Richard Hough, author of Verona Campione, the Miracle of 1985, finds little cause for optimism as Hellas Verona get their 2025/26 season underway.
Hellas Verona kicked off their 2025/26 campaign with a seemingly uninspiring 1-1 draw against Udinese at the Bluenergy Stadium on Monday evening.
After requiring penalties to overcome Serie C minnows Audace Cerignola in the Coppa Italia last week, a point on the road exceeded most pre-match expectations.
A summer exodus
On top of a summer transfer window that has seen an exodus of club stalwarts like Darko Lazovic, Paweł Dawidowicz and Davide Faraoni, and the unseemly rush to cash in on the emerging young talents of Diego Coppola (to Brighton) and Daniele Ghilardi (to Roma), there was little cause for optimism in Verona in the buildup to Monday evening’s curtain raiser against Udinese, a local rival whose glittering Bluenergy Stadium seems to offer a blueprint for how a lowly provincial team might be run.
For Hellas, as I said on social media ahead of kickoff, it was going to be another long season with salvation in Serie A once again the sole objective.
So, a decent performance and a point on the board wasn’t a bad start – it could certainly have been worse – just ask fans of Lazio, AC Milan and Torino.
Another eye-catching performance from Verona’s Brazilian summer signing, Giovane Santana do Nascimento (inevitably truncated to simply Giovane), as well as the emergence of a new leader in the shape of the German midfielder Suat Serdar, whose 73rd minute equaliser from a Giovane assist, suggests that there might just be some cause for cautious optimism in the Hellas camp after all.
Verona’s season will be judged against how they perform against the likes of Udinese, so Monday’s result provides an important benchmark for the rest of the season, and some indication that we might even be on the right track.
In search of nostalgia
Of course, the Gentleman Ultra is all about nostalgia, so I want to go back in time to another clash between these two rivals from the northeast of Italy, to a time when shorts were short, hair was long and a certain Brazilian legend named Arthur Antunes Coimbra donned the black and white stripes of I Friulani.
It’s 10 February 1985. One of the greatest games of the Osvaldo Bagnoli era.
For Hellas Verona, Preben Larsen Elkjær has returned after enduring several months on the sidelines with a thigh strain. Udinese’s own bona fide legend, Arthur Antunes Coimbra, is also back in the starting eleven after a lengthy layoff. Better known simply as Zico, the Brazilian legend joins compatriot Edinho and Andrea Carnevale in one of the most prolific attacks in the league that season (it was Udinese’s abysmal defensive record that found them languishing dangerously close to the relegation zone).
Verona’s towering German, Hans-Peter Briegel, opens the scoring for Hellas and diminutive striker Giuseppe ‘Nanu’ Galderisi adds a second with barely ten minutes on the clock. With 20 minutes played, Elkjær picks up the ball on the halfway line and goes on one of his trademark forays toward goal, pulling off one of the most memorable goals of the season with an audacious lob. With Hellas seemingly coasting to victory, Udinese pull one back from a well-struck Edinho free kick just before half time. In the second half, two more goals in the first 14 minutes complete an unlikely Udinese comeback as the momentum shifts decisively in favour of the home side.
Turning point
This could be a turning point in the season. Hellas have topped the league since that famous opening day victory against Maradona’s Napoli, but recently the sceptics have been circling, waiting for the inevitable collapse. Now, Hellas have squandered a three-goal lead. With Inter breathing down their neck and just a point between them, have Hellas thrown away the championship?
Hellas dig deep. Elkjær responds with his second and, not to be outdone, Briegel completes the rout with a second of his own. Final score: Udinese 3-5 Hellas Verona.
It was another massive turning point in a dramatic season, the moment when Elkjær realised that Hellas might actually have what it takes to win the league. It was a game that Zico would always remember as well. In an interview 35 years later with Verona’s daily newspaper, L’Arena, the magnanimous Brazilian commented:
We lost, of course. But it’s okay to lose games like that. You don’t experience it as a defeat. That was the essence of football. The football that I liked so much. I believe that Verona, at that time, represented the most beautiful expression of Italian football.
That victory preserved Verona’s single-point supremacy at the top of the league (see the league table below). With eleven games still to play, there were plenty more hurdles to overcome, but for many, players and fans alike, that dramatic result against Zico’s Udinese was the moment they understood that Bagnoli’s men had the guts, guile and stamina to finish the game.
Returning to the current campaign, and there was nothing quite so dramatic at the Bluenergy Stadium on Monday evening. But it was great to see a Brazilian and a German once again making such an impact. And Udinese fans still proudly display a banner bearing Zico’s likeness, while Verona’s iconic yellow away strip is a constant reminder of a glorious time when Hellas were competing at the top of the league instead of battling for survival at the bottom.
Richard Hough is the author of Verona Campione, the Miracle of 1985.