SOCCER
Triumphant Italy return home
Posted Tue, 11 Jul 2006

Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi held aloft the World Cup on Monday as he hosted a victory party for the country's triumphant footballers amid a welter of excitement at the world champions' homecoming to Rome.

Prodi hosted a reception at the prime minister's office in the city centre which began more than 90 minutes behind schedule.

The team bus, followed by a cacophonous posse of scooters trailing flags, was repeatedly slowed to a crawl on its way into the city by enthusiastic flag-waving fans.

"We here at home shared with you a tension and suffering without equal," during the month-long competition, Prodi told the 23-member squad, many of whom proudly wore their gold winners' medals around their necks.

"Thanks for reminding the younger generation that achievement is wrought with effort, sweat and commitment," added Prodi. "Grazie. All Italians love you!"

The prime minister, whose beleaguered government is hoping to ride a wave of optimism after the World Cup triumph, handed each of the players a medal during the reception.

The team's plane had touched down at a military airbase outside Rome two hours earlier, and fans who had waited hours to welcome them finally erupted into cheers when the skipper Fabio Cannavaro emerged onto the gangway with the trophy.

Italy's air force acrobatic team, trailing smoke, painted the sky in the green, white and red colours of the national flag during repeated fly-pasts.

But the biggest reception was yet to come. Following the reception, the team was to transfer to an open-topped bus for a victory parade through the historic city centre, which was scheduled to culminate in a giant party at the ancient Circus Maximus, where a crowd estimated at 500 000 had gathered.

The Italian heroes are to be decorated with one of the state's highest honours, the Order of Merit of the Republic, by President Giorgio Napolitano in recognition of their victory.

With banner headlines like 'Champions' and 'The World Belongs to Us', the triumphant Italian press hailed the team as legends, saying their victory over France in Sunday's final had deservedly delivered the nation and themselves proper acclaim.

"We are champions because we are Italian," Corriere della Sera, Italy's biggest-selling newspaper, said in an editorial. From now on "everywhere on Planet Earth, the white, red and green passport of Italy will be stamped with admiration".

The challenge for Prodi now is to tap into that feel-good factor after a desperately grim period for the economy, one of the worst-performing in the European Union, and for domestic football, rocked by a match-fixing scandal.

Prodi and Economy Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa announced a whopping €35-billion in budget cuts at the weekend in a bid to bring the public deficit below the 3.0 percent of GDP required under Eurozone rules by 2007.

"There's a clear, measurable boost to business confidence, and probably to consumer spending as well, in the wake of something like this. We saw that when France won the World Cup eight years ago," said Howard Archer, chief European economist for analysts Global Insight.

"The question is how long it can be sustained?" he told AFP. "And you have to ask, how much is it a question of bringing forward spending that would have taken place anyway further down the line?"

"The best-case scenario is that there will be a short-term boost to public spending, enabling unemployment to dip because companies will take on more workers to cope with the extra demand. But in the long term I suspect it will be pretty modest," said Archer.

The World Cup win will also help ease the pain over a probe into a match-fixing scandal which has scarred the reputation of Italy's top Serie A teams.

Thirteen of the new world champions play for four teams at the centre of the scandal, which are champions Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio.

Uncertainty surrounds their future with their clubs, which do not know in which division they will be playing next season.

Stiff sanctions, including relegation from the lucrative Serie A, are likely to be announced on Wednesday

AFP