The Wanderer
This article is the fourth in a series containing extracts from the book shown below, first published in 1999, which Grays Athletic FC have kindly been granted permission to reproduce:
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinniss
Published by Sphere an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group www.littlebrown.co.uk a Hachette UK Company – www.hachette.co.uk

Club Historian, Chris Turner recently lent me the book to read, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I asked the publishers if I may have permission to publish extracts in our club programme as I thought our readers would find in interesting. I was informed that, sadly, Joe McGinniss (pictured above) had passed away in 2014, so it would be a matter for his estate to consider my request. Although the publishers were, understandably, looking for a payment, I was very pleased to receive agreement through his family that no charge would be made, as they were happy for a community club, such as ours, to publicise Joe’s excellent work. Thank you to Joe’s wife, Nancy and her family for allowing the club to share his amazing story through our Official Match Day Magazine.
THE HISTORY OF FOOTBALL IN CASTEL DI SANGRO
In the first months after World War II, a young priest named Don Arbete was entrusted with the task of rebuilding a rudimentary society in Castel di Sangro, as grieving families slowly made their way back to the ruins of what had been their town from the exile that the war had imposed upon them.
The priest began in the only way he knew: with children eager to kick and a “ball” composed of dirty socks held together with twine. He became so proud of his charges that he invited a neighbouring, though somewhat less devastated village to a play game. Early one October morning in 1945, he loaded his shoeless boys and their ball of socks onto a flatcar, hand-pumped the ten kilometres to the grassless rock-strewn pitch where the opposition waited: arrogant in the extreme because they not only had shoes, but an actual pre-war, if somewhat deflated, football for the match.
The lads of Castel di Sangro “escaped” with a victory, running barefoot for their lives towards the flatcar. They managed to flee successfully, returning to their ravaged village with a tale of triumph so unlikely that had not the priest vouched for it, many would never have believed it.
A town team was officially formed in 1953. In the decades that followed they acquired a reputation for a being a hard-nosed squad that played with unusual tenacity. They enjoyed a fair degree of success in local amateur and semi-professional ranks.
Football in Italy developed a structure and hierarchy as complex, extensive and rigidly adhered to as that of either the Vatican or the Mafia. There are levels upon levels upon levels, and within each level there are layers upon layers upon layers. One might envisage it as a pyramid, although, especially towards the bottom, the smooth geometric shape tends to buckle a bit and the sort of existential untidiness so common to other facets of Italian life holds sway.

At the tip of the pyramid are the eighteen teams that play in the Serie A. There are massive rewards for success, not only for winning the championship, but the access gained to the Champions Cup [Editor as it was known in 1999 when the book was written]. The sale of worldwide television rights has made the competition the golden egg, if not the goose itself, for which every club in Europe strives.
There are also two other international club competitions for teams, that while strong, did not win their country’s league. From these, too, great riches and much prestige can be garnered. [Editor – this gave an interesting insight from an American explaining our wonderful game to other Americans as well as readers in many other countries who may not have realised how big the football “business” had become, even before we reached the year 2000].
Were such bonuses not enough to ensure fierce competition throughout the nine-month Serie A season, a stick, as well as a carrot, is employed. To wit: the bottom four finishers are relegated to the next level down – Serie B. Likewise, the top four Serie B clubs are promoted to Serie A.
Below that, the bottom four in Serie B, drop into the no-longer fully national C1. Here, the thirty-six teams are split into two divisions – north and south – largely to cut down on travel costs, which take an increasing toll on club finances the further a club slips from filled seats in large stadia and the glamour and glory of international competition.
Below C1 there lies the netherworld of C2, whose fifty-four teams are split into three regional divisions. Therefore professional football in Italy consists of 128 teams, with perhaps an average of twenty players in each, meaning that about 2,500 men earn their living playing the game, receiving salaries at the bottom that may just make ends meet, to the many millions earned paid to the stars of Serie A.
Even from C2 the structure continues downward. The “Campianato Nazionale Dilettanti”, or national amateur league, is divided into nine regional “Gironi”, or circles, each consisting of eighteen teams. Despite its name, players receive some compensation, adding 162 semipro clubs to the 128 that are professional.
Even at this depth, stagnation is avoided by having the bottom three finishers from each of the C2 divisions relegated to the Dilettanti, while the winner of each Gironi gets a crack at C2. Meanwhile, the bottom four clubs from each Dilettanti sector are re-assigned to the almost unimaginably lowly “Campionato di Eccellenza Regionale” or championship for the “excellent teams of the region” - a contradiction in terms if ever there was one!
Yet even from there the downward spiral continues, through “Campionato Promozione” and finally to the land of no names, where the hierarchy becomes simply “Prima Categoria”, “Seconda Categoria”, and, at the very, very bottom, “Terza Categoria”, or third category, a level below which there are no teams, simply out-of-shape factory workers kicking a ball around on Sunday mornings instead of going to church.
Castel di Sangro started at the bottom: Terza Categoria – an appropriate level for a squad of locals from a town of five thousand still rebuilding from the war.
Pietro Rezza, a burly young southerner had ridden into town on a donkey one day and started immediately to build housing for a town that needed it. He also soon married the daughter of one of the wealthiest families to have returned to Castel di Sangro after the war.
Rezza began to build farther afield, ranging south, toward and eventually into the city of Napoli, where newcomers who sought to make large sums of money were not welcomed warmly by “La Cammora”, the Neapolitan cousin to Sicily’s “Mafia”. Here the phrase “construction business” was used to describe a variety of enterprises that – were disputes to arise among those involved – tended to put men below ground even faster than they provided new houses above it.
Rezza grew wealthy enough to build himself an estate of Jurassic Park style and proportion high above the small town of Castel di Sangro. He also purchased lavish vacation homes near the sea, in Pescara and in Lugano, Switzerland, where many high-ranking members of organised-crime syndicates were buying or building personal retreats.
By 1982, the football team of Signor Rezza’a adopted home town of Castel di Sangro earned promotion from Terza to Seconda Categoria, which at the time was probably THE major event in the town’s scant post-war history. Unfortunately, the team and the town were flat broke and the higher level would require a small fee to the Categoria central office for its operating budget [Editor: at our current Step 4 level, it’s about £1,200 a season that we have to find to play], a few thousand lire to give to each player for a win, a bit of new equipment and enough cash on hand to reimburse for fuel costs those players who drove their cars to away matches. [Editor: at our level some clubs have contracted players, but more generally, it’s payments to cover petrol costs for games and training, plus other out-of-pocket expenses like a couple of pair of boots].
Yet the difference between the “small fees to the league and some win bonuses and petrol money” and “all the money in the world” is virtually non-existent if you have none! It seemed that they might have to decline the promotion, because they could not afford to accept it.
Signor Rezza, who’d not evinced any prior interest in football, quickly solved the problem by buying the team. He was at the time, sixty-two years old, childless and separated from his wife. He had two nieces – one married an oral surgeon, who gave not a whit about football. The other, Maria Teresa, married the debonair Gabriele Gravina, who had come north from the region of Puglia and had also come of age with large, is somewhat undefined, ambitions for himself.
Gravina began to work closely with Rezza, in the construction business and in “related enterprises”, into which category fell the town football club. Rezza put Gravina in charge of the club and promptly forgot about it.
In the first year in Seconda Categoria they finished second and the following first, thereby earning promotion to Prima Categoria. At this level, it wasn’t possible to field a competitive team made up of only men born and raised in Castel di Sangro. While still not offering salaries, the canny Gravina arranged jobs and in-season living quarters for a few players of higher quality. [Editor: a familiar tale, currently not too far away from us in our own county].
So it continued through the 1980s, with a team at a level that represented cities with a population of at least 20,000 and some far larger than that, rather than the 5,000 who inhabited Castel di Sangro. More and more players arrived from farther and farther away until finally in 1989, to nation-wide, if minor, astonishment, the team broke through to Serie C2 and true professionalism.
This was more than just another step up. It was a quantum leap into an entirely new and unstable orbit. The first two years were a struggle to avoid relegation. From 1991, however, Gravina’s keen eye for useful talent at bargain prices produced consecutive finishes of fifth and fourth place. But, as often happens in the hypertensive world of football, the manager left at the end of the season and his replacement turned out not be to Gravina’s liking.
The review after one-third of the season in 1993-94, [Editor: akin to The Wanderer articles in our programme, three times a season] showed Castel di Sangro were last in the division heading down from the professional league. Just after Christmas Gravina fired the man who displeased him and handed the frozen reins to an unemployed former manager named Osvaldo Jaconi, a man from the northern region of Lake Como, whose CV hung like a millstone from his thick ex-player’s neck.
Football was all he had ever known. After fifteen years as a player in the lower divisions memorable chiefly to himself, he’d retired at the age of thirty-four and embarked on a managerial career.

Over the next ten years, he roamed the country from the northern lakes to the sweltering village of Lentini, deep in the interior of southern Sicily. He was hired and fired at levels from C1 down to semi-pro, but in all enjoyed only sporadic success. He was married with two teenage daughters. He was also single-minded, egotistical, authoritarian, stubborn and physically powerful, with a voice best measured in foghorn decibels and had an inexhaustible appetite for work. Years later, he would claim proudly that he knew only one word of English: “bulldozer.” Pointing to his massive chest, he would say, “I bulldozer.” This was, as self-assessments go, remarkably accurate and encapsulated almost all of Jaconi’s professional strengths and weaknesses.
When Gravina hired him, he was one month short of his forty-sixth birthday and for the first time since he had become a professional player at the age of nineteen, he had been out of work for six months. Many a manager would have taken one look at the club and said no thanks and many would have said no without having bothered to take a look. But Jaconi was desperate and said yes.
He enjoyed immediate success, lifting the team with his strong-arm methods from bottom to seventh place by the end of the season. The following year, he astonished everyone by leading the team through the six-year logjam and won promotion to C1.
The difference between C2, central division and C1 south is vast. Although C2 is professional, it is just barely so. A majority of its clubs come from cities and towns so obscure that even many Italians have a hard time finding them on a map. Ternana, Fermana, Giorgione, Sandona, Forli, Tolentino, Imola: this was backwater, workaday, minor-league Italy. It was astonishing that the team from so deep in the Abruzzo, with a population of 5,000 had risen to this level and was about to go higher – to C1. It was like the distance between galaxies, beyond one’s power to imagine.
In the 1995-96 season, they would face opponents such as Ascoli, who had played in Serie A for four seasons, as recently as 1990. Lecce, the distant metropolis to the south with a population of more than 100,000 and a team that had played in Serie A only two years before, would also provide opposition for our small-town team.
The new level of competition would provide new problems, especially travel arrangements for matches. Renting a team bus would be required and money to fill the fuel tank. There would have to be meals and hotel rooms for the players. Signor Rezza had never intended to LOSE money on his team, but with a home stadium that seated only 4,000, which was 80 per cent of the population, it would not be easy to profit from success.

There was no new investment in the playing squad either. Gravina was pinching pennies so hard, his forefingers turned black and blue. For the adventure of Serie C1, Jaconi would have to make do with what he had. There were a few in the town who believed he might be able to save the team from immediate relegation, but no one foresaw what actually happened. Castel di Sangro finished in second place. There is no point in even asking how this was done, for it was the first phase of the miracle and the miraculous, by definition, defies any attempt at explanation.
Lecce won the league and were promoted to Serie B, but new regulations required that a play-off be held among the teams that finished second through fifth to determine which other club would go up. In the first round, a two-legged affair, fifth-place Gualdo, a team from the city of Macerata in the region of Marche, just to the north of the Abruzzo would provide the opposition.
In Gualdo on Sunday 16 June 1996, Castel di Sangro conceded a goal with only six minutes left. A week later in Castel di Sangro, with only fifteen seconds remaining it was scoreless, which would mean defeat for Castel di Sangro. Jaconi made a bizarre substitution. He sent on a defender who had only played in seven matches all season and who had never scored a goal. Seven seconds after entering the match, he scored.
Later, when asked how he could possibly have chosen that substitute at that moment, Jaconi simply shrugged his broad shoulders, cast his eyes skyward, held out to either side the upraised palms of his hands and said, “Chissa!” Who knows? The series having been tied meant that Castel di Sangro, the team who had finished higher in the regular-season standings, advanced to the final. [Editor: interesting that there was no penalty shoot-out at this stage. But wait and read what happened in the final!].
The final took place in the neutral city of Foggia, about 150 miles southeast of Castel di Sangro. The opponents were Ascoli, a city with ten times the population of Castel di Sangro and a team that had beaten them twice in the league that season.
Gravina announced that he would provide a chartered bus for any town residents who wished to make the journey to Foggia to cheer for the team. As soon as they realised he was serious, the simple folk of Castel di Sangro began to line up outside the offices of La Societa in order to assure themselves a place on the bus. The line grew: first to hundreds, then to thousands. In the end, Gravina had to pay for more than thirty chartered buses – virtually wiping out the team’s profit for the season and sending Rezza into the deepest of funks.
For the match, it was a hot and humid summer day in southern Italy, combining to sap the strength of players from both sides – players already virtually paralysed by the fear that arose from knowing that a single error could prove fatal to the dreams of thousands.
It remained scoreless for the normal ninety minutes and well the thirty minutes of extra-time, with a penalty shoot-out beckoning this time. Jaconi had made two substitutions, but was holding back on the third and final change, much to the concern of the fans, as it was clear that of the village team’s eleven players, only the goalkeeper, who had not had to run at full speed, fighting off fierce and frequently violent opponents with every stride, amid such stifling and exhausting conditions, remained capable of further exertion.
In the 119th minute, this man of magic made his move. The player he waved to the sidelines was not one of his depleted and dehydrated body of men, but Roberto De Julius, the highly capable and – on his day at least – absolutely unblemished twenty-four-year-old goalkeeper!
Trotting onto the field in his stead was the thirty-four-year-old reserve keeper, Pietro Spinosa, who had not played a minute all season. He’d put in ten seasons as a professional, had never risen above C2 level and his last match at that level had come two years earlier. Young De Julius left the field in tears, oblivious to the standing ovation he received.
Of penalty kicks awarded during the course of a match, about eight out of ten are successful. But as the World Cup final of 1990 showed, when penalty kicks are used to determine a winner after 120 exhausting minutes have failed to do so, the percentage of successful kicks can be considerably lower and here a skilled goalkeeper can be of immeasurable value.
So what was Jaconi thinking? Experience over youth? The hope that a surprise might prove unsettling to Ascoli? A quiver of nervousness in young De Julius that only the preternaturally observant Jaconi could detect? Or instead, as the villagers later came to believe, a moment of divine inspiration? Chissa! Who knows?
One by one the five kicks were taken and four on each side were successful, with each goalkeeper having blocked one shot. It was sudden death. Castel di Sangro kicked and scored. Ascoli kicked and scored. Castel di Sangro kicked and scored. Then a player named Milano shot superbly for Ascoli – a hard drive, well to Spinosa’s right, but still clearly inside the upright of the goal. The penalties would move to an eighth round.
But NO!
For the blessed Spinosa, propelled by every canny instinct he’d developed over the years and showing the catlike quickness of a man ten years younger, sprang to his right at the instant the ball was kicked and with both arms extended and his body stretched to its full horizontal length, managed to get just the tip of a glove on the ball, which was coming at him from only twelve yards away at almost sixty miles per hour and deflected it wide of the goal.
This was the moment at which critical mass was achieved. This was the instant that would become known overnight as the Miracle of Castel di Sangro.
Tiny and obscure and isolated Castel di Sangro was going to Serie B! A miracle? Indeed, for the Italian press, not even one word would any longer suffice: “Di miracalo in miracalo!” – Miracle of miracles! – declared one paper.
Castel di Sangro, from the much-derided Abruzzo – but also from the land of Lilliput! – was going to Serie B, where the following season it would compete across the length and breadth of Italy against the teams of such metropolises as Turin, Genoa, Padua, Palermo, Verona, Bari and Venice.
It was beyond comprehension, beyond the wildest forays of the most fervid imagination. The minute I read about it in 1996, in “Guerin Sportivo”, an Italian football magazine to which I subscribed, I knew I would have to go to Castel di Sangro, to write about the miracle and whatever might happen next.
“The way some people talk about football,” a certain manager of the Liverpool team once said, ‘you’d think it was a matter of life and death. They don’t understand. It is far more important than that.”
This much, at least, I understood.
Keep a look out for the fifth instalment of the story, when Joe meets the owner of Castel di Sangro, Signor Rezza.

The Wanderer