James Lawton: Fallen gods of Calcio

Six months after their national team became world champions, Italy's scandal-hit domestic sides are only just coming to terms with a far harder battle - that of restoring faith in the beautiful game

Entirely appropriately, at least some would claim, there were wisps of sea mist in the old Marassi stadium here this week when Internazionale, sprinkled with reserves but shaped by some of the last of the best of Luis Figo, enhanced their growing reputation for invincibility with their 20th victory in 21 games.

This time the team who lead Serie A by 11 points, and whose Anglophile coach, Roberto Mancini, is said to be agog at the thought of overtures from Chelsea, delivered a crushing 3-0 defeat of Sampdoria in the first leg of the semi-final of the Italian Cup. Far from coincidentally, however, a little way down the coast today in the tough harbour town of La Spezia, the fallen gods of il Calcio, Juventus, may also have their latest stride towards a return to Serie A obscured, if not by fog off the Mediterranean then something increasingly evident wherever you look in the wake of the great Calciopoli scandal: smoke and mirrors.

It means that, for the moment at least, there can be no definitive truth in the game that was last summer pronounced officially rotten to its core; just fragments of conscience and occasionally outbursts of anger, some of it founded on established facts, some of it on the suspicion that a certain spell, however besieged it was in all the years of cynicism, has perhaps been broken for ever.

Are Internazionale indeed a mighty team ready to break out of their barren years, helped by the revived power of Patrick Vieira and no doubt major investments in the summer? Or are they the asterisk champions, profiting from a mere pause in the stranglehold of the penalised giants Juve and Milan?

On either question you have a better chance of unanimity in a street riot. The old Milan defender Fulvio Collovati says, "Inter is strong, no question, and they have made precious acquisitions in Vieira and [Zlatan] Ibrahimovic, but this is the strangest year in Italian football and Inter have weakness all around them.

"I have never seen so many [refereeing] errors that make everyone so unhappy as I have in the last year. Maybe we are outraged so much by episodes in favour of Inter because they are winning everything."

Today an eruption of such bile is likely in the small stadium of La Spezia, which will be packed not so much with fascination at the unprecedented presence of superstars like Alessandro del Piero, David Trezeguet and Gianluigi Buffon, but with eagle eyes focused on the possibility that the old dark influence of Juve lingers on.

It is a conclusion that may sound bizarre amid the rubble of Calciopoli but it was evident enough in Bologna recently when, in a vital promotion game, Juve were awarded a decisive goal that, in the words of one commentator, confirmed by television evidence, "simply did not exist". Juve's Marcelo Zalayeta was awarded the goal by the referee Domenico Messina despite the fact that the effort had plainly not crossed the line. The official reaction was "human error" - something Italian fans have been told to accept as inevitable with a new crop of inexperienced officials, a necessity given that 15 Italian referees are still under investigation.

Rarely, though, can there have been a more optimistic attempt to sow toleration on such flinty ground. Juventus may have paid the highest price for corruption but perhaps there was another casualty, and one less likely to recover as completely as the Old Lady of Italian football. Maybe it was trust. The proposition gathers a little more weight, it seems, in almost every corner of the national game.

It showed itself this week in the ferocious reaction of students in the beautiful little town of Agropoli near Salerno when they heard that their college elders - scarcely believably - had invited the man at the heart of the scandal, Juventus' Luciano Moggi, to address young people on the "value of sport in modern society". Moggi, who said "my soul has died" when he was first indicted, turned down the invitation for fear that it would incite his enemies. He might also have heard undergraduate threats that the building would be burnt down, ideally while he was still present.

Certainly, there is no lack of incitement for those reluctant to forgive the excesses of the past. When Ronaldo returned to San Siro this week for a medical and to watch his proposed new club Milan draw 2-2 with Roma in the Italian Cup, the owner and former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was keeping a low profile, but the convicted former club and league president - and current No 2 at the club - Adriano Galliani bathed himself in triumphant smiles for the cameras as he sat with the chubby Brazilian demi-god who was once the hero of rivals Internazionale.

Said one Juve fan, restaurateur Enzo Pace: "Everything is supposed to have changed, but has it? I don't really think so. How can there be trust when you see the same characters marching on. No one is free from suspicion. Inter are the heroes now, but what will we find out about them?"

So far it is the circumstantial but compelling evidence that they had strong links with Telecom Italia, the phone company which was at the source of the wire-tapping that triggered Calciopoli last year. At the time the reigning chairman of Telecom Italia was Marco Tronchetti Provera, the head of Internazionale's chief sponsor, Pirelli. He was succeeded by the "elder statesman" Guido Rossi, who also took over as caretaker of Italian football. He is an avowed fan of the Nerazzuri.

You see in all of this that Italian football isn't a game but a labyrinth; daily plots are hatched if not over the phone then in the mind. There is less optimism for a new age of idealistic cleanliness than a practical need to regroup and accept that new conditions have to be created before there can be any true sense of a league with even half an eye for the common good.

One such move has passed through the lower house of the Italian parliament in the last few days. Deputies voted for a return to collective television bargaining by Serie A, a development which, if confirmed, would bring an end to the grotesque imbalance between the likes of the Milan clubs, Juventus and Roma and the rest in the scramble for individual television rights. This created an income difference that reached as high as €80m (£53m).

Now, the thinking goes, a new sense of Italian football could emerge; the build-up of money in the main power bases, the fuel of corruption, would be halted and along with it the insanity of ambition which persuaded a Moggi that everyone in football was for turning in the most basic way.

Good men certainly hope that Calcio, once a glory, even an underpinning of the Italian's view of himself as essentially clever, and rather beautiful, can find again a little of the old swagger and purpose - that a new generation of players can represent something of what Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi, the brilliant young architect of a breathtaking Milan team, did in a more sanguine age.

They like to think, too, that the sale of another fallen power, Parma - which was built on the fraudulent accounting of the dairy giant Parmalat - will prove another portent of a new and more decent epoch.

The administrator sought out purchasers of impeccable background, and they have suggested that a share of the club will go to a reputable bank.

One certainty, whatever the moral climate, is that next season the asterisk champions, with or without Mancini, will face an entirely new level of challenge.

After the defeat of Sampdoria, Mancini was asked if he was a glutton. "You are going for everything, you are winning all your matches. Where do you draw your limit?" wondered the man with the microphone. Said the coach: "We are no longer a collection of star players. We have a squad of 20 players and it is reasonable that we try to win all we can. It is is not gluttony, it is ambition."

He was supported by the former Internazionale and Italy striker Alessandro Altobelli, who said: "In the past Inter has been a collection of players, but now it is a team ... they are so much stronger than anyone else in Italy because Mancini has achieved a great balance."

At Juve, the remaining stars Buffon and Trezeguet insisted that if they stayed for the purgatory of Serie B it was only on the understanding that next season, assuming the promotion that now looks certain, they would be part of a "serious football project".

This, it seems certain, will involve a major trawling of all available talent, one that might just include Liverpool's Steven Gerrard.

This week the 32-year-old Del Piero revealed that during the Calciopoli fallout he was approached by Manchester United. He said he couldn't leave Juve, that to do that would have been to abandon something of himself, adding: "I'm Juve. I can now only see myself in the black and white. Sometimes you have to look at yourself and realise what is most important to you. You have to know your real identity." No doubt Del Piero was speaking for himself, but it could easily have been for all of Italian football.

The truth is that the champions of the world have so much work to do on their own soil. They have to banish the smoke - and then look into the mirror.

After Calciopoli: How the guilty stand in Italy

* JUVENTUS

Original punishment: Relegated to Serie C1 and deducted 30 points for the 2006-07 season. Thrown out of the Champions' League and stripped of 2005 and 2006 Scudettos.

Final punishment: Relegated to Serie B and deducted nine points. Thrown out of Champions' League and stripped of 2005 and 2006 Scudettos.

* MILAN

Original: Deducted 15 points for the start of the 2006-07 season and thrown out of the Champions' League.

Final: Deducted eight points, reinstated to the Champions' League.

* FIORENTINA

Original: Relegated to Serie B and deducted 12 points. Also thrown out of the 2006-07 Uefa Cup.

Final: Reinstated to Serie A but deducted 15 points and thrown out of the Uefa Cup.

* LAZIO

Original: Relegated to Serie B and deducted seven points for the 2006-07 season. Also thrown out of the Uefa Cup.

Final: Reinstated to Serie A with a 3-point deduction, and out of the Uefa Cup.

* REGGINA

Original: Deducted 15 points for the start of the 2006-07 season.

Final: 11-point deduction and the club were fined £68,000. The club president Pasquale Foti was banned from football for 21-and-a-half years and fined £20,000.