The Arena, by Failing Light

Sunday Was Not Cancelled

The ration book reached the Milanese kitchen before the team-sheet reached the newspaper, and by 1941 both were thinner than they had been. Italy was deep in the war now, and the war had got into everything: into the pantry, into the tram timetable, into the very name of the football club that concerns us, which played the whole of this year as Associazione Calcio Milano, the English syllable ironed out by decree. That is what the team-sheets said, and team-sheets are what survive.

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. Let it be said at once, so that the reader smells the era rather than merely reading it: the cloth went up at the windows on Saturday night and the crowd went out to the ground on Sunday afternoon, and nobody in Lombardy thought the two facts contradicted each other. 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 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 in the order the year served them.

Thirty-Four Conceded

On the fifth of January the team went to Lazio and drew nothing to nothing, the kind of afternoon connoisseurs file under prudence. A week later, on the twelfth of January, Juventus were held 2-2 in Milan, both goals struck by Aldo Boffi, of whom much more presently — and the team-sheet carried, for the first time, Giuseppe Meazza in red and black, of whom more presently still. Replace with: "On the twenty-sixth the team went to Naples and lost 3-2, Boffi striking inside the first minute and Umberto Menti five from the end, with Rosellini, Barrera and Busani answering for the hosts — a reverse of the kind a good winter absorbs and forgets." Then, on the ninth of February, the Derby della Madonnina: 2-2 with Ambrosiana-Inter, an afternoon that settled nothing, as derbies between proud households rarely do.

The plate of the season 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 for the 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. Nor was it only the meanness that impressed: Milano finished with the best record of anyone in the return round, which is to say that across the second half of the season nobody in Italy travelled better. The team of Guido Ara — 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 and Fiorentina level just behind on the same figure: a single point short of second place, and the best defence in Italy standing on its lowest step.

The cup offered a shorter story. 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 Romans, held scoreless in the league in January, had simply waited for the cup to say what they thought.

Sixteen in the Spring

Aldo Boffi scored sixteen league goals in the third-place campaign, and both of the goals that held Juventus in January: il bombardiere di Seregno, plying the one trade the ration book could not touch. He had shared a scoring title in 1938-39 and taken 1939-40 outright, and when the new season opened in the autumn of this very year he began as a man for whom a third crown was already gathering.

Meazza in Red and Black

Giuseppe Meazza was Ambrosiana-Inter made flesh, and the previous chapter has already stood at the border with him: the frozen foot, the club that decided he was finished, the tears, the November crossing. What belongs here is not the arrival but the work that followed it.

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 an attack took shape: Boffi 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. Across two seasons with Milano, from 1940 to 1942, he would make forty-two official appearances and score eleven goals: a modest harvest by the standards of the man, a rich one by the standards of the foot.

There is no more instructive image in the whole of the war years than that one: the man synonymous with Inter leading Milan out while the world burned. It 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.

The Trams Stop Running

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. A supporter could reach it on his own legs, which in the winter of 1941 was the decisive argument in favour of any address. There was a new man on the bench as well — though not a new face: Mario Magnozzi, the captain of the early thirties sold home to Livorno in 1933, returned now to succeed Guido Ara, with Trabattoni still commissioner above him. Renamed, re-housed and re-coached inside the space of a single 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.

It was not — or rather, it was assembling two seasons at once, and only one of them would hold. The league campaign, so bright through the autumn, would fall away after the turn and leave Milano tenth by spring, while the scudetto travelled somewhere no scudetto had ever gone, out of the industrial north altogether. But that is spring's business, and spring lies outside this chapter's jurisdiction; the accounting waits in 1942.

Walking Home in the Dark

But the cup run seeded in that autumn kept its promise. The road that opened with Fiorentina and Lazio at the Arena was a road that would end, next June, at the club's first final — reached, let it be recorded with the appropriate irony, under the name 'Milano'. Who waited at the end of it, and how the two legs went, is not 1941's to tell; the year's whole contribution was the surveying.

Nothing in 1941 fits a cabinet. A defence no side in Italy could better; five goals past the champions on an April afternoon; a convalescent restored and handed the armband; a centre-forward from Seregno filling the net while the country queued for bread; a first final in prospect. Governed from a commissioner's office, coached in relay, exiled from its own stadium and renamed by decree, the club went on being recognisably itself.

They came to the Arena on foot that autumn, because the trams no longer ran, and they walked home in the dark. They would walk it again, and again after that. There was a great deal of the war still to come.