
In this Group B clash, already heightened tensions between the two football teams were exacerbated by the description of Santiago in crude terms by two Italian journalists, Antonio Ghirelli [it] and Corrado Pizzinelli; they had written that Santiago was a backwater dump where "the phones don't work, taxis are as rare as faithful husbands, a cable to Europe costs an arm and a leg and a letter takes five days to turn up", and its population as prone to "malnutrition, illiteracy, alcoholism and poverty. Chile is a small, proud and poor country: it has agreed to organise this World Cup in the same way as Mussolini agreed to send our air force to bomb London (they didn't arrive). The capital city has 700 hotel beds. Entire neighbourhoods are given over to open prostitution. This country and its people are proudly miserable and backwards."[3] Chilean newspapers fired back, describing Italians in general as fascists, mafiosos, oversexed, and, because some of Inter Milan's players had recently been involved in a doping scandal, drug addicts.[4] The Italian journalists involved were forced to flee Chile, while an Argentinian scribe mistaken for an Italian in a Santiago bar was beaten up and hospitalised.