Blowing the whistle on Bertini

PAOLO BERTINI is a nice guy.

I don’t know him personally, but I met him when he was the match official for the game between the Juventus and Liverpool youth teams to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Heysel tragedy, and he seemed, like 99% of referees, to be a man with only the good of the game at heart.

On the FIFA list since 2003, he’s the pride and joy of his local referees’ association in Arezzo – “the model, the example of what every referee dreams of becoming from childhood”, as they said in a tribute to him two years ago.

And he usually gets good marks from the football papers.

Yet this is the same Paolo Bertini who is at the heart of the match-fixing scandal that continues to fester like a weeping wound in the side of Italian football.

At the weekend we learned that 106 games have now been investigated as a result of the monitoring of phone calls involving disgraced former Juventus director Luciano Moggi and other members of his network. Fifteen of them were league games where Bertini was the referee.

Many of these matches are not suspicious; others are controversial, but no more so than many Premiership games where an official gets something wrong. There are actually very few examples of really suspect matches.

Juventus-Milan in December 2004 is one of them. There were two seriously dubious decisions, both favouring the home team.

Milan were refused a blatant penalty when Hernan Crespo was hauled back in the area. Kaka was also stopped with the goal at his mercy for a non-existent offside. The game finished 0-0 and Bertini was the referee.

Phone records reveal that the day before the game Luciano Moggi made no fewer than 51 calls to mobile phones on his secret network, using foreign SIM cards so that the conversations could not be monitored. How many calls related to the Juventus-Milan game is unclear – there were three other suspect games on the same day.

But Moggi’s alleged lieutenant, former Messina director Angelo Fabiani, spoke 18 times with Bertini over the previous few days, and Bertini is known to have been in contact with the Juve boss 15 times over the same period, always using the foreign numbers.

It is this sort of strong, but circumstantial, evidence that convinces the magistrates there was wrongdoing?

To those of us with faith in the integrity of referees there is still the hope that the sheer volume of phone calls might be evidence that Moggi, Fabiani and their co-conspirators in the administration met resistance from Paolo Bertini and his colleagues. After all why should you need 33 phone calls to get someone to fix a match if he is a willing accomplice?

Perhaps all this frantic chat was because there were men of principle among the men in black (or rather lemon, as this is now the colour of choice for match officials in Italy).

Perhaps — but then again, why agree to a clandestine phone network unless you have something to hide? Until one of the referees involved breaks

silence we will never know the truth. In Arezzo they are fervently hoping their favourite son can explain.

For a breath of fresh air and honest competition you need to turn to Holland, where Sunday’s rollercoaster had three cars running side by side as they entered the final 45 minutes of the season, all of them on equal points, each of them in a position to win the title on goal difference.

AZ Alkmaar started the day in pole position, with Ajax and PSV not just treading on their heels but on their ankles and toes as well.

With ten minutes to go PSV were 5-1 up against Vitesse Arnhem, with Ajax 2-0 up at Willem II, and AZ stuck at 2-2 against Excelsior, Rotterdam’s third team.

As the games entered added time, Ajax needed a third and AZ needed a miracle. Instead Excelsior got the goal, and set large Dutchmen in baseball caps blubbering on the terraces.

Full time in Eindhoven, and the most anxious two minutes listening for the Ajax result before the crowd exploded in joy and PSV secured their 20th title. By one goal.

The beauty of league football in countries like Holland is that it continues to provide tremendous excitement and intense local competition.

For all the drama of this week’s Champions League semi-finals, that is still the lifeblood of the game.