Cutting the Cricket Loose

The First Mercy of Peace

The trains ran again. That was the first mercy of the first winter at peace since 1915: the guns had fallen silent two months earlier, and the casualty telegrams with them, and a city that had spent four years waiting on platforms for bad news could stand on those platforms and wait, at last, for something else. What arrived was not ease. Italy would spend 1919 absorbing some six hundred and fifty thousand dead into a demobilising, inflation-bitten economy, and Milan — industrial, restless, the great forge of the north — took more than its share of empty chairs at the table. But the squads refilled with returning soldiers, and the ball, which had spent the war years knocking about the regional cups, prepared at last to come home.

It would not be a gentle homecoming, because the country itself was not gentle that year. The victory tasted of ash — the vittoria mutilata, the mutilated victory, was the phrase on the lips of men who felt cheated by the peace — and before the year was out D'Annunzio would march on Fiume in September and the factories would begin the long convulsion history calls the biennio rosso. Milan the city was the crucible of all of it, as we shall see, and whoever writes of football here, in this year, writes with one eye always on the street outside the ground. In the spring the national championship was still suspended, so Lombardy played a tournament of its own: the second Coppa Mauro, January to March, the last competition of the war.

The Last Tournament of the War

Milan opened it on 12 January at the Velodromo Sempione — the old wooden bowl that wartime economics obliged the two Milanese rivals to share, so that home and away were polite fictions scribbled into the fixture list — and beat Internazionale 4–3, a derby of seven goals played in the raw air of the first January of peace. A week later came the journey to via Lodi in Legnano, and there the cup was effectively decided in a single afternoon: Legnano 6–2 Milan, a thrashing of the kind that leaves no argument behind it, only the long ride back down the line with the score for company.

The rest of the campaign was honest work that could not undo one bad Sunday. A 2–2 draw with US Milanese on 26 January; a 3–1 win at Saronno on 2 February; a 6–1 over Enotria Goliardo at via Bersaglio on 9 February; and on 16 February a second derby and a second derby win, 5–2 — a match the season records file under Milan's name as hosts while one player's biography frames it the other way round, a disagreement that dissolves the moment you remember both clubs were playing in the same borrowed bowl. On 2 March came the return against Legnano at the Velodromo, the one chance to reopen the argument, and it finished 0–0 — a goalless draw that closed the cup as firmly as the 6–2 had opened the wound. Milan then lost 2–1 to US Milanese at via Stelvio on 9 March, beat Saronno 2–0 on the 16th, and finished on 23 March with a 3–0 at via Goldoni over Enotria: ten matches, six won, two drawn, two lost, twenty-eight scored, seventeen conceded, fourteen points, and second place behind Legnano.

There was no manager, because the war had not yet given the club back its shape; a Commissione Tecnica ran the side by committee, and the captain's band belonged to Aldo Cevenini — Cevenini I, the First of that numbered dynasty — who along with Ernesto Morandi played all ten matches, and who shared the top of the scoring list, five goals apiece, with his brother Carlo, Cevenini V. And the campaign left behind one of those facts that no ornament improves: Milan beat Inter twice in the same cup, 4–3 and 5–2, and the cup went to Legnano.

March, and the Changing of Names

That same March, while the Coppa Mauro wound down, the club performed a small act of housekeeping that was really an act of history: it shortened its name. Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club — the full Victorian mouthful of 1899, with its whiff of English wool and its founders' England folded into the syllables — became, simply, Milan Football Club. The cricket fell away like a pressed flower from an old book. Nobody at the club had bowled an over in years, perhaps ever in earnest; but names are ballast, and cutting this one loose said something the club may not have fully intended to say: that the English childhood was over, that the war had made the institution Italian in fact as well as in feeling, and that whatever came next would be built in the language of the city rather than the language of the founders.

March held one more founding, and the facts belong side by side. On Sunday 23 March 1919, Milan closed their tournament with a 3–0 win over Enotria at via Goldoni; that same day, across the city in Piazza San Sepolcro, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Fascism was born in the same city, and in the same months, in which Milan the football club was returning to its championship life. The two facts share a date; the century would take care of the rest. A chronicle that pretends the ground outside the stadium was quiet is not a chronicle but a lullaby.

A Family Removal

Peace redistributes men as surely as war does, only with better manners. Luigi Cevenini — Cevenini III, Inter's own returning legend — had spent the war at home in a manner of speaking, playing beside his brothers in the red and black; with the armistice he went back to Internazionale, to be their legend a second time, and this time the family went with him: Aldo, the captain of the Coppa Mauro side, followed, and Mario too. Three brothers of the numbered dynasty, gone in a single year, and gone across the city — the kind of wound that clubs learn to describe as the natural order of things precisely because it hurts too much to describe accurately.

Nor would there be any Belgian cavalry riding back over the hill. Louis Van Hege, the pre-war goal machine, had been finished as a Milan story since 1916 — his last appearance a city derby with US Milanese on 3 December of that year, his last goal on 26 November in an 8–2 over Cremonese — and the peace carried him home instead: to Union Saint-Gilloise, to a debut for Belgium in March 1919, and, the following year at Antwerp, to Olympic gold. Milan replaced flesh with flesh, as clubs must. Armando Gambuti went out with the brothers; in came Natale Loiacono from Pirelli, Eugenio Negri from Inter, the young Veronese-born forward Mario Roghi, and a scattering of youth and minor Lombard names — the new-fired brick of any rebuilding — the market of that era being less a market than a shuffling of chairs between factory sides and city rivals. But the plain truth remained: the club had lost its scorers and its captain in the same breath, and the autumn would have to invent new ones.

The Goalkeeper Who Fell in Peacetime

Before any of it — before the first derby of the Coppa Mauro, before the name change, before the autumn — the year opened with a funeral. On 7 January 1919, in Milan, Lorenzo Gaslini died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-eight. He had been a goalkeeper of the pioneer generation: one of Lazio's first custodians, from 1910 to 1913, with two Terza Categoria titles to show for it, and a Milan man around and after that — his rossonero debut on 16 January 1910 in a Juventus–Milan that finished 5–3, his last match on 22 November 1914, a 5–0 over Chiasso. The exact shape of his Milan spells is recorded differently in different places, as it is for many men of that generation; the two dates stand like gateposts, and between them a career.

Then the war, which took him higher than any goalkeeper had ever been. Called up on 15 May 1915, he served first with the 1º Reggimento Granatieri on the Carso and the Isonzo — names that in Italian memory need no adjectives — and then transferred to flying school, earned his military pilot's licence on Farman machines, was stationed at Campoformido, and in 1917 took part in the bombing of Tolmino. Consider the odds he beat: the infantry front, then the aviation of 1917, canvas and wire and winter air, every flight a negotiation with physics conducted from an open cockpit. He survived the whole catalogue. And then, in the peace he had helped to win, a pneumonia contracted in the air collected him in a bed in his own city, two months after the Armistice — the war reaching back for one more man after the shooting had stopped.

He lies in the monumental cemetery at Sesto San Giovanni, and plaques carried his name at the Banca Italiana di Sconto and the Tennis Club Lombardo. Goalkeepers and pilots are the same species, if you think about it, and I have: men who work alone, up in the air, judged in instants, forgiven nothing. Gaslini was both, and 1919 deserves to be remembered at Milan as the year that began with his name before it ended with anyone's goals.

The Championship Returns

In the autumn, the Federation gave the game its country back. The Prima Categoria resumed for 1919-20 — the first full national championship since the suspension of 1914-15 — with sixty-six clubs sorted into regional qualifying groups feeding a semifinal round and then a national final, and Milan drawn into Lombardy's Group B. The club, too, put its institutional house in order: Piero Pirelli, back from his cavalry war service, in the president's chair; Guido Moda — Moda I in the club's numbering — as manager, ending the era of the committee; Alessandro Scarioni — Scarioni II — wearing the captain's band that the departed Aldo Cevenini had left behind. Pirelli came back to more than a chair: he set about building welfare for the men of his works, a company sports group founded in this same 1919, and — further off, in 1926 — a stadium raised at his own expense in a district called San Siro, though that concrete belongs to a later chapter than this one. After years of improvisation, Milan had a president, a manager, a captain and a championship. It remained to be seen whether it had a team.

It had. Ten Sundays, ten victories — the autumn of 1919 admitted no other result. Chiasso beaten 3–1 at Campo Pirelli on 12 October; Enotria Goliardo 4–1 at via Colletta a week later; a 6–1 away win over Pavia at the Velodromo Pavese on 26 October, the kind of scoreline that travels home ahead of the train; 4–0 at Atalanta's Clementina ground in Bergamo on 2 November, where Amedeo Varese scored all four goals himself and carried the whole Sunday home like a father carrying the shopping; Ausonia Pro Gorla dispatched 3–1 at Campo Pirelli on 9 November; a harder-earned 2–1 at Chiasso's Campo Mornello in Maslianico on the 23rd; Enotria again, 3–1 at via Bersaglio, on the 30th; Pavia again, 3–1 at via Ravizza, on 7 December; Atalanta again, 5–1 on the 14th at Campo Pro Gorla — Ausonia's own ground, borrowed while Campo Pirelli stood unavailable; and then, on 21 December, on that same Pro Gorla ground, the year's closing statement: Milan 10–0 Ausonia Pro Gorla. Double figures for Christmas. Note, in passing, the geography of those home dates — Campo Pirelli, via Bersaglio, via Ravizza — a club moving out of the wartime Velodromo arrangement and back into grounds of its own choosing, the way a family reopens rooms it had shut for the winter.

And note, above all, the gatecrasher. Varese had slipped into the side back on 16 February, in the 5–2 derby win, a nominal midfielder of a metre seventy and seventy-three kilos — and in the resumed championship this midfielder-by-title became the surprise bomber of the season, stringing hat-tricks through the qualifying rounds and arriving, with a bomber's appetite, in exactly the months when the departure of a dynasty had left the front line unmanned. Every era of this club produces one such interloper. What he had been before Milan, and what his goals finally added up to once the season was counted out to its end, are matters for the chapter that follows; 1919 need only record that he was here, and scoring.

From the Sempione to Maslianico

The Lean Years were not over. The semifinal round and its reckonings belonged to 1920, and the country outside the turnstiles was arming itself with grievances that no result could pacify. But twelve months had rebuilt the shape of a club: a committee had given way to Pirelli, Moda and Scarioni; a departed dynasty of brothers had given way to a gatecrashing midfielder with a bomber's appetite; a wartime cup had been lost to Legnano with two derby wins folded inside the losing of it; and a name coined in English in 1899 had been re-cut to fit the city that carried it. For ten autumn Sundays the oldest consolation in football held true: whatever the streets were preparing, the fixture list, at least, could be made to obey.

In 1919 Milan's universe ran from the wooden bowl of the Sempione to a muddy ground in Maslianico — and yet the institution that walked out of that small world was already, recognisably, the club this chronicle follows across the century: Italian in name at last, English only in memory, an airman mourned in January, ten goals without reply before Christmas. The door to 1920 stood open. Milan Football Club — the cricket cut loose, the century ahead — walked through it at full stride.