Regicide on Sundays

Thirty Rounds, and Then Nothing

Thirty rounds, sixteen clubs, home and away, north and south, the whole peninsula stitched together by railway timetables that the war had not yet torn up: the 1942-43 Serie A began in the autumn of 1942 and closed in the spring of 1943, and nobody who queued for a ticket to it knew he was buying a place at the last championship of its kind for three years. When it ended, the stitching gave way. There would be no Serie A in 1943-44. The national league dissolved, and in the occupied north the federation would improvise a makeshift substitute, the Campionato Alta Italia, whose matches would not kick off until January 1944. The championship of Italy, whole and single and national, would not truly return until the war-fractured, regionalised restart of 1945-46. So the tables of spring 1943 deserve to be read the way one reads the last letter before a long silence: every ordinary line made extraordinary by what came after.

At the top of that last table stood Torino, and they stood there the way a locomotive stands at the head of its train — unarguably. Forty-four points from twenty wins, four draws and six defeats, sixty-eight goals scored against thirty-one conceded; behind them Livorno on forty-three, Juventus on thirty-seven, Ambrosiana-Inter on thirty-four, Genova 1893 on thirty-three. And Torino were not content with the scudetto alone: they took the Coppa Italia as well, completing the first league-and-cup double in the history of Italian football, a feat performed, with the war's cruel sense of staging, in the very last season before the curtain fell. The capocannoniere was Silvio Piola of Lazio with twenty-one goals, an old master sounding one clear note before the country found other uses for its bells.

And Milan? Milan finished in the middle, which in that year was a place with no view in any direction. Twenty-nine points from thirty matches: ten won, nine drawn, eleven lost, thirty-nine goals scored and forty-four let in. Twenty-nine points was a three-way share of sixth place with Bologna and Fiorentina; where a table insists on setting one of the three above another it does so on goal difference, and that is a disagreement of sequence, not of substance — the twenty-nine points are the same in every book. An anonymous campaign, then. But anonymity, in 1943, was itself a kind of blessing, and inside the anonymity there were afternoons of pure, contradictory splendour.

Via del Lauro 4

It was not even, on paper, Milan. The regime had forbidden the club its English baptismal name in 1939, and the institution that took the field in 1942-43 was registered as Associazione Calcio Milano, its official seat a door at via del Lauro 4 in the heart of the old city — a short walk from everything that mattered and, soon enough, from much that would burn.

Behind that door there was no president. In his place sat Umberto Trabattoni, styled commissario straordinario — extraordinary commissioner, a title that sounds bureaucratic until you remember that everything in 1943 was extraordinary and almost nothing was administered. On the bench was Mario Magnozzi, and on the field the armband belonged to Giuseppe Antonini, captain of a squad assembled in wartime the way one assembles a dinner in wartime: with what the ration book and the market between them still allowed, and gratitude for it.

The market had given and the market had taken: the summer had brought Del Medico and three others, honest goods, as we shall see, and some of them better than honest; Meazza had gone to Juventus. The greatest Italian footballer of his generation had passed through Milan — two seasons, 1940 to 1942 — the way a famous guest passes through a house in troubled times, briefly, courteously, leaving the hosts to wonder afterwards whether they had truly had him at all. The previous chapter stood at the Arena gate and watched him go; this one has a season to get on with.

Twice Against the Champions

Here is the paradox that makes 1942-43 worth the candle: the team that could not climb the table could topple the men standing on top of it. The season opened with a 1-1 draw away to Juventus, a respectable soup. Then, on 22 November 1942, Milan went to Turin and beat Torino — the Torino of the coming double, the finest side in Italy — by a goal to nil. And as if to prove it was principle rather than accident, when the return match came, Milan beat them 1-0 again. Twice in one season the champions-elect were measured, held and defeated by a team that would finish twenty-nine points deep in mid-table. There is a moral in this that every tactician knows and no league table records: a side without the patience for nine months of virtue may still possess, on a given Sunday, ninety minutes of perfection.

The regicide did not stop at Torino. On 17 January 1943 Juventus were beaten 2-0; a fortnight later, on 31 January, Roma were taken apart 4-1, and there was a 3-2 victory over Bologna besides — an afternoon of the old blood-and-thunder sort, goals traded like insults across a tavern table until Milan had one insult more than the visitors. Read those results in isolation and you would swear you were reading the diary of a contender.

Then read the derby, and weep as the Milanese wept. On 18 April 1943 Ambrosiana-Inter — for the neighbours had been re-baptised too — beat Milan 3-0, and it was not even the season's only derby defeat but merely the more humiliating of two — the other of that pair had gone 1-3. A team that had twice silenced the champions of Italy could not once impose itself on the other half of its own city. The derby is played not on grass but on nerves, and Milan's nerves, that April, with the war pressing at every window, were not equal to it. Three goals to none: the kind of scoreline a supporter carries about for months like a stone in the shoe, except that within four months the city would be carrying far heavier stones.

The cup told the same story in miniature, as cups do. In the Coppa Italia, Milan advanced past Padova by the handsome, faintly disreputable score of 5-3, edged Livorno 3-2, and then met Torino in the quarter-final and were dismantled, 5-0, by the side they had twice beaten in the league. Football's sense of irony has never needed a librettist. The champions took their revenge wholesale, marched on to win the cup, and sealed the double; Milan went home to count its consolations. They were real enough, those consolations, and they had names. Walter Del Medico, the new forward, led the club's league scoring with nine goals and added a tenth in the cup, while Gino Cappello contributed ten across all competitions, seven of them in the league. Del Medico and Galimberti were the iron men of the season, each playing all thirty league matches and thirty-three in all competitions, and behind them Giovanni Rossetti kept goal with the steadiness the season demanded. Modest treasures; but 1943 was a year for counting modest treasures carefully.

Dusk Where Noon Should Have Been

Aldo Boffi was scarcely on the field that season, and no chronicle of the year can be written without him. The centre-forward from Giussano, the Bomber, had carried Milan's attack since 1936. Consider what he had been. Three times capocannoniere of Serie A — the three crowns this chronicle has already counted, one by one, in the years that produced them. One hundred and thirty-six goals in 194 appearances, every competition counted: a total that, in all the decades since, only four rossoneri have managed to surpass — Nordahl, Shevchenko, Rivera, Altafini. A Milan record of goals in fourteen consecutive matches, standing in the books like a monument. In the late thirties, when Europe was already smouldering, Boffi of Giussano was the most reliable act of creation in Milanese life: whatever else failed, the Bomber scored.

By 1942-43 he was twenty-eight years old, which for a centre-forward should be high noon, and instead it was dusk. The war had devoured the years that ought to have been his greatest; hampered by the conflict and by spells on the bench, he managed only about a dozen appearances that season, and a handful of goals where once there had been avalanches. There is no crueller subtraction in sport than this: the goals a great striker does not score in the seasons history cancels. Boffi's lost years are invisible in every almanac precisely because they never happened, and we are obliged to count them anyway.

He did not leave the stage so much as remain on it while the theatre was dismantled around him. He clung on through the makeshift wartime seasons, and his final match in Milan's colours came on 8 July 1945 — Pavia against Milan, 6-1, in the Torneo Benefico Lombardo, a benefit tournament in a ruined Lombardy, about as far from a coronation as football can arrange. Afterwards he drifted to Atalanta, and then down to Seregno in Serie B, the slow fading of a man who had once been the surest fact of a Milanese Sunday. The bombs and the call-up papers that emptied Italian football in 1943 quietly closed the door on one of the greatest goalscorers Milan has ever possessed, and they closed it without ceremony, which is the way wars close doors.

The Summer the Sky Fell

The season ended in spring, and then history, which had been waiting politely in the corridor, came into the room. On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was deposed. In August the Allied bombers came to Milan in earnest, and the raids of that month were devastating: the city and its industrial hinterland, the forges and workshops that had made Milan the locomotive of Italy, burned under a sky that no longer belonged to anyone who lived beneath it. The Milanese had learned to read many things in that decade; now they learned to read sirens.

Then came 8 September and the armistice, and with it the breaking of the country like a plate dropped on a stone floor. Italy split. The Germans occupied the north and installed the Italian Social Republic; civil war and the Resistance ignited together, and Lombardy — Milan's own green, wet, generous Lombardy, the plain of rice fields and poplars — became occupied territory. Whatever football survived was played between air-raid sirens by shrinking squads, as the call-up papers found the young men one by one. It is customary, in club chronicles, to say that sport offered the people an escape. Honesty obliges a harder sentence: in the autumn of 1943 there was very little sport, and no escape.

What Remained of the Game

The federation, marooned in the occupied north, did what administrators do amid catastrophe: it organised. In place of the abolished national championship it promised a tournament of the possible, drawn in regions rather than in a nation, its opening rounds pencilled in for the new year — and, on the tiller where Magnozzi's hand had been, a new one, Giuseppe Santagostino's. What that competition was, and what Milano made of it, properly begins on the next page, with the year that actually played it. The calendar year 1943 itself gave the rossoneri nothing beyond the tail of the last true Serie A and, in the autumn, the paperwork of rupture.

Look, then, at the shape of the year rather than at the table, which says sixth, or perhaps eighth, and in either case says nothing. A team that beat the double-winning champions twice and lost the derby by three. A new forward, Del Medico, scoring his nine — or seven — while one of the greatest scorers in the club's history, Boffi of Giussano, sat in the shadows with his hundred and thirty-six goals and his stolen prime. A club stripped even of its own name, run by a commissioner, bombed in August, orphaned of its league in September. And still, at via del Lauro 4, a door with a club behind it: no president, no championship, no certainty that any of it would be wanted again, and a set of fixtures waiting for January.