Comunardo Niccolai - footballer

‘King of own goals’ was also a champion

Comunardo Nicolai was a member of the
most successful team in Cagliari's history

The footballer Comunardo Niccolai, a central defender with a propensity for scoring calamitous own goals, was born on this day in 1946 in Uzzano, a beautiful hill town in Tuscany.

Niccolai scored six own goals in his Serie A career, which contributed to his standing as something of a cult figure in Italian football.

He was actually an exceptionally talented player - good enough to be picked for the Italian squad for the World Cup in 1970, where the azzurri finished runners-up, as well as a key figure in the Cagliari team that won the Serie A title in 1970.

But he seemed unable to avoid moments of freakish bad luck and he acquired such unwanted notoriety as a result that people outside the game still reference his name when describing someone doing something to their own disadvantage.

For example, during the course of one of the regular political crises in Italy in the late 1990s, the right-wing politician Francesco Storace said of a policy decision taken by prime minister Massimo D’Alema, “Ha fatto un autogol alla Niccolai” - meaning that he had “scored an own goal Niccolai-style”.

Niccolai's most famous own goal - against Juventus
during the 1969-70 title-winning season

Niccolai acquired his unusual first name an account of his father’s politics.  A fervent anti-Fascist, Lorenzo Niccolai, himself a footballer who kept goal for Livorno between 1923 and 1928, named his son in honour of the Paris Commune, the revolutionary group that briefly held power in France in 1871.

Comunardo played his first football with the youth team at Montecatini before he was transferred to Torres, a club from Sassari in Sardinia.  From there he signed for Cagliari in 1964, joining a team that had just been promoted to Serie A.

Cagliari, who have never before or since been such a force in Italian football, steadily built a squad that was capable of challenging for the Serie A title, which they claimed in 1969-70 with a defence, including Niccolai, that conceded only 11 goals throughout the campaign.

Their stars were goalkeeper Enrico Albertosi, defender Pierluigi Cera, and forwards such as Roberto Boninsegna, Sergio Gori, Angelo Domenghini and the great Luigi Riva, all of whom went to Mexico with Niccolai in 1970 as part of the national team.

Cagliari's 1969-70 team - Comunardo Niccolai is on the
back row, fourth from the left

The title was an unprecedented achievement for the rossoblu - minnows compared with the giants of Juventus and Milan - although even then Niccolai managed to make his mark in the wrong way.

In a game against title rivals Juventus in March 1970, played on a treacherously wet surface, Niccolai jumped to meet a cross that goalkeeper Albertosi was trying to claim with the score at 0-0 and headed it into his own net.  Happily Cagliari managed to come out with a draw after Riva scored a late equaliser.

He became known as the 'King of the Own Goal', although one of Niccolai’s most celebrated misfortunes did not actually result in an own goal.

It came for Cagliari against Catanzaro away from home in the 1972 season. It was the last minute, and with Cagliari leading 2-1 the home team were doing everything to try to equalise, including a number of attempts to win a penalty.

Comunardo Niccolai now works as a scout for the
Italian national football federation

When Catanzaro’s winger, Alberto Spelta, went down inside the penalty area and Niccolai heard a whistle he believed they had achieved their objective and angrily swung a boot at the ball, sending it towards his own goal.

In fact, the whistle he heard was not that of the referee, but a spectator in the crowd.  The ball was not dead and though Niccolai's fellow defender Mario Brugnera managed to stop it crossing the line and prevent an own goal - he did so only by using his hand.  As a result, the home side were awarded a penalty after all - from which they scored.

Niccolai went on to play for Perugia and Prato before hanging up his boots in 1978.  He has since coached Savoia and the Italy Women national team and currently works as a scout for the men’s national team.

Uzzano perches on a hillside in Tuscany, about 45km (28
miles) to the west of Florence in the province of Pistoia

Travel tip:

Niccolai’s home town of Uzzano, in the province of Pistoia about 45km (28 miles) west of Florence, is part of the Valdinievole,a collection of small settlements that dot the plains and hills. The composer Giacomo Puccini spent a few months there, during which he composed the second and third acts of La bohème while resident at Villa Orsi Bertolini, known today as Villa Anzilotti.  Other attractions in the town include the church of Santi Jacopo e Martin (12th-13th century), which houses a Romanesque holy water font and a Renaissance statue attributed to Giovanni della Robbia. Uzzano’s historic centre clings to a hillside, offering commanding views, while special lighting at night ensures the village is visible from the valley below.

The port of Cagliari rises from the sea to provide a
colourful sight for approaching travellers

Travel tip:

Cagliari is the capital of the island of Sardinia, an industrial centre and one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean. Yet it is also a city of considerable beauty and history, most poetically described by the novelist DH Lawrence when he visited in the 1920s. As he approached from the sea, he set his eyes on the confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades which, he noted, seemed to be piled on top of one another. He compared it to Jerusalem, describing it as 'strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy.’  What he saw was Cagliari’s charming historic centre, known as Castello, inside which the city’s university, cathedral and several museums and palaces - plus many bars and restaurants - are squeezed into a network of narrow alleys.


More reading: 

How Luigi Riva became a legendary figure for Cagliari and Italy

Gianfranco Zola, Sardinia's most famous footballing export

Gianni Rivera, star of Italy's 1970 World Cup team

Also on this day:

1966: The film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly goes on general release

1970: The birth of champion jockey Frankie Dettori

1973: Kidnappers release captive heir to Getty fortune


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Luigi Riva - an Azzurri great

Italy's record goalscorer and hero of Cagliari

Striker Luigi 'Gigi' Riva pictured during
Cagliari's victorious 1969-70 season

Luigi 'Gigi' Riva, who was born on this day in 1944, is widely regarded as one of the finest strikers in the history of Italian football.   

Despite playing in an era when football in Italy was notoriously defensive, he scored more than 200 goals in a 16-year club career, 156 of them in Serie A for Cagliari, with whom he won the Scudetto (shield) as Italian League champions in 1970.

Nicknamed 'Rombo di tuono' - thunderclap - by the football writer Gianni Brera, Riva is also the all-time leading goalscorer for the Italian national team with 35 goals, his record having stood since 1974.

After his playing career, Riva spent 23 years as part of the management team for the Azzurri and was a key member of the backroom staff when Italy won the World Cup for a fourth time in 2006.

Born in Lombardia, not far from Lake Maggiore, Riva spent virtually his whole football career with Cagliari and made his home in Sardinia.  The 1969-70 title is the only championship in the club's history and Riva, who scored 21 goals in the title-winning season, is as revered on the island as Diego Maradona is in Naples.

Although he came from a loving home in the small town of Leggiuno, just a few kilometres inland from the shores of Lake Maggiore, Riva had a tough upbringing.

His father, Ugo, died when he was just eight years old, killed in an accident at the foundry where he worked, after which his mother, Edis, decided to send Luigi to a religious boarding school, where the regime was hard.

Luigi Riva in the Italy shirt in which his
goals tally is still the highest.

He did not blame his mother, who had no choice in her circumstances but to work long hours for low pay, but Riva would later confess to suffering loneliness and depression.   One of his regrets was that his mother did not live long enough for him to provide her with a comfortable retirement.

Release from the deprivations of school came when he was 15 and went to live with his sister, taking a job as a motor mechanic with dreams of becoming a racing driver.  But it was his skill as a footballer, and in particular what he could do with his powerful left foot, that began to get him noticed.  After scoring 63 goals in two seasons for a local amateur team, he earned a trial with Internazionale in Milan.  That came to nothing but he was offered a contract to play in Serie C for Legnano, based about 50km from Leggiuno.

He stayed there only one season.  His talent attracted numerous scouts and when Cagliari offered him the chance to play in Serie B he took it.

Sardinia was still a somewhat primitive island in 1963 and Riva was not sure what to make of it. His first impression was of a place 'where they sent people to punish them'.

Yet he grew to love the island and the Sardinians took him to their hearts.  Previously regarded as a perennial Serie B club, they were promoted to Serie A in his first season and, on the back of his goals, began to climb steadily.

Leading Serie A scorer in 1966-67, when Cagliari finished sixth, he was capocannoneri again in 1968-69 with 21 goals as Cagliari achieved the highest league position in their history as runners-up to Fiorentina.

But the crowning glory of his career was the 1969-70 season as Cagliari lost only two matches and conceded just 11 goals in winning their one and only Scudetto.

Riva scored 21 goals of all kinds - tap-ins, long-range shots, powerful headers. Although some critics complained he was too reliant on his left foot, many players effective with both feet could not match his versatility.  An overhead kick with which he scored against Vicenza is still regarded as one of the best Serie A goals of all time.

Although they had other good players, Cagliari supporters hailed Riva as the one who made it possible and his place in the island's folklore was established for all time.

A short film from RAI about Riva and the 1969-70 season

It might not have happened had Riva not felt so at home on the island. In 1967, when Juventus offered him a fortune to go to Turin, he had turned them down.

“I would have earned triple,” he said later. "But Sardinia had made me a man. It was my land. In those days, they called us shepherds and bandits around Italy. I was 23 and the great Juve wanted to cover me in money. I wanted the Scudetto for my land. We did it, the bandits and shepherds.”

With Italy, for whom he won 42 caps, he was a European champion in 1968 but the ultimate title of World Cup winner eluded him, essentially because the great Italian team of 1970 met an even better one in Brazil in the finals in Mexico.

Riva scored twice in the 4-1 quarter-final win over the hosts and Italy's third goal in the so-called 'Game of the Century', the 4-3 extra-time semi-final victory against West Germany, but Italy were overwhelmed as the brilliant Brazilians won 4-1 in the final.

Bedevilled by injuries for most of his career - he suffered a broken leg twice while playing for the national team - he retired in 1978, two years after rupturing a tendon in his right thigh. Cagliari retired his No 11 shirt in his honour in 2005.

The Castello district of Cagliari is
especially beautiful at night

For all that he regarded himself as an adopted Sardinian, Riva never forgot his roots.  In retirement, he returned to Leggiuno, where he knocked down the house where his parents had lived and built a new one in its place, staying there periodically to chat with local people, some of whom he had known when he was a child, and to reflect on the course his life had taken him.

Travel tip:

Although it is Sardinia's main port and industrial centre, Cagliari has become a popular tourist destination for the tree-lined boulevards and elegant arcades of the marina area and the charm of its historical centre, known as Castello, with limestone buildings that prompted DH Lawrence to call it 'the white Jerusalem', which take on beautiful pastel hues at sunset.

Stay in Cagliari

The Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso

Travel tip:

Leggiuno, situated in an elevated position just inland from Lake Maggiore, is close to the Hermitage of Santa Caterina del Sasso, an extraordinary structure that appears to rise from the waters of Lake Maggiore, clinging to a sheer rock cliff face.  A Roman Catholic monastery dating from the 14th century, it used to be accessible only by boat or by a steep flight of steps descending from the top of the cliff.  Since 2010, visitors have been able to reach it via a lift built into an old well.

Stay in nearby Reno Leggiuno

More reading:

Italy's historic fourth World Cup victory

Paolo Rossi's 1982 World Cup hat-trick

Dino Zoff - captain of the 1982 Azzurri

Also on this day:

1512: Niccolo Machiavelli forced to quit by Medici bosses

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