Seven in Turin, Filmed from a Fire Truck

Two Scorelines, Ten Months Apart

Two away scorelines hold 1950 between them. On the fifth of February, in Turin: Juventus 1, Milan 7. On Christmas Eve, at Atalanta: Atalanta 4, Milan 7. Between those two afternoons the club lived out both halves of a single year — a spring that staged the most beautiful injustice the Italian league has ever produced, a team scoring one hundred and eighteen goals and not winning the title; and an autumn that began the correction, the opening weeks of a 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 and the trams ran; the two-stroke rasp of a Vespa had begun to thread itself through the traffic; men stood at espresso counters with their hats still on, drank standing, and went back to work. 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 had been played in the long shadow of that hillside. Into this Italy — grieving, hungry, industrious — Milan had brought three Swedes.

The Trio Sweden Would Not Pick

How the three of them came to be assembled — Nordahl down from the January train, Gren and Liedholm following that summer, the fireman's nickname carried over the Alps in his luggage — is the business of the previous year's chapter, and it can be left there. What belongs to 1950 is the first full season of them together: president Umberto Trabattoni's great wager on the idea that Lombardy and Scandinavia might understand one another perfectly, running at last for a whole championship, in what remains the most famous forward line in the history of the club.

Around Nordahl the other two arranged matters so that the ball kept arriving in the same place. Defences the length of the peninsula spent 1950 hunting for the correct answer to the three of them and finding instead a choice between different ways of conceding: hold the line and Nordahl was already behind it; drop off, and the pass came through the room they had just donated. Whatever the three of them were doing together was so clean that it hardly looked like work at all.

What Milan gained, Sweden had resolved to lose. The Swedish federation of that era would pick only amateurs, and so the contract Nordahl signed in January 1949 closed his international career on the spot, at thirty-three caps and forty-three goals — a goal for every appearance, a ratio that has sat ever since beyond the reach of argument. He was blacklisted from the World Cup of 1950 and blacklisted again from the World Cup of 1954, in precisely the two summers when he was the most complete centre-forward drawing breath. Swedish football writing has long since stopped defending the decision: förnedrad och bortglömd, humiliated and forgotten, is the modern verdict on how his own country treated him in the years Milan was worshipping him. His countrymen settled the matter in the only way left to them, which was to buy tickets and travel to Italy, going abroad to watch a striker their own federation would not select.

So the summer that divides this year has a hole in the middle of it. The World Cup was played in Brazil, and the professionals were barred from it; the men who had stood on the top step in London in 1948 spent the tournament scattered the length of Serie A, ineligible, reading the results like everybody else. Liedholm lived long enough to weigh such things carefully and was never a man for large claims, and he made exactly one about that side, and made it flatly: had the Olympic champions been allowed to travel, 'så tror jag vi hade vunnit VM' — then I believe we would have won the World Cup. It is a sentence a footballer earns the right to say once. It also explains something about the appetite the three of them carried back into Italy each autumn, since the international stage had been bolted shut and the league was therefore the only stage there was.

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, fifty thousand people going quiet at a rate you could have measured with a watch. 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, and the paradox is worth holding up to the light and slowly turning; but from that Sunday forward nobody in Italy needed to ask what the three Swedes were for.

The Ladder and the Lens

Now 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. 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 table, because sentiment must always pay its 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 — more than any other side in the land, and 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 outcomes; 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 in thirty-seven appearances, 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 most productive man in Italy finished the season with nothing to show a grandson but a number.

The club read the plain lesson 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 the fairest ruling is probably that it belongs to the two of them undivided. 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 — the ageing Silvio Piola still in their ranks — were dispatched 9-2, nine, four of them Nordahl's alone; and on the first of October Milan went to Napoli and won 5-3, a scoreline with no defending anywhere inside it, the sort of away afternoon that ages full-backs and delights neutrals.

Humility arrived on 12 November, as it tends to arrive in Milan, wearing the other colours of the city: the derby at San Siro was lost 2-3 to Inter, Lennart Skoglund scoring twice, his second cancelling out a Nordahl double — a reminder that no autumn is all harvest. A fortnight later Bologna came and left with a 2-1 of their own, which makes November the cruel month of the whole campaign. The reply came in the proper manner — 3-0 over Torino on 10 December — and then, on Christmas Eve, Atalanta 4, Milan 7: eleven goals flung about by the two of them at once, seven of them away from home on the day before Christmas, a present delivered early and unwrapped in front of everybody.

Where that season went is not this chapter's to tell. The table, the spring and the June afternoon that finally settled the account are held over for the year that earned them. What belongs to 1950 is the turn itself: the months in which a beautiful team quietly became a serious one, and a drought four decades deep entered its final winter without knowing it.

A Few Screens in Turin

The pivot of the whole year was 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. It stood between two Milans. In its spring, the club 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.

That flicker on a few Turin screens deserves a last thought, because every screen since is its descendant: every set wheeled into a Milanese bar in the decades that followed, every set carried into a kitchen for a great final — 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 commentator had got there first, in dialect, for an audience that would have fitted comfortably into a single tram: Milan l'è un gran Milan.