White Shirts in the Fog

Nine Chairs at One Table

There are years that arrive like a decree, and 1910 came to Milanese football stamped and sealed: for the first time the Italian championship would be played as a single national round-robin, the girone unico, nine clubs at one long table, sixteen rounds, home and away, no regional antechambers and no appeal to geography. The nine chairs were filled entirely from the industrial triangle of Liguria, Lombardy and Piedmont, and the names 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. 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 arrived with the tact of a bailiff.

The club that received it was changing its skin. 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 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. Even the furniture moved: during that season the club shifted its 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 was going in 1910 could do worse than follow that removal cart across the centre of a city in a hurry — a Milan of rubber works and tramlines and migrants pressing in from the plain, Giolitti's Italy at full industrial boil, the fog off the Navigli parting each morning to reveal one more chimney than the evening before.

The Winter of Six Goalkeepers

The season itself is best approached the way one approaches cold polenta: without illusions. 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 1909 had already set the tone: a 2-1 over Ausonia to open, defeat at US Milanese, then a 6-2 flogging in Turin in which Torino's Lang helped himself to five, before two thin 1-0 wins — over US Milanese at home, at Genoa away — closed the year with 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, offered dessert. 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 — though the record books quarrel over whether the feast was served on the 10th of the month or the 17th, agreeing only on the seven courses. A fortnight on, Andrea Doria failed to appear altogether and Milan pocketed a 2-0 by forfeit. The final ledger reads sixth of nine — six won, one drawn, nine lost, 23 scored against 36 conceded — although the compilers of RSSSF, counting the same foggy winter on different fingers, make it seventh with twelve points; the archives of those years quarrel the way old men quarrel over a hand of scopa played forty years ago, and one learns to let them. 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. The cousins were eating first at the family table now, and eating well.

Worse, they finished the meal. 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 fifteen, and stood back. Inter beat the children 10-3 — some ledgers say 11-3, others 9-3, as though even the scoreboard were embarrassed — 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 honesty obliges the chronicler 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 geometry 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. He had debuted for Milan at fifteen, on 14 November 1909 against Ausonia, and in that wretched championship the child played fifteen of the sixteen rounds and scored twice, one of them that goal at Juventus; the journalist Emilio Colombo had already found him his name in dialect — el fieu del Signur, the son of God — and Milan would learn how literally to take it. 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.

The Pale Lightning

A club that has eaten a winter like that must change its kitchen, and in the summer of 1910 Milan did. 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 the 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, the ledger 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: eldest of five footballing brothers — Aldo, Mario, Luigi, Cesare, Carlo — he had made thirteen appearances in that first 1909-10 season, scored in the seven at La Cajenna, and stood by May as the centre-forward of the first eleven the national team ever fielded; 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 — and 1910 could be seen at last for what it was: not a season but a hinge. On one leaf, the worst campaign of the club's young life, sixth of nine, ten derby goals swallowed against one returned, the first scudetto gone to the cousins across the city; on the other, the national team of Italy born of Milan men in Milan's own Arena, a sixteen-year-old son of God holding a record no one has touched in over a century, and a pale lightning-bolt from Brussels gathering nineteen goals in him like a storm. The league table said Milan had fallen; history, which keeps a different ledger and settles its accounts late, was quietly recording that in 1910 this club founded more than it lost. Lean years, yes — but proud ones; and the fog, as every Milanese knows, is where the city has always done its best work.