Oh no! Sampdoria v Chievo is a no go

It was up early after last night’s Juventus v Roma game to get a train to Genoa to watch Sampdoria take on Chievo, but sadly the day was to end in a bit of disaster.
Not quite the disaster levels associated with Genoa in 2001 – for it was here I first learned of the horrors of 9/11, but something close to it on a trip abroad to watch football – we couldn’t get a ticket.
It’s not that surprising that the Italian authorities have clamped down on ticket sales after Genoa was the scene of the riots during the Italy v Serbia game last month.
Gentile Sampdoria fans are hardly in the same class as those Serb fans who smashed the place up, but rules are rules and the rules here are that tickets stop being sold two hours before kick off.
We’d arrived at the ground with about 45 minutes to go and it was great to be back. I’ve seen Samporia before – at home to Ancona in 2003, so it was not really that much of a disappointment that I couldn’t get in, just a tad frustrating.
After confirming with a steward that Gordon and I would not be watching the game in the flesh, we trundled back into Genoa against a stream of Samp fans to drown our sorrows.
Today follows on from trips to Ajax and Anderlecht in the last decade when I’ve been refused entry to a game for similar reasons – these things happen I suppose.
We holed up in bar to catch the end of the football and joy of joys the game turned out to be a real stinker – and there were hundreds of empty blue seats there too.
Samp favourite Antonio Cassano, the former wonder kid of Italian football had, according to a woman in the town’s Bar Mario, called the president a “dickhead” and been axed from the club.
Said woman, who claimed she was American, turned out to be incredibly irriating and as we stood watching the rest of the game she told us that everyone in the bar was “routing for the guys in blue” who of course were Sampdoria.
Yeah right, thanks love.
She was busy pretending to be upset by Samp’s inability to find the net and in between taking the piss out of us for being English she was getting tips on understanding the offside rule by a lovely old Italian gent, who was sure there was a phrase in English football called ‘Franking’. We figured he may have been on about ‘Marking’ but all of remained confused and that didn’t include the woman behind the bar.
With no live football to watch and a train to catch back to Turin we sat down and had a meal to finish off a short trip to Italy. As I tucked in to delicious saltimbocca and chips I decided that it didn’t really matter that we hadn’t managed to get in, it was just really nice being back in Italy once again.