The Professor Leaves the Table

Third, in a City of Two Winters

Milan in 1953 was a city learning to be prosperous again, and it wore its recovery the Lombard way — buttoned beneath a grey overcoat, mentioned to nobody, denied if asked. The fog still owned the Navigli on winter mornings; the trams still complained on their curves; and on the rare days the haze relented you could see the Alps standing beyond the Madonnina like patient creditors, white, silent, certain of eventual payment. In such a city the football club is not a pastime but a ledger of the civic soul, and when the season that had begun under the autumn rains of 1952 closed in the spring sunshine of 1953, the ledger read: third. Internazionale were champions with 47 points; Juventus followed with 45; Milan came home with 43 — seventeen victories, nine draws, eight defeats, sixty-four goals scored against thirty-four conceded, the arithmetic of a house that cooked magnificently and occasionally forgot to lock the cellar.

And how it cooked. On 18 January, Atalanta were carved up 5-1; on the first of February, Palermo were dispatched 5-0; a fortnight later Roma, no small guest, left San Siro with a 4-1 lesson folded into their luggage. In May the kitchen was still open: Fiorentina were beaten 3-0 in their own city on the third, and on the tenth Torino were sent away 5-1. Between these feasts, however, lay the fasts that decide championships. The derby of 8 March finished 0-0, a Sunday of shadow-boxing in which neither Milanese tribe would concede the other so much as a crust; and on 12 April Juventus came to town and took the points, 2-1 — the sort of single-goal afternoon that reads, when the season is over and the accounts are audited, like an epitaph for the whole campaign. Sides that finish third are rarely bad sides. They are good sides that lost the wrong Sundays.

Above the eleven, the institution kept its own quiet weather. Umberto Trabattoni presided, as he had presided through war, reconstruction and Swedish immigration; on the bench sat Mario Sperone, who had inherited the chair from Lajos Czeizler; Carlo Annovazzi carried the captain's armband, with Omero Tognon standing behind him as vice. It was a house in order — and houses in order, as every Milanese notary knows, are precisely the houses in which a will is about to be read.

The Cannon's Arithmetic

Gunnar Nordahl scored twenty-six goals in the league that season — twenty-eight if one counts every competition — and with them took the capocannoniere's crown for the third time. I call him the Cannon, and I shall go on calling him the Cannon, because no other word does justice to the economy of the man: no flourish, no vanity, no interest whatsoever in the decorative arts, merely the shortest distance between the ball and the net, computed faster than any defender could object to the mathematics. Other forwards of that era danced. Nordahl concluded. Watching him finish was like watching a good Lombard cook plate a risotto: nothing wasted, nothing added for show, everything arriving at precisely the temperature required.

Nor did he dine alone. Renzo Burini added thirteen league goals, arriving from the second line with the timing of a man who has read the menu in advance, and young Amleto Frignani contributed seven more from the flank. Sixty-four goals across the campaign, and still no title: the scudetto crossed the city to Internazionale, four points distant — proof, if the moralist required any, that abundance is a virtue only when it travels in the company of thrift.

Lisbon: the Professor Takes Charge

June brought the Coppa Latina, that handsome early experiment in continental vanity by which the standard-bearers of the Latin lands — this year Milan, Stade Reims, Sporting of Lisbon and Valencia — gathered to establish which peninsula cooked best. Milan's matches were staged at the Estádio Nacional do Jamor, at Oeiras outside Lisbon, and Milan travelled there carrying one of the strangest and most touching arrangements in the club's history: Gunnar Gren, thirty-two years old and no longer an automatic name on the team-sheet, would direct the side as player-coach — picking the eleven and then taking his own place within it. The Professor — for so the oldest of the three Swedes was known, il Professore, and no nickname in the Italian game was ever more honestly earned — was to spend his final days in rossonero as instrument and conductor at once.

The semi-final against the hosts, on 4 June, was the kind of match that ages a supporter a full year in a single evening. Sporting struck first through Vasques after twenty minutes and guarded their lead deep into the night, until the Cannon did what cannons do: Nordahl equalised in the sixty-sixth minute and put Milan ahead in the seventy-second, and the tie seemed cooked and plated — whereupon Martins levelled for the Portuguese in the eighty-ninth, with full time already clearing its throat, and dragged the whole affair into extra time. There Liedholm restored the advantage in the ninety-sixth; Martins, an obstinate man, equalised again in the hundred-and-sixth; and it fell at last to Frignani, in the hundred-and-eighteenth minute, with the evening two breaths from its end, to settle the matter: 4-3, Milan into the final, the Professor vindicated and half of Lisbon in mourning.

The Seventh of June

Three days later came the final, and with it one of those coincidences of the calendar that a novelist would strike out as too neat. On 7 June 1953, while Milan took the field at the Jamor against Stade Reims, Italy herself went to the polls in the most bitter general election of the young Republic — the election of the so-called legge truffa, the 'swindle law', that majority-bonus arithmetic by which Alcide De Gasperi's governing coalition hoped to convert a plurality into dominion. The country denied the coalition its bonus, and with that denial the De Gasperi era was, in effect, concluded. Milan, that same Sunday, were denied rather more emphatically.

Raymond Kopa saw to it. The Frenchman scored in the thirty-first minute, Appel doubled the account in the fifty-second, and Kopa closed the ledger in the seventy-fourth: 3-0 to Reims, and no appeal. The previous day Sporting had consoled themselves by beating Valencia 4-1 for third place; Milan flew home as runners-up, carrying a silver medal that weighed like lead. There is no disgrace in losing a final to a side with Kopa in it, but there is no comfort in it either, and the moralist records only this: that a great cycle, when it must end, prefers to end away from home, in borrowed light, so that the grief may be unpacked slowly at customs.

Farewell, il Professore

For it was an ending, and everyone in the travelling party understood it. Gunnar Gren had first pulled on the red and black on 11 September 1949, the eldest and most cerebral of the three Swedes whose surnames Milan had long since fused into a single trisyllable of the golden age: Gre-No-Li. Gren the brain, Nordahl the conclusion, Liedholm the argument in between. Together they had carried the club's post-war renaissance on their reasonable Scandinavian shoulders and delivered the scudetto of 1951, and in doing so had taught Italy that elegance and industry could be imported in the same suitcase.

His final season tells its own discreet story: thirty league appearances, four goals — the figures of a professor emeritus, still lecturing, no longer setting the examinations. Born on the last day of October 1920, he was thirty-two when he took charge in Lisbon, and there is something fitting, almost liturgical, in the manner of his going: his last service to Milan was rendered with head and boots at once, coaching the side he was still playing for, steering it through the Jamor's extra-time madness before enduring, from inside the match itself, the dismantling by Reims. Soon afterwards the news was abroad: Gren to Fiorentina. The trisyllable was broken. Nordahl remained; Liedholm remained; the Gre was gone, and with him went the particular music of that forward line, which was never merely three players but a single sentence — subject, verb, object — that Italian defences had spent four seasons failing to parse.

Clubs do not weep; they publish transfer lists. But supporters weep, and they were right to.

Autumn, and a Stranger on the Bench

The new championship, which opened in September 1953 and belongs to this chronicle by its first half, began as transitions always begin: uncertainly. Arrigo Morselli now held the bench; Trabattoni, entering his fourteenth year in the presidency, had begun what would prove his final season in the chair; Tognon took the captaincy with Nordahl as his deputy; and the market had performed its annual work of subtraction and addition — the Danish forward Jørgen Sørensen arriving alongside the Italians Mario Bergamaschi and Alberto Piccinini, while in the season's broader turnover Annovazzi, the spring's captain, passed to Atalanta, and Burini, its second marksman, to Lazio. A club is a river. One never bathes in the same team twice.

The autumn results read like a fever chart. Draws at Udine, 2-2, and at home to Novara, 0-0; defeat at Sampdoria, 2-1; then a clearing of the throat — Triestina swept aside 4-0 on 4 October, a 1-0 win fetched from Naples on the eleventh, Palermo beaten 4-1 in Sicily on the eighteenth — before a 3-3 with Atalanta suggested the cellar door was swinging on its hinge again. And then the first of November, the derby, and the coldest afternoon of the year: Inter 3, Milan 0. There are derby defeats a city digests over lunch and derby defeats a boardroom cannot digest at all, and this was the second kind. Milan beat Genoa 3-0 on 8 November and it changed nothing: on 10 November Morselli's tenure ended, and the bench passed to Béla Guttmann, a coach whose very name sounded like a passport full of stamps.

The stranger's first weeks suggested the medicine had been well chosen. Legnano were beaten 3-1; Torino were beaten 4-1 in their own house on 29 November — away wins of that size being the surest sign that a new voice is being listened to — and a goalless point was carried home from Florence in early December. Then, on the twentieth, in the year's final act, Milan 1, Juventus 0: the old enemy sent home pointless for Christmas, and San Siro permitted itself, through the December fog, its first unguarded smile since Lisbon.

The Verdict of the Hinge

What did it all amount to? When the 1953-54 season eventually closed, months beyond this chronicle's border, Milan would again stand third — 44 points, level with Fiorentina, behind Juventus on 50 and champions Inter on 51 — so that the year 1953, taken whole, develops the same photograph twice: Inter above, Milan near, the scudetto visible and not possessed. The cousins won both championships that touch this year, and honesty obliges the chronicler to write the sentence plainly and to take no pleasure in it.

And yet 1953 is not a year of defeat; it is a hinge, and hinges look ugly only to those who do not understand doors. The Professor left the table, and his leaving obliged the house to learn new recipes; a travelling coach arrived in November and began, at once, to teach them; Nordahl went on being the Cannon, crowned once more as the league's leading scorer, as indifferent to the changing of eras as artillery generally is. The scudetti of 1955, 1957 and 1959 were already gathering, invisible, in that autumn fog above the Navigli. And for those of us who follow the Diavolo from the far side of the planet — where every European evening is a small, sleepless hour of the morning, and where the club itself would not set foot until a May day in Sydney in 1980 — the lesson of 1953 is the oldest one in the supporter's missal: the men leave, the music remains. Gre-No-Li was dissolved in the summer of 1953. It has not, to this day, stopped playing.