No One Cares What Catania Courts Think
By: Martha | April 5th, 2007
Despite the fact that less that 24 hours ago Catania’s civil court ruled to allow fans back in to Catania’s home games (which are still being played at neutral grounds), their match against Roma on Saturday — which is being staged at Lecce — will be played behind closed doors. Take that, Catania civil courts!
The decision was made by a body called the “National Observers” who, though I can’t find any information about who they actually are, evidently have quite a bit of pull. The all-powerful Observers decreed that, no matter what the courts want, the game is “high risk” and therefore will be played with no one watching. Apparently there have been problems between Catania and Roma supporters* in the past, and that legacy — according to, well, the National Observers — is enough to allow this mysterious body to overrule the courts. Hell, forget the FIGC appeal of yesterday’s verdict, the National Observers have made all of that unnecessary!
This begs the question, though: Is there anything the National Observers can’t do? Who are these people, and would they be willing to come over here and sort out some of the issues we’ve got stuck in the courts? Plus, there’s this whole war thing that’s banging around in Congress — could they do some work on that, too?
*It’s hard to know if last night’s events at the Olimpico had anything to do with this but one could hardly be blamed for assuming there was a connection.
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I think this is another case of Football Italia having translation issues. From what I gather on stadionews, the complete version of “National Observers” that is L’Osservatorio nazionale sulle manifestazioni sportive-National Observatory for Sport, basically, which seems to be part of the Ministry of the Interior/Home Office. (Native/fluent Italian speakers please correct my off-the-cuff translations, my Italian isn’t that great.)
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Ah, well that make a little more sense Lisa, thanks. The weird thing, though, is that I found the phrase “national observers” in several reports of official governmental meetings/events in Italy, but it was never clear what the hell they are. In the other pieces, they seemed more like reporting agencies than the people in charge of enforcement, but that’s all I could discern. (Which, obviously, was far from helpful.)
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