's dive, or because Roma play far more attractive football than Inter most of the time. Who really knows?

Just like you have the right to boo your team for whatever reason, I have the right to tell my team to go and get f***ed if it ever fields a full team of foreigners.

Foreigners in England have enhanced the league. Foreigners in Italy are generally mediocre, doing what Italians could do just as effectively, if not more effectively. But they do it cheaper. The days of the 3 foreigner rule in Italy were good days because those 3 foreigners were usually worthy of their place in the squad. And the national team had depth in every position, players of real world class quality, because young Italians were nurtured through to the national team. eg. Vicini's youngsters which he brought through the ranks of the under 21s through to a young Euro 88 team then on to Italia 90. It doesn't happen any more. You get quality Italian under 21 players like Giampaolo Pazzini at Fiorentina and Raffaele Palladino at Juve saying to their clubs in the media "give us a chance" rather than buy foreign strikers next season, and they're right because they have proved they can score goals. So many players who shine at under 21 national level don't come through for the full national team because they don't get the opportunity at club level, left to play in small teams and serie B.

I might be getting off track.

So to reiterate my main point, I already think Roma have too many foreigners, as does the whole league, but if they played with as many foreigners as Inter or won a scudetto with them, I wouldn't give a fat rat's clacker about the team, and as a fan that's my right. Maybe you feel different if you call your team "Internazionale".

I hope they celebrated long and hard in the change rooms in Siena.

-AR

Anonymous said...

i would just like to add, that the reason I feel strongly about my team (Roma) and all teams not fielding foreigners in the manner of Inter, is because although I support a team, I love Italian football and want it to be the best it can be domestically and in Europe. So I support Milan and Juve in the champions league and when they get to the semis and finals I cheer as if they were my own team. I think you can't help but admire them and they have done so much for Italian football through the years. To some extent I'd even wish Lazio well in Europe. But not Inter. They simply do not represent Italian football either in Italy or in Europe, although I am thankful to Materazzi and Grosso for helping my Azzurri win the world cup, and I'd love for Grosso to play for Roma, but that's where it ends with them.
ok I'm done... it's ginkers' blog.
-AR

ginkers said...

Nice to see there can be so much debate without me! I am with AR on the desire to see more Italian players getting a game but not sure I would be quite so scathing of all the foreigners in the league.

It's a fact that the number of stranieri has dropped significantly lately having peaked a few years ago. Inter are now the exception rather than the rule. For example, I watched a cracking match between Palermo and Parma last night where the foreign input was minimal.

As for Inter's title, I think it will always be considered about a 60% Scudetto. They still had to go out and win it but the odds were skewed in their favour. As for their fans, I have mellowed a bit on their boos but I still think they have a few too many delusions of grandeur for a team that hasn't won the league for the best part of two decades.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Aussie Romanista. Stranieri are less likely to give their all for their Italian club team. Italian players know what cuore, grinta and voglia are and they know how much it means to the tifosi when they show it.

Of course some foreigners are able to make a complete transition into Italian football. Nedved is a great example of that, and as a Juventino I'm delighted to have him playing in my team. The other extreme is a player like Ibrahimovic. I was delighted when he left Juve. He never showed that he would bleed for Juve, like I would if I were him. I don't care how talented he is. There are many other players out there as talented.

Regarding Inter and the multitude of terrible foreigners they've had play for them since they last won a real scudetto, I wonder if one of the young Italian defenders they've discarded in recent years like Bruno Cirillo, Matteo Ferrari and Giovanni Pasquale would have had the nightmare game that that muppet Gresko had on 05/05/02.

Or did Moggi pay him off??? ;o)

- Juventino

Anonymous said...

Good points AR

I agree with them in a sense, but for every Baggio and Mancini that made me fall in love with Italian football there was Zidane, Batistuta and Rui Costa.

I fell in love with Italian football because of the passion, style and unbelievable technical level of the teams compared to any football I had ever seen.

For me, I didn't care whether they were Italian or Brazillian. All the teams played with a style that I prefered and still do to any other league in the World.

Anyway, an intersting point of view and I fully understand it.

Anonymous said...

Foreigners like Zidane, Batistuta (who has unbelievably retired to my home city in Aust!) and Rui Costa are more than welcome in Italy. It's the average cheap foreign crap I'm on about. Juventino explained perfectly above.
-AR