“…one evening, at about seven, Jason took his luck and his boots and headed off to the stadium. There were various ragazzi hanging around, some already kitted up, others joking around. They were nearly all in their late teens or early twenties and Jason felt a bit like Dad as, pre-armed with a few bits of key vocabulary, he asked one of them where the coach was. They gestured towards a man over the other side of the field who bore a striking resemblance to Jesus Christ.
When Jason went over to introduce himself, he was surprised to find that Jesus already knew who he was. ‘Ciao,’ he said warmly, ‘e benvenuto.’ Was he really Jesus and knew everyone in the world? He noticed Jason was looking at him rather puzzled. ‘La tua casa’ (‘Your house’), he said, ‘ho messo tutte le piastrelle’ (‘I tiled your house’).
Another one?! We thought Elmedine’s dad had tiled our house! No. Apparently he only does the outdoor tiling. Jesus had done all the indoor stuff – a big job, big enough to pay for his new car, he ‘joked’.
Jason said that he’d like to come along to football training, just to do some exercise and keep his skills up. ‘Ma certo. Iniziamo proprio ora?’ (‘Of course. Do you want to start now?’)
A bit embarrassed having seen what he was up against in the kit department, Jason headed back to the car to pick up his motley assortment of mismatched QPR socks, Liverpool shorts and raggedy football boots. Everyone else was in pristine Loro Piceno kits, clearly ironed by their mothers, and carried everything around in state-of-the-art kit bags with equally pristine boots tucked away in the bottom. They had two sets of shoes each – trainers for training and football boots for footballing. This was all a bit of a shock to J, whose previous idea of an evening of football was a few fast physical games of five-a-side with plenty of bruises and swearing, then straight down the pub.
Training proper began. It transpired that Jesus wasn’t the main coach – he was just God’s number two, God being a guy called Ciocci who used to play for no less a team than Inter Milan, so in the eyes of the ragazzi was genuinely pretty close to the big guy. This was a man who had played alongside true footballing gods such as (Jason tells me) Jürgen Klinsmann. How on earth he ended up in Loro Piceno, the other God only knows.”
