Thirteen Goals on Borrowed Time

The Axe-Year

There are years that merely pass and years that cleave, and 1914 is the axe-year of the modern world: it falls across the calendar of Europe and across the chronicle of the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club at exactly the same joint, in midsummer, so that whoever would tell the story honestly must tell it twice — once as the tale of an ordinary football city at peace, and once as the tale of a brilliant team playing out the handsomest autumn of its young life on time already borrowed and never to be repaid. Begin, then, in the January fog, which came off the Navigli that winter as it had come off them time out of mind, indifferent to headlines, and lay over a city that had crowded seven of its own clubs into a single championship group of ten: Milan, Internazionale, AC Milanese, US Milanese, Racing Libertas, Juventus Italia and Nazionale Lombardia, with Novara and Como admitted from the provinces and, by an administrative accident we shall come to, Juventus — the real one, of Turin. A Sunday in that championship was a tram-ride through the city's own geography: via Goldoni for Inter, via Stelvio for US Milanese, via Bersaglio for Racing Libertas, via Ravizza, via Monterosa, via Baggina, and home again to Porta Monforte, where Milan still kept its field and its habits.

The Prima Categoria itself had swollen to forty-five clubs arranged in six groups, three of the north and three of the centre and south — football multiplying in Italy the way factories multiplied, faster than anyone could quite govern. And the accident: Juventus had finished last in the Piedmont group the season before, and rather than drop out of the top flight had been reassigned into Milan's girone — relegation by train ticket, exile to Lombardy. The lodger would eat well at the family table. Keep the thought, for it decides the spring.

Points Left on the Tram

The winter's football resumed on 4 January with a 2-2 against Nazionale Lombardia at Porta Monforte, the first of the small leakages, the sort of result a strong side forgives itself on the Monday and pays for in April. Three Sundays later Milan went to Turin, to the Piazza d'Armi, and lost 2-1 to the exiles themselves: Bona twice for Juventus, a penalty on fourteen minutes and a second goal on fifty, with Attilio Trerè pulling one back at seventy-five — the old pioneer, in his eighth season of rossonero service, still doing the honest work while younger men were learning it.

Then, for a fortnight, the true Milan. On 1 February AC Milanese were beaten 6-1, Van Hege helping himself to a hat-trick — the twenty-fourth minute, a penalty on forty, the forty-second — with Marchesi scoring twice and Romolo Ferrario once; on 8 February, at the via Bersaglio, Racing Libertas were dismantled 7-1, Van Hege three again with a sixth-minute penalty, Trerè twice, Marchesi twice. A 3-1 over Juventus Italia followed on 15 February, and a citizen reading his Sunday paper might reasonably have concluded that the season was mending.

It was not. On 22 February, at the via Goldoni, came the derby, and with it the heaviest derby defeat of Milan's pre-war life: Internazionale 5, Milan 2 — Ernesto Morandi on thirty-seven minutes and a Van Hege penalty on forty the only rossonero answers to an afternoon that included, the season's chronicle records, a hat-trick by Cevenini. Which Cevenini, the record does not trouble to say: both Aldo, who had been Milan's own from 1909 to 1912, and young Luigi wore the nerazzurro that year, and when a family sets out to torment you the chroniclers evidently felt the surname sufficed. Luigi — Cevenini III, for the accountancy — was that season the top marksman of the entire championship with thirty-seven goals, and every one of them, to a Milanista, tasted of the old lesson: the sons you let cross the city come back punctual.

The rest was bookkeeping. A 1-1 with US Milanese on 1 March, a 2-0 over Novara awarded at the green table on 8 March, and the ledger closed: eighteen matches, eleven won, four drawn, three lost, twenty-six points, fifty-eight goals scored against nineteen conceded — and third place, behind Inter and behind the lodger Juventus, who took the qualifying berth to which Milan's handsome goal-arithmetic gave no title. The final round proceeded without the rossoneri and was won, of all clubs, by Casale. The rossonera archive's own verdict on that spring is the just one: a campaign of casual points thrown away against weaker sides, lost not on the great afternoons but on the drowsy ones. And over it all lay the shadow of the previous chapter: Renzo De Vecchi, the Son of God, sold to Genoa in 1913 for twenty thousand lire and a bank desk — twenty-four thousand, insist other ledgers, and let them quarrel — against the hundred-lire wages Milan paid its faithful. Remember Genoa. The name returns at the end of this chronicle like a bailiff.

The Belgian and the Old Guard

What stayed constant through the failure was the Belgian. Louis Van Hege, captain and centre-forward, il Pallido Saettante of our earlier pages, finished 1913-14 with twenty-one goals in seventeen matches and would finish 1914-15 with twenty-two in twenty; the rossonera archive, groping for the vocabulary of a later age, calls him 'a complete attacker, not a static centre-forward but a deadly killer moving throughout offensive play', which is to say he had understood, years before anyone coined the term, that a number nine is most dangerous where the defence has not yet thought to look for him. He had been Milan's since 1910. And mark the irony the year was preparing for him: by summer's end his Belgium was an invaded country, and its finest amateur was scoring penalties in Lombardy while the fields of his boyhood learned another language.

Around him stood the old guard and some new carpentry. Luigi Barbieri kept goal in his seventh season; Marco Sala was ever-present in defence, reliable as the tram timetable; Cesare Lovati and Alessandro Scarioni ran the half-back line; Trerè soldiered on, the last on-field survivor of the pioneer generation; Ferrario weighed in with eleven goals; and Pietro Lana, whose name stands beside the club's first-ever goals, scored nine in the league and was quietly playing his final season, though nobody announces such things at the time. The summer brought in a full-back, Amilcare Pizzi, a half-back, Francesco Soldera — eighteen appearances that season, and after the war a rossonero regular of a hundred and forty-six matches — and a forward of twenty from F.C. Volontari di Venezia named Erminio Brevedan, of whom more, much more, presently. Out went Carlo Capelli and Carlo De Vecchi. Modest joinery; and yet from it Milan built the finest team it had fielded in seven years.

A Velodrome, an Assassination, a Newspaper

On the last day of May the club moved house. The first rossonero match at the Velodromo Sempione — a 3-3 friendly against Phoenix F.C. on 31 May 1914 — inaugurated a home that was really somebody else's: a cycling track with a football pitch laid in its infield, two covered wooden stands along the straights, two curved terraces of concrete, an arena built for one sport and lent to another, which is as serviceable an image of 1914 as history offers. Milan would play there, with early-season league matches at the Arena Civica, until March 1919 — a lease whose closing date, note it well, assumed a world that still had the years 1915 to 1918 to spend as it pleased.

Twenty-eight days after the Phoenix friendly, in Sarajevo, the Archduke was shot. The guns of August followed; Italy declared itself neutral; and Milan, the industrial capital, at once began arguing about that neutrality more loudly than anywhere else in the peninsula. This was the city of the Pirelli rubber works — the club president's own family firm — of heavy industry and an interventionist press; it was in Milan, on 15 November, that Mussolini launched his pro-war Il Popolo d'Italia, and from the Socialist party, on 29 November, that he was expelled — the same fortnight in which Milan's footballers were winning 3-0 at AC Milanese and 5-0 over Chiasso. And the war had reached into the dressing-rooms before a single Italian shot was fired: between September and October the class of 1894 was called to the barracks, and clubs across Italy began their championship with conscription papers where their youngest players had been.

Thirteen Goals and a Boy from Treviso

Against that sky, on 4 October at the Arena Civica, Milan opened Girone D by beating Audax Modena 13-0 — to this day the club's record victory in official competition, a scoreline that sits in the books like a boulder in a field, too large to plough around. The distribution of the thirteen deserves its ink. Francesco Soldera, the new half-back, opened the account on six minutes; Trerè, in his eighth rossonero season, scored four — the eighth minute, the thirteenth, the fifty-sixth, the sixty-second; Van Hege scored five — twenty-four, thirty-six, fifty-three, sixty, sixty-eight — the captain conducting the massacre with a metronome; and a debutant scored three. Colombo of Milan refereed, and blew the easiest ninety minutes of his life.

The debutant was Brevedan. Twenty years old, a Treviso boy come down from the Volontari of Venice, pulling on the red and black for the first time while the guns were already speaking in France and Italy still called itself neutral, he scored the sixth goal, the seventh and the eleventh — minutes thirty-eight, forty-one and sixty-one — three times a scorer before most men have managed a touch worth remembering. That season he would play a handful of official matches — five, says the club's book of protagonists; four, says the season ledger; the quarrel is small and the goals were three either way — and be awarded the Scarpa d'Argento Radice as a prospect of the future. A prospect of the future: hold the phrase, and hold his name. This chronicle will need both before it closes.

Nineteen Points of Twenty

What followed was the nearest thing to perfection the club had produced since its championship infancy. On 11 October AC Milanese were beaten 5-0; on the eighteenth Milan went to Chiasso and won 7-1; on the twenty-fifth Bologna came to the Arena Civica and were sent home 9-1; on 1 November Juventus Italia were beaten 6-0 on their own ground; a forfeit at Audax Modena made it 2-0 on the eighth; AC Milanese fell again, 3-0, on the fifteenth; and on 22 November came the first championship match at the new home, the Velodromo Sempione, and a 5-0 over Chiasso to consecrate it. Bologna were beaten 1-0 away on the twenty-ninth, and only on 6 December, the last footballing Sunday of 1914, did anyone take anything from this Milan: a 1-1 with Juventus Italia, the single blemish. Nine victories and a draw; nineteen points of a possible twenty; first in the group, and first by the length of the Corso.

The reader of these chronicles knows what the men on the wooden stands could not. This team — the finest Milan had fielded in seven years — was running on borrowed time, in a city buying newspapers that were talking it into the war. The sequel belongs to 1915's chapter, but the countdown had already begun in this autumn's air: on 22 May 1915 Italy would order general mobilization, the federation would wire its clubs 'Per mobilitazione sospendesi ogni gara' — for mobilization, every match is suspended — and the final round's last Sunday, Milan against Inter among its fixtures, would never be played. Milan had fought through to the final four of the north, alongside Torino, Inter and Genoa; the federal men, believing like nearly everyone that the war would be a matter of months, left the title vacant; and when at last it was assigned, after the armistice, it went to Genoa, top of the northern final group. De Vecchi's Genoa. The bailiff, as promised, at the door.

Two Hundred and Ninety Days

The institutional house that presided over all this was solid in the Lombard manner: Piero Pirelli in the president's chair he had occupied since 1909; the season's registers naming Gilberto Porro Lambertenghi and Enrico Canfari as his vice-presidents; Giuseppe Wilmant keeping the minutes in the new season; and no manager at all — the team entrusted to a technical commission, Stabilini and Beltrami with a third chair over which the record books politely quarrel, Peverelli in one ledger, Carlo Colombo in another. Football by committee, and let it be said plainly: in the autumn of 1914 the committee was running the best footballing operation in Italy.

Now count the cost that was already being written, invisibly, into that register of names. Canfari — co-founder, in another life, of the very Juventus that had just eliminated his Milan, a rossonero player in 1903-04, now a vice-president — would fall on the Carso at Monte San Michele on 22 October 1915, a captain of the 112th Infantry, first into the enemy trench, posthumous Silver Medal. Porro Lambertenghi, marquess, vice-president since 1910, would fall at thirty-four on the Bainsizza plateau on 27 August 1917, commanding a machine-gun section. Domenico Moda, goalkeeper, brother of Guido, would die an artillery sergeant in the Isonzo war zone on 15 October 1915. The roll the club's historians keep runs on — Glauco Nulli, Edoardo Colombo, Egidio Rovelli, Giuseppe Soldera, Lorenzo Gaslini, Alessandro Calderari, Arlando Carito, Luigi Forlano, Paolo Wilmant, Mario Azzolini — and the marble plaque that gathers them all was unveiled on 4 November 1920, by which time the velodrome years were nearly done and the world they commemorated had gone for good.

And Brevedan, the boy of the thirteen. His last match in red and black was the derby of 2 May 1915, lost 3-1 to Inter; twenty days later Italy mobilized; and the prospect of the future went north as a sottotenente of the 55th Infantry, Brigata Marche, up into the Cadore, where he spent June digging trenches and July attacking Monte Piana, and where, on 20 July 1915, at twenty-one, he was killed — the first Milanista footballer to fall in the Great War. Between his first goal at the Arena Civica and his grave in the mountains lay two hundred and ninety days. That is the verdict of 1914, and no other is needed: a club scored thirteen on an October afternoon and finished the year unbeaten at the top of its group, and the century took the debutant's three goals as a deposit on everything it meant to collect. The fog on the Navigli, which does not judge, covered the city as before; the chronicler must judge, and judges thus — the most beautiful autumn of Milan's early life was written in an ink the war had already begun to dry.