The Perfect Punter Final Week: A question of perspective

Italian Football / Perfect Punter / 19 May 2010 / 1 Comments

Roma fans express their views at losing out on the Serie A title

"On the scale that reaches from mug to genius, I’ll characterise my punting as relatively savvy and recreational, and that will do for me. Not perfect in an absolute sense, but perfect for the way that I want to live my life. Happy, ultra free, and in perspective."

The Perfect Punter stares danger in the eye on the streets of Verona and realises that above all, the most important thing about punting is keeping a sense of perspective.

I was deliberating long and hard about how to finish this journey, at least the print version of it, and then the answer jumped up at me on a sunny and supposedly jolly afternoon in Verona. The final lesson is perspective, and here's what happened.

After commentating on the dreadful damp squib of a game that was Chievo against Roma on Sunday, I had a flight to catch and had to find a way of getting to the airport. I sweated my way to the train station and grabbed a place in the fairly small queue for taxis. So far, so good, and not much of an anecdote. Just as I got to the front, eight or nine Roma ultras turned up and pushed to the front. I got a bit English, asked them to queue like everyone else, a taxi turned up, and all hell broke loose. I jumped into the back, and two of the ultras tried to drag me out. One had my collar, the other my leg, and they were egged on by the rest of their mates. As Eddie Izzard once said of homophobes, there are certain groups of men who hang round in groups of eight because they only have an eighth of a brain each. These chaps fitted the bill perfectly.

There were no police around and I'm no drama queen, but I know that if they had pulled me out of that cab then I'd have got a proper kicking, at best. As it happens, I elbowed one and kicked the other and the cab sped away while they hammered the windows, the roof, threw stones after it. In the airport waiting room, I discovered that these maniacs were on my flight.

I'm not proud, but I was shaking, so I turned my back and hid behind a book, hoping that this would be a story to tell with a smile and not a grimace. And so it proved. They didn't see me, but a Roma fan, a good one, saw me looking at them and waved his finger saying: "Not good, not good, capi, capi." It turned out that three of these gentlemen were capi, or heads of ultra groups. I had nearly cab ranked my way into a nightmare, and was lucky, very lucky, to get away.

And so to the perspective. I'm not going to preach some Damascene nonsense here, but when something like that happens and you think about the consequences,you realise how unimportant and banal much of the things that you worry about and spend time on are. And on that list I include punting. I love gambling, and always will, and over this year of learning and of thought and reflection I've got a lot better at it. I hope that the lessons that I've written about have been useful to you and that you've enjoyed reading about them, but the final lesson goes like this.

I'm never going to be a professional punter because I don't care enough. If you are, and you do, then good luck to you, but aside from all of the lessons, and all of the very well thought out tips that you'll read on this site, you need to really care, to almost obsess, to be a proper high stakes pro. And I don't care enough.

Next season I'm going to focus on Serie A, and bet on nothing else, and that will take up less of my time and my energy. I'll love it, and I'll buzz off it, and I think that I'll be good at it. But the key thing is that I'll be doing it for fun. On the scale that reaches from mug to genius, I'll characterise my punting as relatively savvy and recreational, and that will do for me. Not perfect in an absolute sense, but perfect for the way that I want to live my life. Happy, ultra free, and in perspective. Thanks for listening.

Although the Perfect Punter will no longer be on this site, he will forever be referring to himself in the third person on twitter, which isn't as bad as many of you may think. There are some clever people on there, and some idiots. The trick is to follow the clever people. So just go to www.twitter.com/perfectpunter and sign up

Comments (1)

1. Robert Ryan | 23 May 2010

   Really enjoy reading this, however, this twitter isn't working.

   Best regards,

   Robert