The Thirteenth Minute at the Arena

From the Wine-Flask to the Beer-Hall

In the season of 1909-10 a removal cart crossed the centre of Milan, carrying the club's offices from the Fiaschetteria Toscana to the Birreria Spatenbräu — from the Tuscan wine-flask to the Bavarian beer-hall — and whoever wants to understand where Italian football stood in 1910 could do worse than follow that cart through a city in a hurry: rubber works and tramlines, migrants pressing in from the plain, Giolitti's Italy at full industrial boil, one more chimney on the skyline every time you looked up. The club on the cart was changing its skin to match. Piero Pirelli sat in the presidency — he had taken the chair in 1909 and would keep it until 1928, and in 1926 it would be his money that raised the new concrete of San Siro — while Giannino Camperio directed the team and Guido Moda, a defender at the club since 1903 with the championships of 1906 and 1907 already sewn into his 27 official appearances, wore the captain's band.

The championship the cart rolled towards was new furniture too. For 1909-10 the Federation had done away with the regional antechambers and sat nine clubs at one long table — the girone unico, sixteen rounds, home and away, no appeal to geography — and the nine deserve their roll-call, if only because the modern ear no longer hears them all: Internazionale, Pro Vercelli, Juventus, Torino, Genoa, US Milanese, Milan, Andrea Doria, Ausonia — the whole industrial triangle of Liguria, Lombardy and Piedmont, and nothing beyond it. For the first time the table would tell the whole truth about a club, week upon week, with no merciful eliminations to shorten the agony; and for Milan, sixth when the counting stopped, the truth would be plain enough to read from a passing tram.

The Winter of Six Goalkeepers

Injuries fell on the squad in such numbers that boys were pulled from the reserves before their time, and by the end the club had put six different men between the posts — Heim, then Barbieri, then Attilio Colombo for two matches, then Mac Cormack, Gaslini, Ott, then Barbieri and Gaslini again — a roll-call that reads less like a statistic than like a diagnosis. The autumn of the same season has been told round by round in the chapter before this one and will not be told twice; its record is three wins, a lesson in Turin where Torino's Lang helped himself to five, and an afternoon in Genoa struck from the books altogether — a coat of varnish over the rot.

January 1910 removed the varnish. On the 2nd, at the Campo Milan di Porta Monforte, Pro Vercelli administered a 0-3 lesson. On the 16th, at Corso Sebastopoli, Milan scored three against Juventus — Lana from the penalty spot on 13 minutes, the boy De Vecchi on 25, Mayer on 42 — and contrived to lose 5-3, which is the whole season in one afternoon: goals enough for respectability, defending enough for none. A week later Juventus came to Porta Monforte and took the return 1-0; on the 30th Ausonia were held 2-2, Brioschi after three minutes, Carrer on the half-hour, and that draw would remain the only one Milan managed all championship. February brought the derbies, of which more below, and a 4-0 beating at the Foro Boario of Vercelli; March added a 0-1 to Torino at home.

April, at least, relented. Away to Andrea Doria, on the Genoese ground they called La Cajenna, Milan won 7-1 — Brioschi twice, Carrer twice, the young Cevenini I among the scorers, the hosts' lone reply an Ansaldo penalty; some records date the afternoon to the 10th of the month and others to the 17th, and on everything else they agree. A fortnight on, Andrea Doria failed to appear altogether and Milan pocketed a 2-0 by forfeit. The final table reads sixth of nine — six won, one drawn, nine lost, 23 scored against 36 conceded — although the compilers of RSSSF, counting the same winter on different fingers, make it seventh with twelve points. Achille Brioschi finished as the side's leading scorer with five; Carrer and Lana had three apiece. It was, the historians agree with rare unanimity, a mediocre campaign; the Milanese of 1910 will have used a shorter word.

Ten to One: The Darkest Derbies

And yet mediocre is a mercy the derbies do not permit. On 6 February, at Porta Monforte, Internazionale won 0-5; on 27 February, at the Arena Civica, they won again, 5-1, Edoardo Mariani's goal in the fifth minute standing alone against the flood like a man holding up an umbrella. Ten goals to one across twenty-one days: no derby year of the young rivalry had been darker, and few since have matched it.

Worse: they finished champions. Internazionale and Pro Vercelli ended the girone level on 25 points, and a playoff was fixed for 24 April in Vercelli. Pro Vercelli, with exhibitions already arranged, asked to move it to the first of May; Inter refused, the Federation withdrew the postponement, and the Vercellesi replied with the bitterest gesture in the early history of our football — they sent out their fourth team, boys of eleven, and stood back. Inter beat the children 10-3 — four of them to Engler alone — and were champions of Italy for the first time, while the Federation punished Pro Vercelli afterwards for insubordination and unsportsmanlike conduct. A title won against schoolboys, a protest made out of schoolboys: nobody left Vercelli clean that afternoon, and Milan, sixth and elsewhere, was spared at least the shame of being present.

One Afternoon of Vittorio Pozzo

Every chronicle earns one digression, and this year's concerns a name on a February team-sheet. On the 13th of that month, between the two derby floggings, Milan beat Genoa 1-0 at Porta Monforte, Brioschi scoring on 32 minutes — the only match Milan would win on its own field, forfeits aside, in the whole of that 1910 winter and spring. In the eleven that afternoon, the club's chronicles record, stood Vittorio Pozzo: one official appearance in red and black, the first and the last. The weekly Il Foot-Ball, writing on 17 February, described an excellent player formed in Switzerland, returning to the game after roughly two years away; the truth beneath the courtesy is that an injury-ravaged Milan had drafted him in mid-crisis, the way a short-handed osteria borrows a cook.

The general biographies pass over the afternoon in silence, and it would be dishonest not to say so; the story survives on the authority of the rossonero archives, and I choose to believe them, because the irony is too perfectly Milanese to be invented. The man who would twice lead Italy to the World Cup as commissario tecnico — the finest tactical mind this country would produce for half a century — gave Milan precisely ninety minutes, kept precisely one clean sheet, won precisely one match, and vanished. In the club's worst season, its briefest career was, proportionally, its most successful; and the digression, as a digression should, comes home with the shopping.

White Shirts at the Arena

Pietro Lana was born in Milan on 10 October 1889 and had worn the red and black since 1908: quick, precise, and — his biographers reach for the polite phrase — of lively character. His club season had been misery in miniature: three league goals, one of them the consolation penalty in the 5-3 defeat at Juventus, all of them drowned in the general shipwreck. The championship ended in April with Milan sixth and the city's other club champion of Italy. Then came Sunday, 15 May 1910, half past three in the afternoon, and the Arena Civica — the same neoclassical amphitheatre where Inter had scored five past Milan in February — gathered some four thousand curious Milanese for a fixture without precedent: the first match ever played by an Italian national team.

Italy wore white — a neutral shirt pending a decision, though some maintain it honoured Pro Vercelli; the azzurro would come later — and in the eleven stood two Milan men, Lana and Aldo Cevenini — three, if one counts Attilio Trerè, Milan's half-back of the pioneer years, that season in Ausonia's colours and back in red and black within months. In the thirteenth minute Lana scored the first goal in the history of the national side. Before the end he had a hat-trick — the thirteenth minute, the fifty-ninth, and in the eighty-ninth the first penalty ever awarded to Italy, which he converted; France were beaten 6-2. Consider the shape of it: the worst Milan season yet played, and yet when Italy needed founding it was founded by Milan men, on Milan grass, before a Milanese crowd, with a Milan forward writing the first line of the whole azzurro epic in a borrowed white shirt.

Eleven days later, in Budapest, the epic received its first lesson: Hungary 6, Italy 1, and Lana was never capped again — two matches, three goals, a complete international career consumed inside a fortnight, all of it in 1910. But that grim afternoon on the Danube hid a second Milanese record. At the forty-sixth minute a boy came on: Renzo De Vecchi, Milan's own, born in the city on 3 February 1894, who at sixteen years, three months and twenty-three days became the youngest man ever to wear the national shirt — a record that stands unbroken to this day. How he arrived at fifteen, and how the dialect answered him with el fioeu de Dio, the previous chapter has already set down; what belongs to 1910 is the sequel — the goal at Juventus in January, and then this, an Italy with a whole peninsula to choose from sending on a boy of sixteen from Milan. Lana, for his part, never left the city of his thirteenth-minute genesis: he lived out his days in Milan and died there on 6 December 1950, the man who scored Italy's first goal in the year his own club could barely score at all.

Importing the Lightning

A winter like that condemns a squad, and in the summer of 1910 Milan rebuilt its own. The Gazzetta dello Sport of 7 August set out the traffic: from Brussels came the forward Louis Van Hege and the defender Roger Pierard, both of Union Saint-Gilloise, and from Racing Club Bruxelles the midfielder Maurice Tobias, called Max, who would take Moda's captaincy; out went Diment, Mayer and Hunzicker. Poor Ausonia — last with five points and not a single victory — collapsed altogether, and Milan gathered up the salvage: Bontadini, Rizzi, Trerè II, Bavastro, Bovati and Giovanni Mauro, with Cesare Lovati, Gian Guido Piazza and the goalkeeper Roberto Cozzi arriving besides. Moda himself would pass in time into the game's institutions, a founder and board member of the referees' association established in August 1911 and twice, later, Milan's coach: the pioneer generation retiring into the committee room, as pioneer generations do.

The Federation, meanwhile, repented of its own boldness and folded the girone unico away after a single year, restoring the regional groups. In the new ligure-lombardo-piemontese girone the true beginning came on 27 November at Ponte Carrega, where Genoa were beaten 0-3 and the debutant Van Hege scored twice, on 26 and 37 minutes, before Tobias added the third. They would call the Belgian il Pallido Saettante — the pale lightning-bolt — for the pallor and the speed and the dribbling that went through defences like weather; by the time the season closed he would stand as the championship's leading scorer with nineteen goals in sixteen matches, and by the time his Milan story closed, years and a war later, his total would read ninety-seven league goals in eighty-eight games. Milan had signed its first great foreign goleador, and the age of importing lightning had begun.

December confirmed the change of weather. On the 4th, Pro Vercelli — the champions-to-be of that season — were held 0-0 at Porta Monforte by the rabble of the spring. The 11th was a rest day, and on the 18th, at via Stelvio, US Milanese were taken apart 3-6: an own goal inside the first minute, Tobias on 18, Cevenini I on 32 and again on 83, Van Hege from the penalty spot on 38, Bontadini III on 68. Cevenini deserves his sentence here, and in the present tense: the forward of twenty introduced a chapter ago, on an afternoon that belonged to somebody else, stands by May as the centre-forward of the first eleven the national team ever fields, and closes December scoring in pairs — a dynasty's opening chapter, written in a year everyone else was trying to forget.

So Milan closed the calendar year unbeaten in the new championship: two wins and a draw, nine scored, three conceded, a December that seemed to belong to some other club than the one whipped ten-to-one in February. The first scudetto was Internazionale's, and nothing here will pretend otherwise. What stays with Milan is the rest of 1910 — the Arena at half past three, four thousand Milanese in the old amphitheatre, a borrowed white shirt, and the thirteenth minute, which no table can relegate and no winter can take back.