RECALLING THE MIRACLE OF CASTEL DI SANGRO

JONNY BRICK CELEBRATES THE SILVER ANNIVERSARY OF A FOOTBALL BOOK SET IN ITALY AND WRITTEN BY AN AMERICAN CRIME WRITER TURNED CALCIO CONVERT...

- JONNY BRICK

IF FOOTBALL were on the national curriculum, then Joe McGinniss' The Miracle of Castel di Sangro would be on the GCSE syallabus.

It took me until a recent holiday to get stuck into a story that seemed, like a James Joyce novel, to be crushed by the weight of its own reputation.

Its American edition has the subtitle 'A tale of passion and folly in the heart of Italy', while Brian Glanville, the doyen of football critics, reckons the story is 'the stuff of science fiction' and a tribute to 'our kind of football'.

FourFourTwo magazine, meanwhile, ranks it alongside The Glory Game by Hunter Davies and Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. Having now read all three, I put McGinniss' tale above the pair of North London ones, as well as above pretty much every other tome in my football library.

Perhaps only Mike Calvin's book Family, about his time embedded with Millwall FC, matches it for drama and suspense, and as an exploration of the human condition through the ups and downs of association football.

The year 1996 saw the passing of the torch from Italian football to the Premiership as Europe's most watchable league.

But for middle-aged McGinniss, who had been a feted writer on American politics and divorced father of three at the age of 27, the 'raw, untameable passion' of Italy was his destination, in particular the mid-eastern Abruzzo region.

Castel di Sangro, which was bombed to smithereens in the Second World War, is 'a tiny village of pig farmers...

tucked high in the mountains', but it becomes the centre of the writer's universe for the 1996-97 Serie B season. His passions had been stirred by USA '94 and, in particular, the wretchedly unlucky and enormously skilful Roberto Baggio, whose play showed 'a degree of elegance, a grace and an aura of magic' that enraptured McGinniss.

He compares the hysteria around the player to John F Kennedy or The Beatles.