The Cursed Match and the Son of God

A Year Struck Twice in Silver

Italy spent 1911 gazing at itself in a mirror, and the mirror stood in Turin. Fifty years had passed since the Kingdom was proclaimed, and the cinquantenario was celebrated the way a self-made industrialist celebrates — with an exhibition of machines: the International Exposition of Industry and Labour ran from the end of April to the middle of November, with sister expositions in Rome and Florence, and the young nation walked through its own pavilions admiring what it had become. Then, on 29 September, as if the machines demanded employment, Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire for the sands of Libya. The adventure was sold as a stroll and became a grind, and it smuggled two dark novelties into the century: over the Libyan coast that autumn an Italian aviator flew the first aerial reconnaissance in the history of war, on 23 October, and on 1 November another dropped the first bomb ever released from an aeroplane. The reader should keep those dates in his coat pocket as he reads what follows, because they are threaded between Milan's Sundays like black ribbon through a wreath, and because the generation that played these matches would soon be conscripted by the consequences.

Milan — the city of rubber and looms, of the Navigli hauling their barges up through the fog — had its football club presided over, for the third year, by Piero Pirelli, with Gilberto Porro Lambertenghi at his elbow as vice-president, and the club wore the city's industrial face: home at the Campo Milan di Porta Monforte, with the Arena Civica for grander occasions; direction passing that year from Giannino Camperio to the technical commission of Ernesto Belloni; the captain's band passing from Max Tobias to the Veronese Giuseppe Rizzi. And here is the cruel symmetry that makes 1911 a chapter rather than a corridor: the calendar year straddles two championships, and Milan finished second in both, behind Pro Vercelli in both, in a format that gave the runner-up precisely nothing — no medal, no playoff, no passage to the final, nothing but the arithmetic of regret. Only the group winner went forward. Everyone else went home. Twice in one year, Milan went home.

Spring: a Championship Mislaid in March

The spring belonged to the 1910-11 championship, contested by nine clubs of the western triangle in the girone ligure-lombardo-piemontese, and the new year opened as though the title were a formality. On 29 January Milan won 2-0 away to Juventus, Louis Van Hege striking on 17 minutes and Aldo Cevenini on 85; on 5 February the derby was taken 2-0 from Internazionale, Tobias and Van Hege the scorers; on 12 February Genoa were beaten 2-0, Van Hege twice, the second from the penalty spot. Three wins, not a goal conceded — and then the championship was mislaid in the space of five Sundays. At Vercelli on 19 February the leaders won 1-0, which was no disgrace; but on 5 March Milan lost 2-0 at home to US Milanese, on 12 March could not score against Piemonte, on 19 March lost 1-0 at home to Andrea Doria, and on 26 March travelled to Torino and were dismantled 5-1, Pietro Lana's goal a coin tossed into a well. The home defeats to US Milanese and Andrea Doria, and that rout in Turin, are what killed the title; the table merely notarised the death.

What followed was the splendour of the irrelevant, a genre Milan would come to know intimately. On 23 April Juventus were beaten 3-0, Van Hege and Cevenini among the scorers; on 30 April came the derby of nine goals, of which more below; and then the recovered fixtures of May and June became a shooting festival — Torino beaten 5-2 on 14 May with two from Tobias, Piemonte beaten 7-1 on 28 May with four from Van Hege, Andrea Doria overwhelmed 7-1 in Genoa on 4 June with four more from the Belgian, two from Tobias and one from Cevenini. Sixteen matches, ten won, forty-four scored: and still the ledger read Pro Vercelli 27, Milan 22, with Torino at 18 and the rest trailing away to poor Juventus on 10. In June the men of Vercelli beat Vicenza, winners of the experimental Veneto-Emilia group, 3-0 and 2-1 to take the title, and Milan was left to contemplate the oldest of footballing sums: that the goals you score in June weigh nothing against the points you drop in March.

Nine Goals at the Fair

The derby of 30 April 1911 deserves its own table at the banquet. Milan 6, Internazionale 3 — one of the highest-scoring derbies the young rivalry had yet produced, a country fair of a match about which the record books agree on everything except the details: Tobias converted two penalties, Van Hege scored twice, Carrer and Lana are on the scoresheet, Engler answered twice for Inter, and whether a Trerè own goal completed the tally is a point on which the ledgers still quarrel like elderly relatives dividing an inheritance. Let them quarrel. What matters is the flavour: nine goals on a spring afternoon, the city divided and delighted, and a Milan forward line that had learned to cook with the abundance of a Lombard kitchen — everything into the pot, and let the neighbours smell it.

And what a kitchen it was. Van Hege, born in Uccle in May 1889 and signed from Union Saint-Gilloise the year before, finished the 1910-11 campaign with nineteen goals in sixteen matches, capocannoniere of the championship — il Pallido Saettante, the Pale Lightning, lethal with either foot, the club's first foreign fuoriclasse, on his way to nearly a hundred goals in only eighty-eight league appearances and, further off, an Olympic gold with Belgium at Antwerp. Tobias, who had arrived from Belgium with him and worn the captain's band all season, contributed eleven. Cevenini, eldest of the five footballing brothers of that name, added seven, and was by now furniture in the young Nazionale — capped in Paris in April, against Switzerland at home in May, and again at La Chaux-de-Fonds a fortnight later, in a year when Italy twice played at home in Milan and twice failed to win. On the wing there was even a Uruguayan, the teenage Giulio Bavastro of Paysandú, the first South American ever to wear the red and black, blooded at Genoa the previous November. A Belgian spearhead, a Uruguayan winger, a Milanese chorus: arguably the most cosmopolitan dressing room in Italy, in a city that was itself becoming Italy's window on the world. And still scoring, quietly, was Pietro Lana — the same Lana who a year earlier at the Arena had scored the first goal the Italian national team ever scored; in 1911 he found the net against Torino in March, at the fair of 30 April, and from the penalty spot in October: history's first azzurro goalscorer still doing his rounds like a lamplighter at dusk.

The Boy Who Leapt the Ditch

Now the chronicle narrows to one player, because 1911 belongs, in its deepest ledger, to a seventeen-year-old defender. Renzo De Vecchi was born in Milan in February 1894 and had been il Figlio di Dio — the Son of God — since before he shaved, the nickname coined by an awed rossonero supporter for a boy who defended like a theologian, with reasons. The devotion had preceded the contract. Before his father, a rossonero of the passionate persuasion, shouldered the club's steep membership fees in 1908 to enrol him, the boy used to leap the drainage ditch at the ground to watch Milan without paying, until the gateman came to recognise the devotion and began, in the Milanese way, to see nothing. He made his club debut at fifteen, against Ausonia in November 1909; he made his Italy debut at sixteen years, three months and twenty-three days, in May 1910, and no younger man has worn the shirt since. And in 1911 he simply never rested: every one of the sixteen matches of the 1910-11 campaign, every one of the eighteen that followed, plus the Nazionale, which called him again for La Chaux-de-Fonds in May. He was the fixed point of the Milan defence, the one certainty in a team still being assembled around him.

Which is what makes 8 October 1911 so cruel that the club's historians gave the afternoon a name. Opening day of the new championship, Porta Monforte, and the visitors were Piemonte — the group's doormat, a side that would finish the season dead last with four points. Cevenini scored on 12 minutes, as expected. On 25 minutes, De Vecchi turned the ball into his own net. One-all it stood, and one-all it finished. The crowd went home mildly annoyed, the way one is annoyed by a scorched risotto — a pity, not a tragedy, there would be other Sundays. Only the following spring would the afternoon reveal its true price, when the final table read Pro Vercelli 32, Milan 31, and the historians reached for the phrase that has stuck to the fixture ever since: la partita maledetta, the cursed match — the single point that cost a scudetto, dropped at home to the worst team in the group, on the season's very first afternoon, off the boot of the club's most beloved son.

The Answer from Eleven Metres

What makes the story bearable — what makes it one of the finest small stories in the club's early history — is that the boy answered. But first the machine around him must be given its due, because the autumn of 1911 produced the most authoritative football Milan had yet played. A week after the cursed match the team went to Vercelli, where nobody escaped easily, and drew 1-1, Lana converting a penalty on 26 minutes before Milano II levelled for the champions after the hour. On 22 October US Milanese were beaten 6-0, Lana scoring from the penalty spot; on 29 October Milan went to Turin and beat Juventus 4-0, the new captain Giuseppe Rizzi — recovered from Ausonia the year before, a Veronese of appetite and elbow — scoring a hat-trick of strange beauty: the 45th minute, the 46th, and the 85th, two goals straddling the interval like a man who continues his argument through the coffee. Rizzi would finish the season with twelve.

Then, on 5 November, the derby. Inter arrived with a familiar face: Franco Bontadini, Milanese, born in 1893, who had played seven matches for Milan in 1910-11 before crossing the city that year — and who, with the malice the football gods reserve for such occasions, scored against his old club. The afternoon leaned the wrong way. On 59 minutes Milan were awarded a penalty, and the man who walked forward to take it was not a forward at all but the seventeen-year-old defender who had carried an own goal on his conscience for four weeks. De Vecchi struck it home. Rizzi added the winner on 79 — the books bicker, as usual, over the minutes, never over the score — and Milan had the derby 2-1. Four days earlier, over Libya, a man had dropped the first bomb in history from an aeroplane; at the derby a boy dropped his burden from eleven metres, and of the two experiments in gravity the second is the one this chronicle prefers to remember. He would convert four penalties that season: the sin of October redeemed in instalments, with interest.

The machine rolled on: 1-0 at Casale through Rizzi, 3-1 over Torino with two from Cevenini and one from Van Hege, and then, on 26 November at Genoa, the campaign's only defeat, 1-0 — one loss in the entire championship, and it would not be the loss that mattered. December closed the year with a 4-0 over Andrea Doria, Van Hege and Cevenini sharing the goals two apiece, a 3-0 away to Piemonte, and, on 17 December, a 2-2 at home with Pro Vercelli — the two powers of the age standing level on the field one last time before the arithmetic separated them. Van Hege and Cevenini would finish the season with eighteen goals apiece, the side's joint top scorers, in a team that scored sixty and conceded ten.

One Point, Weighed Forever

The full bill arrived only in the spring of 1912, but it belongs to this chapter because every item on it was purchased in 1911. Eighteen matches: fourteen won, three drawn, one lost; sixty scored, ten conceded; thirty-one points. Pro Vercelli: thirty-two. The men of the rice fields went on to crush Venezia 6-0 and 7-0 in the final, and Milan was left holding the most elegant losing ledger in the young history of the Italian game — undone not by any defeat but by a draw, at home, against the group's worst side, on the opening afternoon. The autumn's consolation was a silver shoe: the Scarpa d'Argento named for Gerolamo Radice, the former Milan goalkeeper who had put it up, claimed in its inaugural edition that preseason — pretty silverware of the kind the era awarded generously for friendlies while the championship gave the runner-up nothing. Around the young core, the old guard was folding its aprons: Guido Moda, champion of 1906 and 1907, was in the last of his playing seasons, his return as the club's coach still some years off; and Marco Sala, the slight, nervy defender of whom the journalist Emilio Colombo observed that he was one of those opponents who do not impress but are felt, kept his place through it all — the cursed match included — with a first Italy cap waiting for him in the March to come.

So how should the year be entered in the great register? Not as failure, though it failed twice; the fairest word is apprenticeship, served under the harshest of masters. Pro Vercelli, provincial and implacable, taught Milan in 1911 the lesson the club would spend a century relearning: that championships are not won on the June afternoons when the goals arrive in fours, but on the October afternoons when the doormat holds you — that the distance between glory and its silver shadow can be one point, one own goal, one mistimed touch on the season's first day. And history, which files everything, asks us to note the names in the margins. Bontadini, who scored against us in November, would go to the Great War concealing his medical degree so as to march with his comrades, until he was found out and made a medical sub-lieutenant. Bavastro, the boy from Paysandú, would enlist in 1915 and fall at Gallio in January 1918. The aeroplanes over Libya were a rehearsal; so, in its way, was this season of magnificent futility. Milan ended 1911 with the best team it had yet built, a seventeen-year-old already carrying its defence and its conscience, and nothing to show for any of it but a silver shoe and a curse — and if you wish to understand the rossonero temperament, its irony, its patience, its taste for glory salted with grief, you could do worse than begin here: one point short, the fog coming up from the Navigli, and the new year waiting like an unpaid bill.