Speaking ill of the game

Saturday, June 24, 2006 | 8:04 a.m.

The depth to which a scandal has rocked Italian soccer became very clear to Las Vegas lawyer Bruce Leslie last month in Viareggio, north of Pisa on the Mediterranean coast.

During a crash course in Italian at the prestigious Centro Puccini, Leslie got to pick the topic for a private session one day with Elanora, a professor. He brought that day's copy of the pink La Gazzetta dello Sport.

"I chose sports," Leslie said. "Lo Scandalo" has been front-page material for weeks. Soccer, or football, in Italian is "calcio."

CAL-cho, Leslie said.

"You wouldn't think she would have known about teams or players," he said, "but she knew who Lippi is."

Marcello Lippi is the 58-year-old coach of the Italian national team, called the Azzurri. He and goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon had been implicated in the latest calcio scandal. They have been a fabric of Italy for decades. (See chart.)

"She could talk about the scandal for 10 or 15 minutes," Leslie, 55, said of his teacher. "It's important for them to be educated and to know about culture. So she knew of the scandal, even though she wasn't into sports."

It has centered on match fixing and illegal betting in Serie A, Italy's top-flight league, and officials at four top teams: AC Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio and Juventus.

After six weeks of interviewing referees, team executives and other figures, Francesco Borrelli, the magistrate leading the investigations, gave a 190-page report to prosecutor Stefano Palazzi of the FICG - the Italian soccer governing body - on Monday.

Palazzi started ordering trials at the end of the week. A ruling is expected before the final game of the World Cup on July 9 in Germany.

The probe started just before Leslie arrived in Italy. Newspapers published transcripts of telephone conversations between Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and officials from the Italian Football Federation about referee match appointments.

The entire Juventus board and Federation president Franco Carraro resigned in the wake of the investigation. Moggi quit the day Juventus clinched its 29th Serie A title.

The scandal has been called the biggest in Italy in 20 years.

"The football world is not rotten to the roots," Borrelli told reporters as he left Federation headquarters, "it is rotten in some of its branches."

Apparently, those are long branches, as five other magistrates are conducting probes around the country. Rumors began spreading recently that the FICG might cancel Serie A next season while the mess is cleared.

That seemed extreme to the Las Vegas tourist who spent most of May learning Italian and cycling 50 miles a day in the Tuscan hills.

"Can you imagine the commissioner of the NFL ever canceling a season, under any circumstance?" Leslie said. "I can't think of any circumstance in which that would happen."

If found guilty of trying to fix matches, top clubs could be relegated to Serie B or C1, stripped of trophies or have points deducted at the start of the 2006-07 season. Individuals could face bans.

That added a tinge of drama to the holiday for Leslie, who works for the Las Vegas law firm Beckley Singleton, and his two Reno friends, Rick Campbell and Ken Creighton.

In his many trips to Italy, Leslie has most often attended Serie B games, which he likens to Las Vegas 51s games.

"It's not about the hoopla or skyboxes," he said. "It's hanging out in your neighborhood, with a beer and a brat."

An avid cyclist, Leslie was stunned that "Lo Scandalo" relegated the "Giro d'Italia," which he considers the most grueling bike race in the world, to the back pages of La Gazzetta.

"Every day there was a new revelation," Leslie said. "Anything else was secondary, in the back of the newspaper. The passion Italians have for soccer can't be found in America."

Oops

We recently erred twice.

Hakan Sukur of Turkey did not score the World Cup's quickest goal in the 11th minute of a game against South Korea in 2002. That goal came in the 11th second .

In addition, 31 countries battled through two years of qualifying to get to Germany 2006. The hosts, obviously, did not have to qualify.

But, with all the turmoil around them - coach Juergen Klinsmann commuting from Southern California, the Oliver Kahn-Jens Lehmann goalkeeper duel, etc. - the Germans probably dealt with more controversy than many teams that went through qualifying.

Oops II

ESPN and ABC have committed their fair share of gaffes during their World Cup coverage, but Aussies everywhere must have cringed early Sunday morning.

Leading up to the telecast of the Socceroos' game against Brazil , ABC aired a live shot from an Australian city.

At the bottom of the screen, "Syndey" showed. Kids, the "d" precedes the "n." ABC fixed it for a second viewing of the famous opera house.

Player-owner

Las Vegas Strikers co-owner Steve Lazarus began warming up two weeks ago, then coach Frank D'Amelio put the former Cal State Northridge midfielder in against Arizona in the second half.

Hey, it's good to be an owner. Then again, that would be doing Lazarus a disservice.

He did not disappoint, nearly rocketing a rebound into the net on his first attempt on goal. It sailed just wide.

Player-owner II

Frederic Apcar, the Strikers' other owner, is spending time in Germany at the World Cup. We'll tap him for his experiences after the tournament.

Match of the Week

Argentina vs. Mexico, noon today

Now the World Cup really begins, with the start of the knockout stage.

Mexico can avenge a 6-3 defeat to Argentina in pool play of the 1930 cup in Montevideo, Uruguay, the only time the two countries have played on the game's biggest stage.