The Year They Could Not Say Milan

The Year They Could Not Say Milan

There are years that arrive with trumpets and years that arrive with a ration book, and 1941 came to Lombardy carrying the second, its collar turned up against a fog that no longer parted for anybody. Italy was at war, deep in it now, and the war had reached into everything: into the pantry, into the tram timetable, into the very name of the football club that concerns us. The regime, which could not abide an English word on an Italian team-sheet, had ordered that 'Milan' — that stubborn souvenir of the founders, worn all these years like an heirloom watch — be ironed flat into 'Milano'. And so the club played the whole of this year as Associazione Calcio Milano, a name that fitted it the way a borrowed suit fits a man at a funeral: correctly, and wrongly.

Let it be said at once, so that the reader smells the era rather than merely reading it: football continued. It continued because the peninsula demanded it, because Sunday without the game would have been a second blackout, and because men in wartime need somewhere lawful to shout. But it continued under strain — players liable to the call-up, austerity on every table, and, before the year was out, an electricity shortage that severed the trams from San Siro and drove the club back into the middle of the city, to the old Arena, as if history had taken it by the sleeve and marched it home to its youth. Calendar 1941 thus straddles two seasons, as calendars insist on doing: the strong spring finish of 1940-41, and the promising, then troubling, autumn of 1941-42. We shall take them as the year served them — in order, and with wine where the food demands it.

Spring Steel in the Fog

The winter run-in was, on paper, a modest banquet, and paper for once told the truth about its texture. On the fifth of January, away to Lazio, a goalless draw of the kind connoisseurs file under prudence; a week later Juventus were held 2-2 in Milan, both goals struck by Aldo Boffi, of whom much more presently; on the twenty-sixth the team went to Naples and won 3-2, which in any winter is a way of announcing seriousness. Then, on the ninth of February, the Derby della Madonnina — a 2-2 draw with Ambrosiana-Inter, the neighbours from across the Madonnina's shadow — an afternoon that settled nothing, as derbies between proud households rarely do.

The plate of the season, however, was served on the sixth of April, when Bologna came to Milan. Bologna, understand, were the aristocracy of the hour — they would finish the season as champions, thirty-nine points, a sixth scudetto in their cabinet — and Milano put five past them while conceding one. A 5-1 against the eventual champions is not a result; it is an argument, and the argument ran thus: this team, whatever the final table chooses to say, fears nobody in Italy.

What the final table chose to say was third — thirty-four points from thirty games, twelve won, ten drawn, eight lost, fifty-five scored. And one figure above all deserves to be read twice, slowly, the way one reads a will: thirty-four conceded, the fewest in the whole of Serie A, the stingiest defence in the land. The team of Guido Ara — the coach who had taken over from József Bánás — was built the Lombard way, on a dry foundation, like a farmhouse that expects hard winters. Above him, in an arrangement the times had made common, sat Umberto Trabattoni as commissario straordinario, with Antonio Busini as technical director; on the field the armband belonged to Bruno Arcari. Bologna first with thirty-nine, Ambrosiana second with thirty-five, Milano third with thirty-four: a podium measured out in single points, and the best defence in Italy standing on its lowest step.

The cup offered its own small parable. In May, Milano went to Casale and won 5-1 in the sedicesimi — the club's log dates it the eleventh — and then, a week later, Lazio came to San Siro and left with a 0-2 that ended the adventure in the round of sixteen. The lesson needed no long division: the Romans, held scoreless in the league in January, had chosen the cup to present their invoice.

The Bombardiere of Seregno

Every era of this club has had its cannon, and the cannon of the war years was Aldo Boffi — il bombardiere di Seregno, a nickname we shall repeat as often as he earned it, which is to say constantly. In the third-place campaign he was the team's marksman with sixteen league goals; both goals against Juventus in January were his; and in the season that opened in the autumn of this very year he would lead not merely Milan but all of Italy, capocannoniere of Serie A 1941-42 with twenty-two goals — twenty-eight across all competitions. It was his third scoring title: he had shared one in 1938-39 and taken 1939-40 outright with twenty-four. Three crowns in four seasons, gathered while the world was dismantling itself.

Across nine seasons in red and black, from 1936 to 1945, the bombardiere would put away one hundred and thirty-six goals in one hundred and ninety-four official matches — a total that, after eight decades of richer eras and better-fed centre-forwards, still stands fifth on the club's all-time scoring list. Consider what the number means before you pass it. These were not goals scored in a plump time, with full stadiums and full stomachs; they were wartime goals, rationed-bread goals, struck by a man from Seregno while the trams stopped and the lights went down. There is a moral in that, and the moral is thoroughly Lombard: when there is less of everything, the serious workman produces anyway, and keeps his accounts in order, and does not discuss it.

The Man with the Frozen Foot

And yet the strangest, most human figure on the pitch in 1941 was not the cannon but the convalescent beside him. Giuseppe Meazza was Ambrosiana-Inter made flesh — two World Cups, 1934 and 1938; two hundred and forty goals in nerazzurro; the boy from Milan's own streets who had grown into the greatest star the national game possessed. Then the body presented its bill. The piede gelato, they called it — the frozen foot — an occlusion of the blood vessels of his left foot, a circulatory ailment that stole the better part of two seasons from him and, by some accounts, brought him within sight of amputation. Inter, believing him finished, let him go, which is the sort of decision that keeps historians in work.

On the twenty-eighth of November 1940 he did the unthinkable and crossed the city. He pulled on the red and black of the eternal rival, and through 1941 — the year this chapter holds in its hands — he rebuilt himself in rossonero, piece by piece, the way a mason rebuilds an arch, testing each stone before trusting it. Around him the attack took shape: Boffi the bombardier to finish, and young Gino Cappello, newly arrived and already scoring, who across three wartime seasons in the shirt would gather thirty-six goals of his own. By the autumn the club's chroniclers record Meazza wearing the Milan captain's armband, and scoring at the Arena in the cup — against Fiorentina, on the twelfth of October, his name on the sheet beside Boffi's, as if the decade had decided to sign itself.

For a supporters' club there is no more instructive image in the whole of the war years: the man synonymous with Inter leading Milan out while the world burned. Those who love football as a morality play should sit with it a moment. Meazza in red and black is proof that the game belongs finally to men and not to shirts; that a great player is a fact of the city before he is a fact of any club; and that pride, when the foot freezes and the lights fail, is a coat a wise man learns to unbutton.

Autumn at the Arena, by Failing Light

The new season opened with the war standing one step closer. The electricity shortages had disrupted the trams that carried the people out to San Siro, and so the club came back into the heart of the city to play its home matches at the Arena Civica — the old bowl by the park, older than the club itself, suddenly host to its Sundays. There was a new man on the bench as well: Mario Magnozzi, succeeding Guido Ara, with Trabattoni still commissioner above him. A team renamed, re-housed and re-coached, all within the space of a war — and still expected, every Sunday, to play.

And for a while, by that failing light, the football was bright. On the twelfth of October Fiorentina were beaten 4-1 in the cup at the Arena, Boffi and Meazza among the scorers; a week later Lazio — the autumn's answer to May — were beaten 4-2. On the twenty-sixth Modena were dismantled 7-1 in the league, and on the ninth of November the champions Bologna were beaten 2-0. Read those four Sundays together and you would have sworn a serious season was assembling itself in the middle of the city, within walking distance of the Duomo.

It was not — or rather, it was assembling two seasons at once, and only one of them would hold. The league campaign, so promising through the autumn, collapsed after the turn and dragged Milano down to tenth: twenty-seven points, ten won, seven drawn, thirteen lost, fifty-three scored and precisely fifty-three conceded — a ledger balanced to the last centesimo, level on points with Fiorentina and Liguria, and not far enough above the drop for anyone's digestion. Boffi's twenty-two goals bought the league crown for himself and safety, little more, for the team. And the scudetto went to Roma — forty-two points, their first — the first title in history carried south of the old northern line. The peninsula's grip on the game was shifting, and 1941-42 was the season the fingers first moved.

The First Final, and the Verdict

But the cup run seeded in that autumn kept its promise. The road that opened with Fiorentina and Lazio at the Arena carried the club, in the June that followed, to the first Coppa Italia final in its history — contested, let it be recorded with the appropriate irony, under the name 'Milano'. Juventus stood at the end of it: 1-1 in Milan on the twenty-first of June 1942, then 4-1 in Turin a week later, five goals to two on the aggregate. A maiden final, and a lost one — but a club learns finals the way a man learns mountains, by failing on the lower slopes first, and the great cup years that came later were owed a debt by these ones.

A word, before the verdict, to the readers for whom this chronicle is written — the faithful of Adelaide, who follow the Diavolo from the far side of the world's clocks. In 1941 Australia was not merely far from all this; it was unreachable, another planet beyond a burning sea. The club would not set foot on Australian soil until 1980, thirty-nine years on, when a touring Milan side at last reached Adelaide itself and beat a South Australian selection 3-1. These war years are therefore inherited memory for the Adelaide rossoneri — not witnessed but owned, the way one owns a grandfather's medals, and polished the same way, at night, when the match in Milan kicks off at some unholy local hour and the inheritance suddenly feels close.

The verdict on 1941, then. A club stripped of its own name held on to everything the name actually meant. It kept the best defence in Italy through the spring; it thrashed the champions 5-1; it gave a home to the bravest signing of the era and watched the man with the frozen foot walk again; it kept its cannon firing until he was the most reliable marksman in the land; and in the autumn it planted a cup run that would flower into the club's first final. A club is not its trophies; it is its conduct in the years when trophies are impossible. In 1941 — governed from a commissioner's office, coached in relay, exiled from its own stadium, renamed by decree — Milan, for we shall use the true name whatever the team-sheets were made to say, behaved like a great club. The fog would lift; the trams would run again; the name would come back. Names do, when they are true.