The Last Whole Championship

The Last Whole Championship

The fog came down over the Navigli that winter as it always had, indifferent to communiqués and ration cards, and beneath it sixteen clubs played out thirty rounds of a championship that nobody yet understood would be the last of its kind for three long years. The 1942-43 Serie A began in the autumn of 1942 and closed in the spring of 1943, a full league season conducted with the old liturgy — home and away, north and south, the whole peninsula stitched together by railway timetables that the war had not yet torn up — and when it ended, the stitching gave way. There would be no Serie A in 1943-44. The national league dissolved like sugar in hot coffee, 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 the Alps stand beyond the Madonnina on a clear morning — 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 ringing the bell one final time before the bell towers of Italy had other work to do.

And Milan? Milan finished in the fog, which is to say in the middle. Twenty-nine points from thirty matches: ten won, nine drawn, eleven lost, thirty-nine goals scored and forty-four let in, a ledger with the flat taste of risotto made without saffron — nourishing enough, golden nowhere. Twenty-nine points was a three-way share of sixth place with Bologna and Fiorentina, though the reader who consults a different almanac may find Milan printed eighth, for the compilers never agreed on how to order three clubs locked on the same number, and the historian does well to shrug where the statisticians quarrelled: the twenty-nine points are the same in every book. An anonymous campaign, then — except that anonymity, in 1943, was itself a kind of blessing, and except that within the anonymity there were afternoons of pure, contradictory splendour.

A Club Called Milano

It was not even, on paper, Milan. Since 1939 the regime had forbidden the club its English baptismal name, that souvenir of the founding fathers and the club's English cradle, and so 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. The Italianised name was a small violence among enormous ones, but it tells you the temperature of the age: even a football club's vowels had been conscripted.

The club had 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 market still offered, and gratitude for it.

The market had given and the market had taken. The summer's arrivals were the forward Walter Del Medico, the defender Edoardo Galimberti, the forward Guido Corbelli and the defender Luigi Zorzi — honest goods, as we shall see, some of them better than honest. But the departure was the one that stung the connoisseur: Giuseppe Meazza, who had worn the rossonero shirt for the two seasons from 1940 to 1942, left for Juventus. The greatest Italian footballer of his generation had passed through Milan 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.

Regicide on Sundays, Ruin in the Derby

Here is the paradox that makes 1942-43 worth the candle, and it is a paradox as Milanese as fog and as old as football: 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 regicides 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 more insult 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 cousins too had been re-baptised by the regime — beat Milan 3-0, and it was not even the season's only derby defeat but merely the more humiliating of two. A team that had twice silenced the champions of Italy could not once impose itself on the neighbours from across the city. The derby is played not on grass but on nerves, and Milan's nerves, that April, with the war pressing on every window, were not equal to it. Three goals to none: the kind of scoreline a supporter carries around for months like a stone in the shoe, except that within four months the city would have far heavier stones to carry.

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 — seven, by another ledger, and the difference between the two accountants need not detain anyone who saw him play — while Gino Cappello weighed in with around ten across all competitions. 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.

The Bomber of Giussano

Every chronicle of this year must make room, near its centre, for a man who was scarcely on the field: Aldo Boffi, the centre-forward from Giussano, the Bomber whose boots had carried Milan's attack since 1936. Consider what he had been. Three times capocannoniere of Serie A — 1938-39, 1939-40, 1941-42 — with the sources agreeing on twenty-four goals for the second of those crowns and twenty-two for the third, and quarrelling, as sources will, over the first. One hundred and thirty-six goals in 194 official appearances — 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 that stood 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 arithmetic 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 record book precisely because they never happened, and the moralist insists we 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 long diminuendo of a man who had once been the loudest instrument in the orchestra. Let the reader be in no doubt about the verdict of this chronicle: the bombs and the call-ups 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 fog; 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 arranged a regional substitute — the Divisione Nazionale, the Campionato Alta Italia, a tournament of the possible for the German-occupied half of a broken country. Milano, as the club was still obliged to call itself, was drawn into the Lombardy qualifying zone. But the fixtures would wait for the new year: the first matches were set for January 1944, so the calendar year 1943 itself gave the rossoneri nothing more than the tail of the last true Serie A and, in the autumn, the paperwork of rupture.

The club prepared for the improvised campaign with improvised furniture. For the wartime season organised in that autumn of 1943, the bench passed from Magnozzi to Giuseppe Santagostino, with Antonio Busini alongside him as technical director — old hands asked to keep a football club recognisable while the city around it was being made unrecognisable. Trabattoni remained the commissioner of an institution with no president, a registered address at via del Lauro 4, and no championship to play in.

How, then, should the chronicle judge 1943? Not by the table, which says sixth, or perhaps eighth, and in either case says nothing. Judge it instead by the strange, stubborn shape of the year: 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 136 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 — this is the point, and it is the only point — still there, still registered, still training, still waiting for January. Great clubs are not proved by their trophies, which any rich season can buy, but by their winters. In 1943 Milan was mid-table in the last championship of a dying world, and it endured. The fog lifts; the Alps are still there. So, when the fog of that terrible year finally lifted, was Milan.