Forty-Four Years of Fog, Then June

The Long Lent of the Rossoneri

There are cities that carry their winters inside them, and Milan is one of them: the fog comes off the Navigli in November and does not so much fall as take up residence, greying the trams, muffling the bells, hiding the Madonnina from the men who glance up at her out of habit on the way to the factory gates. For forty-four years the Rossoneri had lived inside such a fog. Three championships had been won in the club's infancy — 1901, 1906, 1907, when football in Italy was still a gentlemen's misunderstanding conducted in long shorts — and then nothing: not through one war, not through another, not through the comings and goings of coaches and forwards who promised the sun and delivered the usual Lombard drizzle. A supporter born on the day of the last title would have turned forty-four still waiting, old enough to have sons who mocked him gently for his loyalty.

And yet by the spring of 1951 the city itself had stopped apologising. Italy was rebuilding under De Gasperi — patiently, with Marshall Plan money and its own obstinate hands — and the chimneys of the industrial north smoked with something close to optimism. At San Siro a football team had been assembled that scored goals the way Milan was then building apartment blocks: relentlessly, in quantity, without pausing to admire the work. The final ledger of that 1950-51 championship reads less like a statistic than a manifesto: sixty points from thirty-eight matches, twenty-six won, eight drawn, four lost; one hundred and seven goals scored and thirty-nine conceded. Inter finished second on fifty-nine — one point behind, one point after nine months of labour — and Juventus third on fifty-four. It was Milan's fourth championship, the first won under the single national division that had existed since 1929, and above all the first in forty-four years; no man who stood on the terraces that June needed the arithmetic explained to him.

Three Swedes and a Hungarian Blackboard

The architects deserve naming in the correct order, which is never quite the order of fame. President Umberto Trabattoni paid for the house. Lajos Czeizler, a Hungarian of that itinerant Danubian priesthood of coaches who carried the passing game across Europe like friars carrying scripture, drew the plans, with Antonio Busini as technical director at his shoulder. And the load-bearing masonry — the glorious, goal-shaped masonry — was Swedish. Gunnar Gren, Gunnar Nordahl, Nils Liedholm: Gre-No-Li, a syllabic trinity the newspapers coined and the city recited like a grace before meals, three northerners who had come south and found, in the fogs of Lombardy, something apparently indistinguishable from home.

Nordahl above all. He had arrived on 22 January 1949, the first Swede to take his football to a foreign league, trailing the most novelistic of biographies: in Sweden he had been a fireman, and Il Pompiere he remained, though the nickname inverted itself on contact with Serie A, because this fireman's true profession turned out to be arson. In 1950-51 he burned the league to the ground: thirty-four goals in the championship alone, thirty-eight across all competitions, and a second consecutive capocannoniere crown to set beside the thirty-five of the season before — the second of what would in time be five, which remains a record, and which is the sort of number one simply lays on the table and leaves there, like a winning hand.

Around the Swedes, Italians of sturdier clay. Lorenzo Buffon kept the goal. Carlo Annovazzi drove the midfield and helped himself to sixteen league goals, an indecent figure for a mediano. The summer of 1950 had brought reinforcements, the full-back Arturo Silvestri from Modena and the little winger Mario Renosto from Venezia — remember Renosto, because June has a joke prepared for him. And the armband belonged to Andrea Bonomi of Cassano d'Adda, of whom much more later, because his is the kind of story that makes a chronicler put down the statistics and pour himself a glass.

A Hundred and Seven Goals

How does a team score a hundred and seven goals in thirty-eight matches? Not politely. In September 1950 Novara — the ageing Silvio Piola in their ranks — were dismissed 9-2, four of the nine belonging to Nordahl alone. In October Milan went to Naples and won 5-3, a scoreline like a great platter of fried fish, generous and faintly indigestible. December brought a 7-4 against Atalanta that was not football so much as opera buffa, eleven goals flung about with the prodigality of a wedding feast; and in February 1951 came a 9-0 against Palermo, the largest home win of the season, on an afternoon when San Siro must have felt less like a stadium than a granary being filled against the memory of forty-four lean years.

There were scares, because there are always scares, and November 1950 was the cruel month: Inter took the derby 3-2 at San Siro, Lennart Skoglund's second goal of the afternoon cancelling a Nordahl double, and a fortnight later Bologna came and left with a 2-1 win of their own, and the old fog crept back to the city's doorstep and sat there, waiting to be invited in. A side that scores a hundred and seven will concede thirty-nine; Czeizler's Milan defended the way rich men economise — sincerely, but without conviction. What saved them was never the defending. It was the refusal, sustained from September to June, to stop scoring; the understanding, which is the oldest tactical truth in the game and the hardest to live by, that the surest way to concede one goal fewer is to score two more.

The Scudetto Arrives by Loudspeaker

Sunday, 10 June 1951, and destiny showed its taste for irony. Lazio came to San Siro; Flamini scored in the thirteenth minute; Nordahl — who else — replied in the twenty-fifth; and in the thirty-ninth Primo Sentimenti, fifth of the footballing Sentimenti brothers, put Lazio back in front — this after his brother Lucidio, in the Lazio goal, had already saved a penalty from Annovazzi. Milan lost, 2-1, at home, on the day they became champions of Italy. For while San Siro fretted, Torino were beating Internazionale in Turin, and when the loudspeaker gave the crowd the score from the other afternoon, the ground understood before the players did. The news reached the team in the dressing room, so that the drought of forty-four years ended not with a roar at a goal but with a shout at an announcement — half-dressed men embracing among the boots and the liniment, robbed of the on-pitch celebration and past caring, champions in their socks.

The purists will note, and the purists are always right, which is their particular tragedy, that the season did not formally close that afternoon. A week later, on 17 June, came a dead rubber in Rome, lost 2-1 while the rest of the league emptied its pockets in the sunshine — Inter putting five past Genoa, Juventus six past Atalanta, Bologna seven past Lazio, everyone suddenly generous once nothing was at stake. Some chronicles call 10 June the final day and others merely the decisive one, and the two camps may quarrel at their leisure. The title had a date. The date was the tenth. And there is something profoundly Milanese in winning it while losing, the way a merchant closes his greatest deal on the day his umbrella blows inside out.

Four Days of June

There was no time to sober up. From the 20th to the 24th of June, San Siro hosted the third edition of the Latin Cup, the annual convocation of the leading clubs of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain — the nearest thing that era possessed to a European crown, and the entire tournament played in Milan, which is to say that the city, having waited forty-four years for one festival, was handed a second before the bunting of the first had come down.

In the semi-final on 20 June, before some thirty-five thousand, Milan beat Atlético Madrid 4-1 — and here came Renosto's joke. The winger from Venezia had been bought, in essence, as a delivery service, his season's work the slinging of crosses onto the head of Nordahl; on this afternoon the deliveryman kept the parcels for himself and scored a hat-trick — the seventeenth minute, the fifty-fifth, the seventy-fifth — while Nordahl, in a rare fit of modesty, added only the other. Perhaps the truest tribute to Czeizler's Milan is precisely this: a team in which even the men hired to serve the goalscorer held strong opinions about goalscoring, and acted on them in front of witnesses.

The final came on 24 June, against Lille, and it was not a contest but a coronation: 5-0, Nordahl three — of course three — with Renzo Burini and Carlo Annovazzi completing the account. The statisticians noted with period courtesy that Lille's André Strappe finished as the tournament's top scorer with five; Milan noted, rather more loudly, that the cup itself — the first international trophy in the club's history — was staying beside the Navigli. Fourteen days, then, from the loudspeaker to the silverware: a forty-four-year famine ended and a first foreign conquest secured, both at the club's own ground, both washed down, one likes to think, with something better than the usual house wine. The Golden Fifties were not coming. They had arrived, and they had arrived by tram.

Ciapin, the Captain from the Adda

Every triumph needs its plain man, and Milan's wore the armband. Andrea Bonomi was born on 14 February 1923 in Cassano d'Adda, a small town east of Milan where the river Adda runs quick and green out of the mountains, and he came to the club in 1941 for five hundred lire — a fee so modest it reads today like a misprint. He made his Serie A debut on 22 November 1942, in a wartime city learning to live by night in its cellars, and he simply stayed, through the worst years and into the best. They called him Ciapin. He was a wing-half and full-back without an ounce of glamour, a man who supplied in running and grit what nature had declined to supply in refinement, and in 1950-51, while the Swedes gathered the headlines, Ciapin played all thirty-eight league matches and lifted, as captain, the Scudetto his city had awaited for forty-four years — and then, that same June, the Latin Cup besides.

Here the chronicle must lower its voice. When Bonomi was six years old he fell into the Adda and was drowning, and the boy of ten who pulled him from the water was called Valentino Mazzola — the same Valentino Mazzola who grew up to captain the Grande Torino, and who had died at Superga only two years before Bonomi's title. No novelist would dare the symmetry that football writes with a straight face: the rescued boy becomes a champion of Italy, and the championship itself is delivered to him, on that tenth of June, by a Torino victory — the bereaved club of the boy who once fished him from the river reaching out, as it were, one more time. The chronicler records the coincidence and declines to explain it, because some accounts are settled in currencies we do not hold.

On 25 November 1951 the Azzurri called, once and once only: a 1-1 draw with Switzerland, a single cap, the whole of the international recognition granted to a man who had captained the champions of Italy through every match of their season. In 1952 he would leave, and the leaving had no romance in it: Brescia in Serie B, then Piacenza, drifting down the divisions like a barge going downriver, until retirement found him in 1955. He had reached the summit and then descended on foot, without complaint, in the Lombard manner — which holds that the view from the top is a thing you keep in your pocket afterwards, not a thing you talk about.

The River and the Reckoning

Autumn turned the page, the 1951-52 championship began, and the chronicler must now say what Milan did not yet know: that the new season would end in second place, fifty-three points against the sixty of Juventus, who thereby collected their ninth title; that Nordahl would score twenty-six in the league and still be beaten to the capocannoniere by Juventus's John Hansen with thirty, while Inter's István Nyers gathered twenty-three. The Fireman would have other fires, and the decade would keep most of its promises; but the lesson of the Golden Fifties was already legible in its first autumn — that in this league nothing is inherited, not even by champions, and every June must be earned again from a standing start in September.

And in November, the river rose. On the night of the 14th the Po burst its banks in the Polesine, down in the Rovigo country, and some eighty-four people died and around one hundred and eighty thousand were driven from their homes — one of the worst peacetime floods Italy has known, arriving in the very autumn the industrial capital was still toasting its footballers. A nation rebuilding itself on borrowed money and its own hands was reminded what its rivers think of human planning. The chronicler who has just spent a page on a boy pulled alive from the Adda does not need the symmetry pointed out to him: water gives and water takes, in Lombardy and in the Veneto both, and 1951 held the two truths in one hand all year without ever quite closing its fist.

So, the verdict. 1951 was the year the fog lifted: the year Milan remembered it was a great club and proved it twice in a fortnight of June, once by ledger and once by silver; the year a fireman from the north scored more league goals than most sides could answer; the year a plain captain from a river town carried the armband to the summit, looked at the view, and walked quietly down the other side. Greater seasons were coming, and crueller ones, for the Fifties would deal both from the same deck. But every golden age has a morning on which it wakes, and this one woke on 10 June 1951 — to a defeat, at home, announced by loudspeaker, and to the loudest celebration Milan had heard in forty-four years.