The Fireman and the First Flicker

Fog on the Navigli, Smoke from the North

There are calendar years that behave like football matches — a first half, a second, and between them an interval in which everything is rethought — and 1950 was such a year for the Milan of the red and the black. Its spring contained the most beautiful injustice the Italian league has ever staged: a team that scored one hundred and eighteen goals and did not win the title. Its autumn contained the beginning of the correction — the opening weeks of the campaign that would end, at last, a wait stretching back to 1907, when the club had last been champion of Italy and the century itself was still in short trousers. Hold both halves in the mind at once, as the year itself did, and you understand nearly everything about what this club was becoming.

The city around the team was rebuilding itself with that particular Milanese diligence which regards self-pity as a waste of working hours. Five years out of the war the scaffolding climbed, the trams ran, the fog came down over the Navigli each evening like a landlord collecting rent, and in the kitchens the risotto turned its patient gold, because a city may lose a great deal and still refuse to lose its saffron. Italian football, meanwhile, was convalescent: in May of the previous year an aeroplane had struck the hill of Superga above Turin and carried off the Grande Torino entire, and every championship since was played in the long shadow of that hillside. Into this Italy — grieving, hungry, industrious — Milan had brought three Swedes, and the Swedes had brought with them the cold fire of the north.

Three Swedes and a Fire Bell

The order of their arrival matters, as the order of courses matters at table. Gunnar Nordahl came first, signed on 22 January 1949, a centre-forward with the build and the finality of a closing argument. Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm followed in the summer of that year, and from their three surnames the newspapers pressed a single word that became a banner, a slogan, almost a trademark of the age: Gre-No-Li. All three were internationals of Sweden; all three had stood on the top step of the Olympic podium in London in 1948; and together they formed what remains the most famous forward line in the history of the club — president Umberto Trabattoni's great wager on the idea that Lombardy and Scandinavia, fog for fog, might understand one another perfectly.

Nordahl deserves a paragraph of his own, because before he was a goalscorer by profession he was a fireman by trade. His Swedish club, IFK Norrköping, had found him a post in the town's fire brigade, in the honest old way of a football that had not yet learned to pay a man simply for being wonderful, and the nickname crossed the Alps in his luggage: Il Pompiere, the Fireman. There is a complete moral philosophy folded into that name. Here was a man trained to extinguish fires who would spend his Italian years lighting them — in penalty areas, in title races, in the imaginations of boys from Porta Ticinese to the far side of the world.

Around him the other two played the parts the good Lord assigns to intelligence and to elegance. Gren thought the game a move and a half before it happened; Liedholm measured it out like a chef who never once salts by accident; Nordahl concluded it. The division of labour was so clean, so nearly classical, that defences all over the peninsula spent 1950 discovering that there was no correct answer to the three of them, only a choice between different ways of conceding.

The Fifth of February

Every era has one afternoon that serves ever afterwards as its letter of introduction, and for the Gre-No-Li years that afternoon fell on 5 February 1950, at the Stadio Comunale in Turin, before some fifty thousand souls, against a Juventus side sitting at the top of the league table. The leaders scored first, through Hansen in the twelfth minute, and for a quarter of an hour the natural order of the championship appeared intact.

Then Milan corrected it. Nordahl levelled in the fifteenth minute. Gren struck in the twenty-third, Liedholm in the twenty-fourth, Nordahl again in the twenty-sixth: three goals in four minutes, a squall out of a clear sky, the kind of passage that makes a stadium fall quiet in the way a courtroom falls quiet. When Nordahl completed his hat-trick four minutes into the second half, the match had stopped being a contest and become a demonstration, in the strict mathematical sense of the word.

Burini added the sixth in the seventieth minute, and in the eighty-fourth Enrico Candiani — 'Candiani II' in the punctilious notation of the day — signed the seventh. Juventus 1, Milan 7. Away from home. Against the leaders. The champions of that season would still, in the end, be Juventus, as we shall see, and the paradox deserves to be savoured slowly, like something bitter at the end of a long lunch; but from that Sunday forward nobody in Italy needed to ask what the three Swedes were for.

The Ladder and the Lens

Now for the detail history almost missed, because on that same afternoon, while Nordahl was busy with his hat-trick, Italian television was being born. The RAI chose Juventus–Milan for an experiment: the first Serie A match ever transmitted on television, visible only in the Turin area through the Eremo transmitter, a signal sent out to the handful of screens then in existence like a message in a bottle addressed to the future.

And here fate permitted itself a joke of genuinely Milanese dryness: the cameras were mounted on the external ladder of a fire-brigade autoclave — a fire truck — parked outside the stadium. So the Fireman was filmed from a fireman's ladder; Il Pompiere's greatest blaze of the season was captured by the very apparatus built to put such things out. The commentator, Carlo Balilla Bacarelli, reached for the old Milanese sentence — 'Milan l'è un gran Milan' — and it must be admitted that, as opening lines of an entire art form go, television in Italy could have begun with worse.

Almost nobody noticed the milestone. The scoreline buried it, as a great harvest buries the invention of the plough; regular RAI broadcasting would not begin until 1954, and the experiment went quietly into the files. But beginnings do not require witnesses in order to be beginnings. Somewhere between the twelfth minute and the eighty-fourth, football and the screen were introduced to each other, and neither has been alone since.

One Hundred and Eighteen, and Second

Now the ledger, because the moralist must always pay a call on the accountant. In the 1949-50 championship Milan played thirty-eight matches, won twenty-seven, drew three, lost eight, and gathered fifty-seven points. They scored one hundred and eighteen goals — a record for the twenty-team, thirty-eight-round Serie A, a figure that reads less like a statistic than like a boast — and conceded forty-five. And they finished second, five points behind Juventus, the same Juventus they had dismantled by six clear goals in Turin. Football permits such verdicts; it is why the game resembles life rather than geometry.

The spring told the whole story in miniature. A week after Turin, Pro Patria were beaten 7-1; then on 23 February came Lazio, and a 3-2 defeat, one of those small heresies that end up costing cathedrals; on 26 February Torino — the reborn Torino, assembled out of grief and civic stubbornness after Superga — were beaten 7-0 at San Siro, Nordahl scoring four of them, and one imagines even the scorers celebrating with a certain tact. Nordahl finished as capocannoniere with thirty-five goals, the first of five such crowns he would collect in red and black on his way to becoming the club's greatest scorer of all time. Thirty-five goals, and no medal: the Fireman had burned down every house on the street except the one that mattered.

The lesson of the arithmetic was plain, and the club read it plainly. Goals are lyric poetry; championships are double-entry bookkeeping. A side that loses eight times donates its genius to the anthologies and the title to somebody else. What distinguishes the Milan of 1950 from a hundred beautiful losers before and since is that it took the lesson without renouncing the poetry — it resolved to keep the hundred goals and to mislay the eight defeats — and the proof of that resolution began arriving with the September fixtures.

The Autumn the Wait Began to End

The institutional house was in order, which is never a small thing. Trabattoni presided; on the bench sat Lajos Czeizler, a Hungarian of the great Danubian school of football pedagogy, though history has never quite decided how to divide the credit between him and the technical director Antonio Busini, and perhaps the fairest ruling is that it belongs to both, as a good risotto belongs equally to the rice and to the broth. The armband was worn by Andrea Bonomi, in the red and black since 1941 and captain through its proudest seasons, a bandiera in the full sense of a word that has no honest translation. Home was San Siro now — only the previous October had a rescheduled Thursday fixture against Lazio been played out, goalless, at the old Arena Civica — the club keeping both feet in its future and sparing its past one last backward glance.

The 1950-51 championship opened in September, and Milan came out of it like a side with forty-four years of correspondence to answer. Udinese were beaten 6-2 on 10 September; Sampdoria were taken 2-1 away a week later; on 24 September Novara were dispatched 9-2 — nine — and on the first of October Milan went to Napoli and won 5-3, the sort of away afternoon that ages defenders and delights neutrals.

Humility arrived on 12 November, as it tends to arrive in Milan, wearing the other colours of the city: the derby was lost 2-3 to Inter, a reminder that no autumn is all harvest. The reply came in the proper manner — 3-0 over Torino on 10 December — and then, on Christmas Eve, Atalanta 4, Milan 7: seven goals away from home on the day before Christmas, a present delivered early and unwrapped in front of everybody.

We know now, as the reader of a chronicle is entitled to know, where that season went: to first place with sixty points, twenty-six wins, eight draws and only four defeats, one hundred and seven goals scored against thirty-nine conceded, and to a scudetto sealed on 10 June 1951 — the first since 1907, the end of a forty-four-year wait, with Nordahl once again the league's leading scorer. But the sealing belongs to the next chapter. What belongs to 1950 is the turn itself: the moment a beautiful team quietly became a serious one, and the long drought entered its final winter without knowing it.

The Verdict of the Year

So let the year be judged as a whole, first half and second together. In its spring, Milan proved it could be the most devastating attacking force the Italian league had ever measured and still finish behind a more parsimonious rival; in its autumn, it began proving that the devastation could be disciplined without being diminished. Between the two halves stood the afternoon of 5 February — the 7-1 in Turin — which was at once a result, a manifesto, and, thanks to a fire truck's ladder and a hilltop transmitter, the first football ever to reach an Italian living room.

That flicker on a few Turin screens deserves a final thought, because every screen since is its descendant: every television in a Milanese bar in the decades that followed, every set carried into a kitchen for a great final, and — in the fullness of time, on the far side of the planet — every screen switched on before dawn in Adelaide, where the faithful of this club still trade their sleep for the sight of the red and black, as if the Eremo transmitter's message in a bottle had finally washed ashore. In 1950 Milan learned the two things that would define its century: how to score more goals than anyone had ever scored, and how to be seen doing it. The Fireman lit the blaze; the cameras, perched on the ladder of his old profession, carried the light. The verdict of the year is therefore simple, and it is the one the commentator reached first: a great Milan — with the greatness, from now on, no longer negotiable.