The Examiners at Linate

Cement Dust, and a House Between Dynasties

The scaffolding around San Siro never came down that year. Milan in 1960 was cranes and cement dust and raw new autostrada, the boiler-room of the miracolo economico, the industrial and financial capital of a country that spent its summer showing a scrubbed face to the world at the Games of the XVII Olympiad in Rome, 25 August to 11 September — Italy's coming-out ball, watched by everybody. The north did not go down to watch it. The north was busy making money.

The football team of this booming city was a great house between dynasties. The Gre-No-Li Milan of the mid-fifties had been sold off piece by piece, the way an heir disposes of an estate; what remained in the spring of 1960 was a side coached by Luigi Bonizzoni under the technical direction of Giuseppe 'Gipo' Viani, presided over by Andrea Rizzoli, captained by the ageing and eternal Nils Liedholm with Juan Alberto Schiaffino as his vice — good enough to finish third, not good enough to matter. Third they duly finished in 1959-60: forty-four points from thirty-four games, seventeen won, ten drawn, seven lost, fifty-six scored against thirty-seven conceded. Respectable, and nothing beyond respectable. Above them Juventus took a fifty-five-point championship, their eleventh, with Sivori and Charles at the sharp end of it; Fiorentina followed on forty-seven; and below, at a distance a Milanese could keep warm all winter, Internazionale on forty.

Four Blows in One Derby

For one afternoon that spring the old house remembered it had been a palace. On 27 March 1960, matchday twenty-four, some seventy-two thousand souls climbed into San Siro for the derby, and what they saw has never been dislodged from the record: Milan 5, Internazionale 3, four of the five struck by one man, José Altafini — the first player ever to score four goals in a league derby of Milano, and nobody has matched him in the championship since; only Aldo Cevenini's five, in the closed-doors Coppa Mauro play-off of March 1918, stands above it.

Consider the architecture of the thing. Altafini took Milan's first, second and fourth goals before the interval — three in a first half, which in a derby is not ambition but plunder, the plunder of a man shown the whole treasury and given no reason to stop — and then, in the fifty-fourth minute, he produced the fourth for the momentary 5-1. Before the afternoon was out San Siro had risen to him through its own haze of cigarette smoke, and the applause came not only from the terraces but from Liedholm himself; and when the captain applauds the centre-forward, you may take it that something has occurred beyond the ordinary commerce of goals. Inter salvaged their three and carried them home. Nobody remembers the three. History, which is unjust and correct, remembers the four.

A Spring Running Down, a Europe Without Lights

The rest of the spring was the work of a prosperous firm with no appetite for risk. The calendar year had opened on New Year's Day itself with a 4-0 demolition of Sampdoria, the replay of a December fixture abandoned to fog; then Juventus came to San Siro on 10 January and left with a 0-2 that told everyone how the title would go. Milan answered in the manner of the wounded bourgeois — furiously, and away from home: 3-0 at Bologna, 3-0 at SPAL, home wins over Atalanta, Alessandria and Genoa, the derby in March, a 3-2 over Padova — until a 1-0 stumble at Palermo on 24 April put out whatever candle still burned. On 15 May Juventus completed their double over the rossoneri, 3-1 in Turin; and on 5 June the season expired quietly, 0-0 at Atalanta, like a guest leaving without saying goodbye.

And Europe? Europe, for the whole of calendar 1960, was silent. Milan had been removed from the European Cup the previous November by Barcelona, one goal to seven on aggregate — the preceding chapter sets that reckoning down in full, and a number of that shape need only be written once. Both legs of it fell before the year turned, so that 1960 itself passed without a single European night at San Siro, without one evening on which the floodlights were lit for a foreign name — a strange privation for a club that had helped invent those nights, like a great tenor given a year in which nobody asks him to sing.

What June offered instead was the Coppa dell'Amicizia, the Italo-French cup of friendship, which Milan treated with the seriousness Lombards reserve for anything involving the French: Toulouse were beaten 6-3 at home on 12 June and 2-0 in their own country a week later, and the 1960 edition went, on the combined results of its clubs, to Italy — Milan's eight goals prominent among the reasons. It is not a trophy over which grown men weep. But a side that puts eight past French opposition across two evenings has not forgotten what it is for; and Altafini, who finished the league campaign with twenty goals — twenty-eight across all competitions — was very largely the reason it had not.

Summer Surgery

Then came the summer, and the summer was surgery. Juan Alberto Schiaffino, six seasons a rossonero and the finest footballing brain the club had employed since the war, was sold to Roma; with him went Ernesto Grillo, Gastone Bean and Giancarlo Danova, and in the opposite direction arrived Mario David from Roma, Santiago Vernazza from Palermo and Paolo Barison from Genoa — honest reinforcements, the sort a prudent house-steward brings back from market. But the true business of that summer, the transaction for which 1960 will be remembered when every scoreline in this chapter has faded to sepia, was the purchase of a boy; and the club itself framed the boy, quite openly, as Schiaffino's succession.

Rain on the Training Field

He was born in Alessandria on 18 August 1943, which means the whole affair was transacted around a lad who had not yet turned seventeen, and who had already been a professional for a year: a Serie A debut at fifteen for his home-town club on 2 June 1959, a 1-1 draw against, of all opponents, Inter. It was Franco Pedroni, an ex-rossonero then coaching Alessandria, who whispered the name northwards, and Milan moved with the cunning of a Lombard merchant: a fifty per cent co-ownership stake taken in 1959, the boy left at home to ripen for a further season, the way a builder in that city of scaffolding leaves good timber to season because he knows exactly what he intends to build with it.

Gipo Viani trusted his own eyes but liked witnesses. He arranged a trial for 20 May 1959 on the club's training field out at Linate, hard by the airport, and posted Schiaffino and Liedholm to conduct the examination. One need invent nothing: rain coming down on the grass, an aerodrome at the far end of it, Viani watching from the dry side of a car window, a frail-looking adolescent asked to show two great men what he carried — and the examiners concluding, in whatever silent language the elect use among themselves, that the inheritance was safe. So that when Schiaffino left for Roma a year later, the club could hand the boy his place as one hand passes a thing to another. Alessandria were relegated at the end of 1959-60, and Milan completed the purchase that June: the reported terms were sixty-five million lire plus Giancarlo Migliavacca and the loan of Sergio Bettini, on top of the stake already held — though other accounts put the entire affair nearer one hundred and thirty million, which is not a contradiction but the eternal difference between what a thing costs and what one admits to at home. From that day his career was bound to Milan alone.

The farewells and the baptisms followed with an almost liturgical neatness. Rivera's last act for Alessandria came on 19 June 1960, in the Coppa delle Alpi against La Chaux-de-Fonds; his first official match for Milan on 18 September, a Coppa Italia tie won 5-3 — away, by the mischief in which football specialises, at Alessandria itself; and his league baptism seven days later, on 25 September, in the number ten, in a 3-0 dispatch of Catania. The birthday had fallen in August: Milan signed a sixteen-year-old and fielded a seventeen-year-old, and both descriptions are true. The press, needing a label, reached into English and called him the Golden Boy. Gianni Brera's pen would in time find him a name at once more barbed and more affectionate — abatino, the little abbé — but that word belongs to later chapters. In 1960 there was only the astonishment.

Autumn Under Todeschini

The new championship opened on 25 September with Paolo Todeschini on the bench — and let one thing be set straight here, because hurried chronicles have sometimes smuggled Nereo Rocco into this autumn, impatient for the great era to begin. Rocco did not coach Milan for a single day of calendar 1960. The year belongs to Todeschini; Rocco belongs to the chapters that follow, where he arrives soon enough, like a storm that has been audible for an hour before it breaks.

Todeschini's autumn was the autumn of a young, uneven, occasionally magnificent team, one that played whatever stood on the chalkboard at two speeds, brilliant and bewildered. Catania were dismissed 3-0 on the opening day with the boy at number ten; a week later Milan went to Padova and were taken apart 4-1, which is the tuition adolescence pays; Bologna were then crushed 5-1 at San Siro as though in apology. The masterpiece came on 6 November at the Comunale in Turin, where Milan beat the champions Juventus 4-3 in their own house — and it says everything about the perversity of that season that Milan would win both league meetings with Juventus and still finish behind them. The derby of 20 November was lost 0-1 to Inter, football having its own way of collecting what it is owed; Napoli were beaten 2-1 away and Torino 2-0 at home, Roma held Milan 2-2, and Christmas Day itself was spent at Bari, goalless, the players' panettone postponed by professional obligation.

There the calendar ran out on them, goalless in Puglia with the table still open and Todeschini's two speeds still unreconciled. The spring would count the cost, and the counting of it — where the season finished, what the points came to, who had scored and who had merely stayed — is the balance with which the following year's chapter opens its books. And Nils Liedholm, captain through all of it, carried the armband into that spring, so that this calendar year had given him both the derby at which he applauded a team-mate's genius and the airfield at which he had stood in the rain and approved the future.

Nothing for the Cabinet

By the standards of the cabinet-makers, 1960 yielded almost nothing: a third place, a second place begun, a friendship cup taken off the French, not one European night under the floodlights. And yet no year in this chronicle did more work per trophy. In twelve months the club buried one aristocracy and enthroned another; it let Schiaffino go with honour to Roma and received, from his own hands as it were, the boy who would carry the number ten into the scudetti of 1962 and 1968 and the European Cups of 1963 and 1969. Empires announce themselves quietly. Rome spent that summer showing the world its Olympiad, and the world stood up and applauded. Milan showed nobody anything. It kept its cranes, its cement dust and its lire, and it finished buying a sixteen-year-old from Alessandria on a wet field beside an airport, with two old masters standing in the rain as witnesses — and then it waited, which is the only trade this city has never learned to enjoy.