Paul Rouse

And you can see Italian anti-fascist protesters boo the Italian team when they arrive in to play their games in France.

And I think that's...

That's a reminder, I think, that no country is ever one thing or another at a particular time.

And that although you may identify with the national team and how it wins, you can also use it to display your displeasure as well as your pleasure.

Yeah.

He seems to have had an extraordinary capacity to motivate people to play together in a unit and to play together for Italy and to try and win.

And, you know, all this talk about, oh, the Brazilians were bought off in 38.

They didn't play their best player, Leonidas, in the semifinal.

He'd scored a hat-trick in 6-5.

He's supposed to have had a calf injury there, so...

It's so easy to look backwards and say the reality of it is Italy won the final 4-2.

They were a really, really strong team.

There's just a lack of specificity about the supposed chicanery that went on.

It seems to me that it would be difficult to bring home that bribe if indeed you had been bought off.

On the strength of it.

No, and it continued through to the stage of the 1990 World Cup, where you see Angelo Schiavio, who scored the winning goal in the 34 final.

He gave an interview to Gazeta dello Sport before those finals, where he said, I sincerely don't remember much of that day, the final that he's talking about today.

I actually learned the details I had forgotten only by reading the newspapers that talked about it.

For example, that Mussolini was present.

They said he was going to come, but I hadn't noticed that from the field.