Third Class to Ponte Carrega

A Requiem Before the Whistle

Before there could be football in Milan that year, there had to be a funeral. Giuseppe Verdi suffered a stroke at the Grand Hotel on 21 January 1901 and died there six days later, on the 27th, aged eighty-seven; and the city, which does everything at scale, its grief included, waited a month past his private burial and then produced the great public event of the year — an estimated three hundred thousand Milanese lining the streets for the reburial procession to the crypt of his Casa di Riposo, Arturo Toscanini lifting a chorus of eight hundred and twenty voices into 'Va, pensiero' as the maestro went by. When a city has wept on that scale in the winter, whatever it does in the spring tends to be forgotten by history. History, in this one case, has made an exception.

It is the business of this chronicle to explain the exception. Milan in 1901 was Italy's industrial and financial capital in full boom — steam and silk, banking and printing, the fog off the Navigli thickening of an evening like the steam off a good risotto — and somewhere beneath the level of grand opera and grand commerce a foreign curiosity was being practised on Sunday afternoons. The entire national football championship that spring consisted of five clubs from three northern regions, settled over a few Sundays of April and May; and by the challenge-round custom of the age the holders, Genoa, who had won every edition ever contested — all three of them — sat serenely in the final and waited to discover which of the pretenders would earn the honour of being beaten.

The Firm of Via Berchet

The pretender, as it turned out, would come from a wine shop. Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club — the cricket stood proudly in the name, and the vice-president took it seriously — conducted its affairs from the Fiaschetteria Toscana in via Berchet and played its football at the Campo Trotter, a trotting ground surrendered on Sundays to the new religion, with the Madonnina above the rooftops and the Alps beyond her on the clear days. The president was Alfred Ormond Edwards, born in Shropshire on 12 October 1850, a pillar of the British colony who had served as Her Majesty's vice-consul in Milan, and who now presided over something more durable: he held the club's chair from the founding until 1909, his many commitments obliging him early on to delegate the daily running of the firm. Beside him stood the vice-president Edward Nathan Berra, captain of the cricket section, and the secretary Guido Gregoletto, keeping the minutes of a firm that was about to acquire, in its second year of trading, the title of champion of Italy.

The team itself was a colonial enterprise with local recruits. Of the thirteen players Milan used across the season, only five were Italian. The core was British — Hood in goal, Davies and Allison in attack, Kilpin at the heart of things, the founders Neville and Dobbie in the wider squad — reinforced by the Swiss defender Hans Heinrich Suter and his countryman the half-back Kurt Lies, whose first name the Italians of the age cheerfully rendered as Corrado, the clerks of 1901 being no more careful with names than with spelling: Hood appears elsewhere as Hoode, Suter as Sutter, Lies as Lees, according to which yellowed sheet you choose to trust. The Italians included Gadda, Angeloni, Recalcati and Colombo — Gadda and Recalcati freshly prised from Mediolanum, the gymnastics-society club across town, which thereby served Milan as both city rival and nursery — a double office it would perform twice that year without once being thanked for either.

Allison has earned his own sentence. An Englishman born in France, he was captain of the club's first season — though here the record books quarrel, some giving the armband to Allison with Kilpin as player-manager, others crowning both men at once, as if the early chroniclers could not conceive of so English a club with only one captain — and he was remembered as a master of the offside law at a time when the referees themselves had barely finished reading it: a forward who turned jurisprudence into an attacking art. Suter would end his days in America, more than half a century on; Recalcati would drift back to Mediolanum and thence to US Milanese, whose 1904-05 tournament he finished as top scorer and whose football section he would one day direct. Football was young, and men passed through it the way travellers pass through a station buffet — quickly, and leaving a cup half-drunk.

The Butcher's Son and His Vow

But the season, like the club, belonged to the butcher's son. Herbert Kilpin was born in Nottingham on 24 January 1870, the son of a butcher; he came to Italy in 1891 for the textile and lace trade, and by 1898 he had settled in Milan in the company of his teammate Samuel Richard Davies — for in those days champions emigrated in pairs as naturally as they shared dressing rooms. He was thirty-one in 1901, the player-manager, first among equals in everything but the disputed armband; and the photographs remember him under a British cap, as if to keep the rains of Lombardy formally notified of his origins.

He also carried a debt he intended to collect. Kilpin had stood on the losing side of the first two championship finals Italian football ever staged, in 1898 and 1899, wearing the shirt of Internazionale Torino and beaten both times by Genoa; and the old chronicles hand down the toast he is said to have offered at a Genoese banquet, to the champions' own Pasteur: 'I will found a club and I will beat you.' Whether the words fell exactly so, no notary can certify — toasts improve in the retelling, like the wines beneath them — but the deeds were duly registered. He founded the club. In 1901, he beat them.

The Medal of the Murdered King

Before the championship came the medal. The Medaglia del Re — the Medaglia d'Oro Umberto I, struck in honour of the king assassinated in July 1900 — carried a clause worthy of a folk tale: the first club to win three consecutive editions would keep the trophy forever. Milan held the first; in the late winter of 1901 it went after the second, and every round was staged at home in Milan, an arrangement early football permitted without blushing. Mediolanum fell in the quarterfinal on 3 March and Juventus in the semifinal on 10 March, by margins over which the record books quarrel with such enthusiasm that this chronicle declines to arbitrate; and on 17 March came Genoa, and a final that finished 1-1 after extra time — on which score, for once, every source agrees.

They agree, too, on what followed, which is the more instructive part. Genoa refused to replay the final, and the medal was awarded to Milan: its second consecutive edition, the middle panel of a triptych that would be completed in 1902, when the trophy retired permanently to via Berchet. One may read the refusal as pride, or fatigue, or a calculation about trains; this chronicle merely observes that the champions of everything had begun declining appointments with Milan, and that in sport, as in commerce, a refused appointment is often the first confession.

Four Sundays of Spring

The championship proper opened on Sunday 14 April 1901, at the Trotter, with the city derby of the Lombard eliminatory: Milan 2, Mediolanum 0, the goals credited to Samuel Richard Davies and Kurt Lies — though even here the archive wobbles, for the contemporary gazettes left no trace of the fixture, and the most scrupulous of the modern annalists doubt the derby was ever actually played, preferring to wave Milan through to Turin unexamined. The same afternoon, on the Piazza d'Armi in Turin, Juventus were dismantling Ginnastica Torino by five goals to nought, Malvano helping himself to three and Donna to two, so that the semifinal wrote itself: the survivor of Lombardy against the survivor of Piedmont, for the right to be beaten by Genoa.

It nearly did not write itself on time. The semifinal was fixed for Sunday 21 April at the Piazza d'Armi and then postponed, the record states with beautiful dryness, because Milan's players were unavailable — and there is the whole of early football in one line of a fixture list: these were lace-trade men and textile clerks with obligations, men for whom a championship semifinal had to be fitted around the ledger and the loom, and the calendar of Italy politely waited a week for them.

When they did arrive in Turin, on 28 April, they brought a boy. Ettore Negretti, born in 1883 and arrived from Servette of Geneva, was a boy of about eighteen, and on the Piazza d'Armi he scored twice; Herbert Kilpin added the third; Donna and Malvano replied for Juventus, and it ended 2-3 — Milan through to a final against the only champions Italy had ever had. Negretti would finish as Milan's top scorer of the championship, three goals from his two recorded appearances, take the Medaglia del Re in both 1901 and 1902, and then walk out of history so completely that the registers cannot even tell us when he died. Football consumes its young politely; but it consumes them.

Third Class to Ponte Carrega

What follows is the founding miracle, and like all founding miracles it travelled third class. To reach the final in Genoa on Sunday 5 May 1901, the Milan players took the train south and paid the fares out of their own pockets, riding third class down to Liguria — amateurs in the fullest sense, a lace-trade man and his colleagues going to the Campo di Ponte Carrega to face a club that had won every Italian championship ever played, on its own ground, with the great Spensley in goal. Kick-off was at three in the afternoon. Milan arranged itself in the pyramid of the age, two backs, three halves, five forwards: Hood; Suter, Gadda; Lies, Kilpin, Angeloni; Recalcati, Davies, Negretti, Allison, Colombo. Genoa answered with Spensley; Ghigliotti, Pasteur II; Passadoro, Pasteur I, Rossi; Agar, Bocciardo, Calì, Dapples, Delamare — and the referee, the Italian record notes without visible embarrassment, was a Genoa member named Ghiglione.

Milan won 3-0. On the how, the record books quarrel like heirs at a will-reading. One goal was turned into his own net by a Genoese; one was Kilpin's, the vow made flesh; and the third has no securely documented author, though the sheets set the name of the boy Negretti beside the captain's. The English annals append extra time where the Italian ones remember none; and the statisticians of the RSSSF carry the score to this day as a mere 1-0, a minimisation the Italian chroniclers dismiss as the long-established error of the sparser sources. Genoa's own club publication called 5 May a 'giornata nera' — a black day — conceding that its squad had fallen gravely, nought to three, against the strong Milan Club, while insisting that the true distance between the teams would have produced at most a narrow margin. Every defeated aristocracy in history has issued the same communiqué.

And then the era showed its manners. The beaten hosts staged a banquet in honour of the Milanese, with numerous toasts — one hopes Kilpin proposed none of his own, the company having seen what his toasts could do — and the day closed with a night-time boat trip, victors and vanquished afloat together on the dark Ligurian water. Then the champions of Italy rode the train back north, carrying the Coppa Fawcus and the Medaglia del Titolo Nazionale, with the King's medal beside them on the club's own roll of honours, towards the fog, the Trotter and the wine shop in via Berchet.

Add up the ledgers and the season reads: not a single defeat — five victories and a draw on the fuller accounting, one win fewer by the scrupulous tables that doubt the Mediolanum derby; three goals conceded on every version of the arithmetic, two to Juventus and one to Genoa; and a goals-scored column that lands anywhere between thirteen and seventeen, depending on which of the quarrelling medal scoresheets you elect to believe. The record books of 1901, having agreed on nothing else, were not going to begin agreeing with the sums. Seventeen months — roughly, for even the founding date is quarrelled over, the official history saying 16 December 1899 and the annalists 18 December, the day the Gazzetta announced it, as though Milan had been born twice and liked it both times — separated the signatures in a fiaschetteria from the title of champion of Italy. Genoa had been the only champion the country had ever known, and now it was not. The butcher's son from Nottingham had lost two finals in another man's shirt, sworn his oath, founded his club, disciplined it, dressed his own head in a British cap, and beaten the unbeatable on their own field, with the boy from Servette beside him and a referee from the home rolls in front of him. In a city that had buried Verdi that winter with three hundred thousand mourners, no one mistook a football match for history. That is the last recorded error of the Milanese year 1901.