The Phantom Goal and the Matinee Idol

Thirty-One Points, Twelfth of Eighteen

The season Milan were still dragging through the January of 1931 had in truth been lost before the leaves turned: Mario Magnozzi, the captain, broken at Livorno on the opening afternoon of September, and everything after it following as consequence follows premise. A crew that loses its helmsman in the harbour mouth does not often find the open sea. The run-in ended in the spring and left these figures behind it: thirty-four matches, twelve won, seven drawn, fifteen lost, forty-eight goals scored against fifty-three conceded, thirty-one points, twelfth place among the eighteen. Two draws and four defeats in the first six rounds had set a tone that was never afterwards altered. Juventus took the title — their third — on fifty-five points, a horizon away; Livorno and Legnano went down through the trapdoor; and Milan sat in the grey middle of the table like a barge moored midstream, going neither up nor down, merely swaying.

The men responsible wore the failure with differing degrees of dignity. On the bench sat the Austrian Engelbert Koenig, presiding over a side whose most honest workman, Giuseppe Santagostino, scraped together eleven league goals — devotion applied to insufficient material, a cook doing his best with half the pantry bare. Mario Benazzoli kept the president's chair, Anteo Carapezzi the sporting director's desk, and San Siro, that young cathedral out beyond the western edge of the city, kept its Sundays — though what it was given to consecrate that spring was mostly the liturgy of mid-table.

Bánás, and Good Carpentry

Summer brought the remedy Italian clubs of the era reached for as instinctively as a grandmother reaches for broth: a Danubian. Out went Koenig; in came József Bánás, a Hungarian, heir to that central-European schooling which held that football was a matter of the ball doing the running and the head doing the thinking. Benazzoli stayed on as president, Carapezzi stayed at his desk, and Magnozzi — mended now — kept the armband. San Siro waited to see what the new man would make of them.

The crew was refitted with intelligence rather than extravagance. Piero Pastore came back from Lazio to lead the line — of him, much more presently, for he is the year's true novella. Giuseppe Bonizzoni arrived from Cremonese to complete, alongside Luigi Perversi, a defensive line drawn in front of the goalkeeper Dario Compiani; Giovanni Moretti came in from Crema to work the midfield beside Magnozzi; Giuseppe Fiammenghi and Arrigo Fibbi filled out the ranks. Out, in the other direction, went Guglielmo Borgo, Luigi Galetti and Angelo Minoia. It was not a revolution; it was carpentry — but good carpentry, as the spring of 1932 would eventually prove, is worth more to a football club than most revolutions.

An Autumn of Small Coins

The new championship opened on 20 September and Milan, as if suspicious of their own improvement, began by paying themselves out in small coins: one apiece with Fiorentina at San Siro, nothing apiece with Lazio in Rome a week later, one apiece again with Alessandria at home on 4 October. Three draws — respectable, bloodless, the football of a convalescent taking short walks. Then the road tilted. On 11 October Juventus, the reigning and future masters, dismissed them 2-0 in Turin; on the eighteenth came the derby, of which a separate account must be given, for it belongs to the mythology of the city; and on 25 October Bologna administered a 3-0 lesson of their own. Three points from six matches: the record of a struggler, worn by a side that was quietly becoming something better.

The proof arrived on All Saints' Day, the first of November, when Napoli came to San Siro and were beaten 3-1 — the season's first victory, and the sort that matters beyond its points because it tells a dressing-room that the plan is not a superstition. From there the campaign found its keel. Bánás's Milan would come to lean all year on three men who answered every call — Pietro Arcari, Magnozzi and Francesco Pomi — and on the returning Pastore, whose goals gave the autumn its meaning and the winter its warmth.

The Goal That Never Was

Now the derby — and the reader must first accept the name under which the enemy travelled, for in 1931 there was no Internazionale on the fixture list. The regime had small patience for words that looked abroad, and so the club from the other parish played as Ambrosiana-Inter, a name borrowed from the city's patron saint, as though holiness could be conscripted. Under whatever flag, they were the city's power in those years: winners of the first single-division scudetto in 1929-30, and in Giuseppe Meazza they possessed the one Milanese footballer whom even the opposing parish discussed in the hushed tone otherwise reserved for weather and miracles.

On 18 October 1931, at San Siro, the sides produced a derby that would be argued over for generations, though never about its winner. Arcari put Milan in front; Meazza inspired the recovery, and Ambrosiana turned the afternoon around; and then, in the forty-first minute of the second half, with Milan trailing, Magnozzi let fly, the Ambrosiana goalkeeper Smersy got something behind it, and the referee — Carraro of Padua — ruled that the ball had crossed the line. A goal, awarded to Milan: 2-3. The Ambrosiana players surrounded the official in fury and the ball was booted into the stands by way of legal argument; the goal stood; and so, unmoved, did the result. Ambrosiana-Inter 3, Milan 2.

Consider the shape of the irony, for it is perfect. The first ghost goal in the history of the Milanese derby — the ancestor, by thirty-six years, of the celebrated gol-non-gol of 1967 — was a phantom that materialised on Milan's behalf, a gift from the whistle pressed, perhaps wrongly, into rossonero hands. And it changed nothing. Milan were given a goal that may never have been, and lost all the same, at home, to the neighbour. There is a whole moral philosophy in that afternoon: fortune, when she has decided against you, will sometimes hand you her favours precisely so that you can feel their uselessness. The old men on the tram home did not need a philosopher to explain it to them.

The New Valentino

Piero Pastore, centre-forward, was born in Padua on the third of April 1903 with a face that was always going to cause trouble. The game had known him early — at fifteen years and 222 days he had become the youngest player Juventus ever fielded — and the nation had known him since 1928, when he was named in the Italy squad that took Olympic bronze in Amsterdam, a medal campaign that never once required him to step onto the pitch. In the summer of 1931 he came back to Milan from Lazio, to a club he had served before, and led the line as though the penalty area were a stage on which he had been contracted to appear.

He was, that season, the difference between grey and colour: thirteen goals in thirty matches, top scorer of a Milan climbing from twelfth towards fourth. The Danubian design of Bánás gave the side its order; Pastore gave it its argument — the point of the whole patient structure, the man for whom Moretti and Magnozzi did their measuring. A team that had scraped forty-eight goals from the whole of the previous championship would score a great deal more freely in this one, and no one carried a larger share of the improvement than the centre-forward.

And then he left — not for another club, but for another world. A financial disagreement with Milan, of the sort that footballers usually resolve by sulking briefly and signing anyway, Pastore resolved by walking out of football altogether: his final match in rossonero came on 26 May 1932, and the next lights he stood under were arc-lamps. In 1933 he took the lead in Acciaio — Steel — a film conjured from a subject by Luigi Pirandello, shot among the furnaces of the steelworks at Terni, with Mario Soldati shaping the script and choosing the footballer for its lead. The critics, reaching as critics do for the largest available comparison, anointed him the new Valentino.

The cinema kept him for decades — a face in Roman Holiday, in War and Peace, in Barabbas, the centre-forward grown into a character actor, glimpsed in the corners of other people's masterpieces — until his death in Rome on 8 January 1968. His Milan years came in separate spells, with wanderings between them, which seems fitting for a man who was never entirely in any one place. But about 1931 there is no disagreement at all: it was the hinge of him, the last full year he gave to the game before the screen took him for good, and he spent it scoring Milan's goals. A club could ask for worse farewells.

Fourth, After Twelfth

The campaign that began in that stuttering autumn would not be settled until the spring of 1932, and it can be left standing there, unfinished, with only a promise attached: this Milan were bound, by the spring, for fourth. The arithmetic of that climb — the banquet of goals that fed it, the final afternoon that sealed it, the table it produced — waits for the next chapter and is set down there in full. Fourth, after twelfth, is not glory. It is direction — and in the lean years, direction is the only luxury a supporter can afford.

Beyond the touchline, 1931 was Mussolini's Italy in the grip of Mussolini's decade. The championship itself was a child of the regime's appetite for centralisation, the old regional labyrinth flattened in 1929-30 into a single national division; the neighbours' very name was an act of political grooming; and that same year the state reached even into the universities, demanding a loyalty oath of Italy's professors, while the Great Depression went quietly about its demolition of the continent's certainties. There was no Europe for clubs to play in because there was, in the footballing sense, no Europe: only the peninsula, its Sundays, and its single unforgiving table. What news a man got of his team came late and second-hand, out of a newspaper or a neighbour's wireless set, and was chewed over on the tram until the next Sunday supplied more.

Milan won nothing in 1931 and lost nothing that mattered. Behind that sentence stand a twelfth place carried out of the previous winter like a debt; a Hungarian hired, a squad re-timbered with sense rather than gold; an autumn of small coins redeemed on All Saints' Day; a derby lost beneath the first phantom goal the fixture had ever produced; and at the centre of it all a centre-forward too handsome for the trade. What they did, that year, was turn — the way heavy things turn, with poles and patience and nobody applauding — until the bow was at last pointing somewhere. Nobody in the stands that October knew they were watching a centre-forward's last full year in the game. They knew only that he scored, and that the table had begun, finally, to be worth reading from the top down.