Verona players refreshingly good but some fans poor

Serie A club have played very well since being promoted, but their fans chose to sing instead of maintain a one-minute silence in memory of those who died in a boat accident in Italy.

Verona, in yellow, have played excellent football since being promoted to Serie A football.

The eyes of the world have been on Italy, and particularly the tiny Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, over the last week.

Bodies are still being recovered from the sea around Lampedusa of victims from the shipwreck in which over 200 people escaping from Africa lost their lives.

At stadiums across the Italy, football was asked to think for a moment about the tragedy. Mostly, the one-minute silences before kick off in memory of the dead were impeccably observed by crowds at Serie A arenas.

At Bologna it was not.

The images of Hellas Verona’s away fans singing when they had been asked to be respectful have now been broadcast worldwide. The sabotaging of the moment seemed concerted. The saboteurs appeared to be chanting, sarcastically, a well-known funeral dirge.

The match had started late, because of fighting between rival fans outside the ground. By the end of the game Verona, newly promoted, were celebrating a win that took them fifth in the table.

It is refreshing to see an upwardly mobile club succeed in a top flight dominated by big-city teams, but it would also be fair to say that not everybody welcomed Verona’s return to Serie A after an absence of 11 years.

Some of their ultras have a poisonous reputation, racist as well as delinquent, and the behaviour in the lead-up to the match was a stark reminder of why.