Rezart Taci or Rollo Tommasi? The Young, the Bald and the Diving.

By: Ben | July 28th, 2009

The name Rezart Taci looms over Bologna Calcio as the smog does the city. The name sparks something vaguely reminiscent of the imaginary Rollo Tommasi of James Ellroy’s LA Confidential. The crook who got away with it; the offender who is never held accountable, the true man of teflon.

Not to say that Albanian oil tycoon Rezart Taci is a crook; yet the purchase of 80% of Bologna’s shares for the sum of 20 million euros is nothing short of criminal. What bothers me is that the phantom materialized amidst the storm of Moggi’s “consultation” dinners with the Menarini’s. The puppeteer had returned, and the Menarini’s were responsible for his premature return…

Shortly thereafter the initials RT branded themselves into the minds and hearts of all the faithful. The question remains: who is the man? All that is known is that he made his waves in petroleum, and the fierce statement “Our objective is to strengthen the team and we will spend aggressively in order to make the team competitive.” Evidence of which remains to come…

I am not a xenophobe, racist or bigot by any means: a fierce skeptic? Yes. I fear the motivations of a little known petrol-man, I fear the double headed eagle crest on the Albanian flag and I fear the reasons for the swiftness of the Menarini’s sale of majority shares. Yet as Orson Welles so elegantly put: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Let’s hope this chaos stirs a Renaissance in Bologna.

Well on a more positive note the stork delivered three new packages. Emiliano Viviano (The Young) the under 21 goal keeper for the Azzurrini, Roberto Guana (The Bald) the combative midfielder from Palermo and Giacomo Tedesco (The Diving) from Catania who famously crumbled to the pitch resulting in the subsequent sending off of Sulley Muntari.

Of the three, Emiliano Viviano is most welcome. It has been too long now that we have relied on the geriatric Antonioli: in youth we will find new roads. Tomorrow the fixtures will be drawn, leaving 25 days for mister Rezart Taci to make good on his claim to spend “aggressively”.