The Hellas Verona glory days were the early 1980s. Promoted in 1982, they immediately took Serie A by storm as a well-drilled, talented team with something to prove. Mavericks and misfits, sublime talent and unconventional outsiders, they took on the likes of Diego Maradona, Zico, Michel Platini, Sócrates and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. And won. Crowned champions of Italy in 1985, an achievement that remains one of the greatest sporting upsets of all time, I have recently been speaking to the players involved with a book to follow next year to commemorate the 40th anniversary. In the meantime, it was a fun picking the best of them for a Hellas Verona fantasy five-a-side team!
Claudio Garella
Rejected by Lazio after a string of howlers, Garella found his way again at Sampdoria, then playing in the second tier, before moving to Verona in 1981, earning promotion as Champions of Serie B that same season. A decisive member of that 1984-85 Championship winning team, Garella was to prove decisive in countless matches, not least against Roma on 21 October 1984, when he kept a clean sheet with a string of world class saves. Absolutely unconventional, he was renowned for using all the limbs available to him to block, parry and deflect.
In the summer of 1985 he moved to Napoli, then busy constructing a team around Maradona capable of winning the championship. The following season he kept 14 clean sheets in 29 matches, allowing Napoli to lift the first Scudetto in the club’s history. That same year he was the protagonist as Napoli won the Coppa Italia, completing an historic double. Notwithstanding his remarkable form in Serie A, Garella was consistently overlooked for the national team in favour of Dino Zoff, Franco Tancredi, Walter Zenga and Stefano Tacconi. You can keep them all, “Garellik” would be my first pick on the fives pitch!
Hans-Peter Briegel
The athletic German could play in either defence or midfield – exactly the kind of versatility you need on a five-a-side pitch! A talented decathlete, Briegel could run 100 metres in 10.8 seconds. At Kaiserslautern and West Germany (where he earned 72 caps) he was primarily known as a left-back, but when he arrived in Verona in the summer of 1984, the head coach Osvaldo Bagnoli recognised his athleticism and unleashed him as a rampaging box-to-box midfielder. He won the 1980 European Championship with West Germany and two World Cup runners-up medals (1982 and 1986), and, of course, the historic Serie A title with Hellas. In Maradona’s first game in Serie A, the powerful German marked him completely out of the game; the Argentine barely touched the ball. In fact, it was Briegel who scored as Hellas secured an impressive 3-1 victory, a start to the 1984-85 campaign that would propel them towards the most unlikely of Scudettos.
Pietro Fanna
Pietro Fanna is probably the greatest Italian player you have never heard of, one of just six to have won the Scudetto with three different clubs. A product of the great football production line at Atalanta, he was singled out for greatness at an early age and snapped up by Juventus where he won the first of his five league titles. His talent was unappreciated by Giovanni Trapattoni and he found his way to Verona in 1982 where, like Briegel, he was unleashed by the quietly effective Bagnoli. Box-to-box, ambidextrous, offensive, defensive, assists and finishes, he was a total footballer. After impressing with Verona, Inter quickly swooped for him, and he won his fifth championship medal in Milan before returning to Verona to see out the final years of his career. Quiet and reserved off the pitch, devastatingly fast, aggressive and clinical on it – perfect characteristics for a five-a-side.
Preben Elkjær
Part of the great iconic uber-cool Danish Dynamite team of the 1980s, Elkjær was a maverick, a loose cannon and “un Cavallo Pazzo” (a crazy horse) as the Italians liked to call him. That fun-loving and free-spirited personality belied a supremely talented and extremely competitive individual who could – with a moment of acceleration, power or pure audacity – turn a match on its head. Particularly revered in Verona is that famous “shoe-less” goal as Hellas surged to victory against Platini’s Juventus. Though he sat a significant chunk of the season out through injury, he remains the figurehead of that campaign and, despite a number of lucrative offers, remained loyal to Verona until his career began to wind down in the late 1980s. In one notorious episode that helped to shape his reputation, the Cologne coach Hennes Weisweiler asked him if it was true that he had spent the early morning hours at a nightclub in the company of a bottle of whiskey and a lady. Elkjær assured him it was a lie. In fact, he explained to his exasperated coach, he had been in the company of a bottle of vodka and two ladies!
Luca Toni
OK, so he was not in the championship-winning team, but how could you leave out the club’s record Serie A goalscorer? With over 300 goals in a long and varied career, Toni is the fourth-highest scoring Italian player of all time, second only to Alessandro Del Piero in the postwar period. His arrival at Verona, where he saw out the twilight of his career, coincided with my first full season following the team. I naively imagined that Hellas was always like that: statuesque strikers with flowing locks scoring goals for fun. Of course, the reality was somewhat different. But with 48 goals in 98 league appearances – and that trademark celebration – I will always treasure the emotional farewell in 2016 when one of the great Italian strikers bowed out with a memorable victory against Juventus at the end of a truly epic career.
