Roma’s support has always been drawn from the left-wing following of the inner city. It is not uncommon at Il Derby Capitale for the losing fans to attempt to burn down their section of a ground that is home to both clubs. I Lupi, the wolves, finished fourth in Serie A, behind Juventus, Internazionale and Udinese. More importantly, for the first time in six years, they finished ahead of Lazio.The rivalry between the two Roman clubs is as fierce as any on the European football map Lazio were the club Mussolini supported.

Zeman may have acquired talented summer recruits – the Russian midfielder Dimitri Alenitchev, the Argentine striker Gustavo Bartlet and the Cameroon defender Pierre Wome – but they were not the high-profile signings for which the fans had been calling.Their chief frustration was that Roma made encouraging progress in Zeman’s first full season last term. Some 200 of them staged a sit-down demonstration at the club’s training ground. They accused Francesco Sensi, Roma’s president, of lacking ambition. The colours of the ribbons tied to it, however, are not the burgundy and yellow of Roma.The cup belongs, for the time being at least, to Roma’s fellow tenants in the Stadio Olimpico. The promise of future football silverware in the Eternal City belongs to Lazio too. Since assuming ownership of Roma’s rivals in 1992, Sergio Cragnotti has spent pounds 190m – double the amount England’s biggest spenders, Newcastle United, have lavished in the same period – in attempting to build a team to break the Juventus- Milan stranglehold on the scudetto. This summer alone, flush with the profits of the first football club flotation on the Italian stock market, Cragnotti invested a staggering pounds 70m on players.

Marcelo Salas, Ivan De La Pena and Christian Vieri were among the new arrivals at the Stadio Olimpico – to play for Sven Goran Eriksson’s Lazio team.Roma’s followers were not impressed. Gianluca Vialli and Alessandro Del Piero, who were both implicated by Zeman, are taking legal action to clear their names. On the day Zeman was called to give evidence to the inquiry, Vialli called him “a football terrorist”.
On Tuesday night it will be the managerless Leeds that Zeman will be seeking to ambush. Embattled as he has become, fighting to uphold his reputation, he will not see the first leg of the Uefa Cup second-round tie as a little light relief. The one battle Zeman cannot afford to lose this season is the fight for silverware at the Stadio Olimpico The Coppa Italia has been on display there since May. It is not so much talk as an inquisition that Zdenek Zeman has found himself embroiled in since 25 July. AS Roma’s Czech coach, Bohemian by birth but renowned as a disciplinarian, provoked a national scandal when he told the magazine L’Espresso that drug-taking was rife in Italian football.

The Italian Olympic Committee, which governs sport in the country, launched an inquiry which got to the very heart of the game last week when the backroom staff of the national team were questioned about the administering of performance- enhancing substances The Italian players’ union has threatened to strike. Why were they permitted to leave Britain? And will we meekly allow them free passage next time and let other countries do our dirty work for us? Or will the Ministry for Sport, the Task Force and Home Office prefer to accept the findings of a report on the trouble during France 98 prepared by the Football Supporters’ Association which claims that not only was it “exaggerated out of all proportion” but that the ticket allocation, the French police and media enticement were the main causes. If the England team had the same nerve and imagination and were fired by the same sense of injustice they’d be unbeatable.. IN ENGLAND (well, in Yorkshire at least) all the football talk has been of who the next manager of Leeds United might be. In Italy all the football talk has been of the man who manages the team Leeds United face in the Stadio Olimpico on Tuesday.

Last week, the Luxembourg police were waiting in force and arrested 100 rioters. Good for them and congratulations, also, to the Belgian police who on the previous day sent back home a few dozen who had paused to get pissed on their way to the game.Apparently, some of those concerned had caused trouble in France. Someone has his priorities wrong.Mercifully, there will now be a respite in the export of English football hooligans. This is due not to any great masterplan but to the fact that the England team are not going to be bothering the continent until next summer. Since the venues, Bulgaria and Poland, are unlikely to prove enticing to our brave louts we may even escape being disgraced yet again as we were in Luxembourg on Wednesday.I had the shaming misfortune to see them wreck the place in 1977 They roughed it up once more in 1983. Once the envy of the television world for all-round excellence – the current World Matchplay Championship is a perfect illustration – the members of this department are being slowly, some may say systematically, stripped of the events they need to feed on.Other television outfits, Sky and Channel 5 particularly, have used sport to bludgeon their way into public awareness The BBC are being propelled in the opposite direction. Perhaps it was a subtle plot to give the cricket authorities a timely nudge about tradition and to remind the rest of us what we owe them in memories.It didn’t work.