The Sheriff's Deputies

Ink in Rome, Work in Milan

On 25 March 1957, in Rome, Italy put its name to the treaty that founded the European Economic Community. The ink dried a long way from Lombardy, and yet it was Milan — industrial, impatient, already humming with the first great surge of the economic miracle — that would do much of the work the signature promised. You could hear that work being done in the mornings: the shutters going up on the espresso bars, the two-stroke complaint of the Vespas taking men to factories that had not existed when the war ended. The country was joining Europe. Its most European city had, in truth, never really left.

Football, which is always a decade ahead of the diplomats in these matters, had its own accession under way. Andrea Rizzoli's Milan of the Golden Fifties had been built on the great foreigners — on Swedes and a Uruguayan, on the conviction that San Siro should stage the best the world could offer — and in 1957 that conviction faced its sternest test. The year would deliver a sixth scudetto, a hard lesson in Madrid, and by autumn a place in the young European Cup, so that it reads now like a rehearsal for everything the club would become. It began with a departure and a number nobody knew how to replace.

Who Scores Now

Gunnar Nordahl was gone. Write the sentence plainly, because that is how the city received it: the greatest goalscorer the club had ever housed, sold to Roma, as the last chapter mourned at length. Gren had already departed, so that of the Swedish triumvirate only Nils Liedholm remained — captain now, still the calmest passer in Italy, still leaving nothing to chance and nothing to be argued about afterwards.

The faithful braced for famine. Centre-forwards of Nordahl's tonnage do not grow on the plane trees of the Sempione, and in the espresso bars, over cups drunk standing, the question was the simplest in football and the hardest to answer: who scores now? The club's reply was not one man but a whole market — and, as it turned out, a boy.

An Ocean, Three Trains, and a Boy Back from Piacenza

To conduct the succession Rizzoli engaged Giuseppe Viani, called Gipo, called more usefully lo Sceriffo — the Sheriff — a nickname he wore the way other men wear a watch, without comment and never removed. He replaced Héctor Puricelli in the dugout and set about swearing in his deputies: Carlo Galli arrived from Roma, moving against Nordahl's traffic; Ernesto Cucchiaroni crossed an ocean from Boca Juniors, the whole width of the Atlantic between one kind of football and another; Per Bredesen came down from Udinese, Luigi Zannier from Atalanta, Alfio Fontana back from his loan at Triestina; and from Piacenza, where he had plundered 23 goals in 21 Serie C matches, returned a slight forward named Gastone Bean, of whom more — much more — presently.

The Sheriff's first weeks were the stuff of ambushes. Napoli came to San Siro and won 5-3, the sort of afternoon that gets a new manager's photograph printed small and unkindly; Padova beat the champions-to-be as well, 2-0, on the October afternoon when Bean made his first appearance of the season; and then, crueller than any result, Liedholm himself was taken from the side — viral hepatitis, roughly October to December, two months in which Milan had to learn to think without its thinker. A lesser squad folds there. This one, oddly, straightened its back.

Three-Nil in Florence

A season turns on a single afternoon and almost never says which one in advance. Milan's came on 28 October 1956 in Florence, against the Fiorentina of the reigning title, the champions who had painted the previous spring purple. Milan won 3-0, away, against the holders, and the result did what such results do: it reorganised the league's imagination. From that afternoon the rossoneri pulled clear, and by the season's high water, in mid-March, they had put nine points between themselves and the Tuscans, which in the two-points-for-a-win arithmetic of the age was not a lead but a jurisdiction.

The derbies, for once, declined to decide anything. Both meetings with Inter finished 1-1 — the first on 21 October 1956, the return on 10 March 1957, when the opening goal was scored by the boy from Piacenza, of whom, again, presently. A drawn derby is the city looking in the mirror and finding itself neither more handsome nor more honest than it feared; Milan took its point, twice, and went back to the business of winning everywhere else, which is the only known cure for a derby that refuses to be won.

Nordahlino

Now the boy. Gastone Bean was born in San Canzian d'Isonzo, near Gorizia, out where the river runs Habsburg-green and the borders have moved more often than the church pews; he stood one metre sixty-nine in an age of oak-built centre-forwards, was twenty years old, and had already had one Milan spell, in 1953-55, so that his arrival from Piacenza was strictly a homecoming, though the crowd could be forgiven for not remembering the first visit. He was never a guaranteed starter — the Sheriff alternated him with Galli at centre-forward, week by week, according to the opponent and to some private weather of his own — and yet when the championship was counted Bean had scored 17 league goals, Milan's leading marksman and the fourth-best tally in the division, in a race led by the capocannoniere Dino Da Costa of Roma with his 22, and ahead of his own colleagues Galli, who added 14, and Schiaffino, who gave 9.

San Siro, which coins nicknames the way the old mints once coined ducats, christened him Nordahlino — little Nordahl — and the diminutive was both affection and measurement: he was not the great Swede and never would be, but he had answered the summer's question, and in a championship autumn that is worth more than resemblance. The readers of Il calcio e il ciclismo illustrato voted him their favourite Champion of 1957, an honour of the sweetest and most perishable kind.

Perishable indeed. When José Altafini arrived in 1958, Bean slid back to luxury reserve, and his last match in red and black came on 15 May 1960, against Juventus, with the trumpets long since put away. But there is no sermon owed here. A career is measured by its best weather, not its length, and Bean's winter and spring — seventeen goals where a legend had stood, each one the kind a newsreel would have run twice — is what most footballers would trade a decade for: one metre sixty-nine of him wheeling away with both arms up, in a stadium that had spent the whole summer mourning somebody else.

One Point in Turin, Three Sundays Early

The title arrived on 19 May 1957, with three rounds still to play, and it arrived — this is the detail one loves — not with a triumph but with a point: a 2-2 draw away to Torino, the afternoon from which the club has always dated its sixth scudetto. There is something fitting in a championship sealed by a draw in Turin, of all cities, accepted with a nod rather than a flourish. What matters is the substance: Milan were champions of Italy for the sixth time, and nobody from the Alps to the toe of the boot disputed that the best side in the peninsula wore red and black.

The final table read 48 points from 34 matches — 21 won, 6 drawn, 7 lost — with 65 goals scored and 40 conceded, Fiorentina second on 42 and Lazio third on 41. Seven defeats admit a champion's mortality; the 65 goals answer for them. A team that had sold the greatest scorer in its history had somehow scored its way to the title, the burden shared out among a boy, a Roman and a Uruguayan like an inheritance divided fairly among sons of very different temperaments.

Five-One in Madrid

In June came the Latin Cup, the old summer congress of the Latin champions, staging its final edition in Madrid. Milan travelled as holders, winners of the 1956 tournament, met Real Madrid in the semi-final on 20 June, and were dismantled under the flashbulbs, 5-1. There is no gentler verb that respects the reader. Three days later the players gathered themselves to beat Saint-Étienne 4-3 for third place, a consolation with the taste of reheated coffee, and came home carrying something more useful than a trophy: an exact measurement of the distance between themselves and the white monarchy of Europe. Madrid would be the examination; this had been the mock. Milan filed the lesson away.

Vienna, Zurich, Glasgow

As champions of Italy, Milan entered the European Cup of 1957-58, and the preliminary round against Rapid Wien became a serial novel in three instalments: 4-1 at home on 2 October; a 5-2 collapse in Vienna on the 9th, which left the whole argument locked at 6-6; and — the rules of the day being what they were, no away goals, no actuarial tables, only the instruction to get back on the train and play again until somebody yielded — a play-off in Zurich on 30 October, won 4-2, so that Milan's whole European adventure was rescued in Switzerland, on neutral grass, by a side that had learned in Madrid what such evenings cost. The round of sixteen was altogether more imperial: Rangers were beaten 4-1 away and 2-0 at San Siro across November and December, 6-1 on aggregate, dismissed with a thoroughness that required neither play-off nor adjectives, and the continent began quietly to take notes.

At home, meanwhile, the champions were discovering the oldest of football's ironies: the crown and the form book rarely share a season. The defence of the scudetto, begun in September, sagged from the first, and the total it eventually produced is set down, with the shame it deserves, in the chapter that follows this one. New men had come: Ernesto Grillo, Giancarlo Danova, and, among the young, two boys out of the academy whom the next year will properly introduce — but the season had already chosen its theatre, and it was not a domestic one.

The road through Vienna, Zurich and Glasgow ran on, as we now know, toward a May evening in Brussels; what waited there is the following year's to tell. 1957 stands on its own feet. In March, in Rome, ministers signed Italy into Europe with a pen; through the autumn, at San Siro and in the cold grounds of the north, Viani's Milan signed the club into Europe with its boots. And a sixth scudetto won without Nordahl proved the deeper thing, that the institution had outgrown its kings: the great Swede left, the Sheriff arrived, the thinker fell ill, and still Milan won — because by 1957 Milan was no longer a collection of champions but an idea about how the game should be played, and ideas, unlike centre-forwards, cannot be sold to Roma.