Fourth at the Turn

A Triestine and a Stub of Chalk

He had come up from Padova the previous summer with a Triestine's voice and a stub of chalk, and the city had barely looked up. Milan in 1962 had forgotten how to sleep. The economic miracle was at full boil: the factories ran their shifts through the night, the new apartment blocks marched outward across the plain like infantry, southern vowels softened the tram queues, and money — actual, spendable, astonishing money — was suddenly everywhere and in a hurry. Into that noise came a man who did not look like the future. Nereo Rocco had spent his years in the provinces perfecting the defensive art that purists sneered at and results kept vindicating — catenaccio, and the counter-thrust delivered like an insult — and Milan had hired him to do in the metropolis what he had done in the margins: win by refusing, first of all, to lose.

The house he entered was in good order, at least on paper. Andrea Rizzoli sat in the president's chair; Giuseppe Viani watched over the football as technical director; and the captain's armband belonged to Cesare Maldini, who would play every one of the thirty-four league matches that season, a man who missed not a single Sunday while the side around him learned an entirely new language. This was Rocco's first season at the club, and the first title of his life would come at the end of it: what was later called his shock championship. The phrase is just, provided we understand that the shock was administered slowly, over months, the way winter administers itself to Lombardy — imperceptibly, and then completely.

Sani, and the Half That Bound

The old order had left the stage with varying degrees of grace. Nils Liedholm, the last of the Gre-No-Li line, had retired — an era folding itself away like a linen tablecloth after a long lunch. And Jimmy Greaves, the Englishman signed from Chelsea for that very season with such expectation, was gone before the enterprise could ripen, sold on to Tottenham Hotspur; Milan had bought an Englishman of rare and cold finishing and found itself, before the season was out, obliged to look elsewhere.

Elsewhere turned out to be Brazil. At the midpoint of the season Milan sat only fourth, several points behind Inter, and the sceptics — a Milanese crop that never fails — had begun drafting Rocco's obituary. Then came Dino Sani, the Brazilian regista whose signing the club's own annals describe as a real turning point, and the side that had been a collection of good players became, at last, a team. A midfield finds its centre the way a sentence finds its verb: nothing else in it makes sense until that word arrives. From the turn onward the Rossoneri took thirty-one of a possible thirty-four points, a run that included one long unbroken chain of victories, and they hauled in Inter with the pitiless calm of a man reeling home a fish he knows is already tired.

Four Afternoons, and a Round to Spare

The spring told its story in four acts. On 25 March, away to Atalanta, a pitch invasion meant the match never even kicked off, and the judges awarded it to Milan 2-0 a tavolino — points minted in a committee room rather than on the grass, but points weigh the same whatever the mint. On 1 April, Mantova were beaten 1-0 at San Siro, one of those lean, locked afternoons Rocco's teams learned to treasure. Then on 8 April came Torino, and the penultimate round, and the match on which everything turned: Milan won 4-2, José Altafini scored twice, the boy Rivera scored as well, and on a thousand balconies the same shout went up at the same moment. The win over Torino sealed the title mathematically, with a round to spare. The season closed a week later, on 15 April, with a 3-0 win away at SPAL, taken at a walking pace by men who had nothing left to prove.

The final table was severe and complete. Fifty-three points from thirty-four matches; twenty-four won, five drawn, five lost; eighty-three goals scored against thirty-six conceded — and let those who call catenaccio sterile explain, if they can, the eighty-three. Inter finished five points adrift on forty-eight, with Fiorentina third on forty-six, Bologna on forty-five and Roma on forty-four; at the other end of the table Padova, Lecco and Udinese went down through the trapdoor. It was the eighth scudetto in the club's history and the first of Nereo Rocco's life, and for one season at least it silenced the oldest argument in Italian football, since here was a side that guarded its goal like a miser and still scored more than anybody.

The Little Abbot

And through all of it moved a child. Gianni Rivera, born in Alessandria on 18 August 1943, had been secured in 1959 under one of those co-ownership arrangements by which Italian football hedges its prophecies, and Milan had paid sixty-five million lire to own him outright before he ever pulled on the shirt — a sum that scandalised the accountants and now reads like the theft of the century. In 1961-62 he was eighteen years old and he scored ten league goals, among them the one against Torino on the afternoon the title was sealed. A nickname had already been hung on him — l'abatino, the little abbot — coined by Gianni Brera with a critic's arched eyebrow, for there was something cloistered about the boy, a distaste for mud and elbows that offended the puritans of effort. Yet the abbot kept scoring; the abbot threaded passes through defences the way a scholar threads an argument through objections; and a name offered as reproach was already on its way to becoming a caress. That is the danger of loving players as fallible men: they answer you.

What Santiago Took Back

Consider now the spring of José Altafini. Born in Piracicaba, Brazil, on 24 July 1938, nicknamed Mazzola in his homeland for his resemblance to the sainted Valentino, a world champion with Brazil while still a teenager in 1958, he had just finished the league season with twenty-two goals, sharing the capocannoniere's crown with Fiorentina's Aurelio Milani, clear of Inter's Gerry Hitchens and Mantova's Angelo Sormani on sixteen and Fiorentina's Kurt Hamrin on fifteen. He had crowned the campaign with two goals in the Torino match that sealed the title — his second scudetto with the club, for he had been part of the champion side of 1958-59 as well. In April there was no more beloved man in the rossonero half of the city.

The blue shirt, though, took a country from him before it cost him one. Altafini had accepted Italian citizenship — the paperwork of the oriundo, an emigrant family's parish register converted into an international career — and when he pulled on the azzurro the Brazilian press had a word ready for him, and the word was traitor. His defence, offered decades later to Brazilian interviewers who by then were willing to hear it, was administrative rather than sentimental: the CBD, the federation that had made him a world champion at nineteen, simply did not pick men who played abroad. “Naquele tempo, o Brasil não chamava quem jogava no exterior. Ninguém,” Altafini said — in those days Brazil did not call up anyone playing overseas, nobody — and then he closed the argument the way a door closes: “Não fui eu que deixei o Brasil. Foi o Brasil que me deixou.” It was not I who left Brazil; it was Brazil that left me. A man can be exiled without moving, if the selectors decide it for him.

Then came Chile. Italy took her oriundi to the World Cup — the foreign-born, the adopted sons — and Altafini pulled on the blue shirt for the group matches: a goalless draw with West Germany on 31 May, the same match in which young Rivera made his competitive debut for Italy, with captain Cesare Maldini also in the squad; and then, on 2 June in Santiago, the fixture that history files under battle rather than football. Chile won 2-0, though winning is a mild word for an afternoon of violence that scandalised everyone watching, and Italy went out at the group stage while Brazil, serene in the distance, retained the trophy. The teammates of his teenage summer in Sweden collected a second world title without him; watching it from the wrong dressing room was a wound that never quite scarred over, and he would come to name the changing of shirts among the great regrets of his life. The inquest was conducted in the Italian manner, which is to say with knives, and the blades fell heaviest on the oriundi — on Altafini above all, accused of shrinking from the fight, as though a centre-forward were under contract to be a gladiator. He was twenty-three years old. He was never selected for Italy again. And football itself drew the lesson, drew it late and drew it against him: after 1962 FIFA would no longer tolerate a man representing a second country when he had already worn the shirt of the first, so that the door Altafini walked through was bolted shut behind him, with him on the far side of it and nobody left to blame. The man carried shoulder-high in April was a scapegoat by June, and if you wish to understand this game — its glory and its ingratitude taken in a single swallow, like espresso with sugar and a cigarette — you could do worse than study the calendar year of José Altafini.

The Autumn the Road Opened

The champions spent the summer remaking themselves, as champions must. The season's cups had been nothing to frame — a second-round exit from the Coppa Italia, a Fairs Cup adventure ended in the very first round by the city selection of Novi Sad, a semi-final in the Coppa dell'Amicizia, that amiable continental curiosity which that year admitted the Swiss — and the market brought new blood: the winger Bruno Mora from Juventus, with Sandro Salvadore travelling the other way in exchange; the Peruvian defender Víctor Benítez from Boca Juniors; Giuliano Fortunato; the Brazilian José Germano. But the prize of the new season was not domestic at all. As champions of Italy, Milan set out that autumn on the road of the European Cup — and where that road ended was not yet a thing anyone at the club was willing to say out loud.

Two ties were played before the winter, and neither of them detained the champions long. Union Luxembourg came first, in September, and were less an opponent than an exercise in scales; then November brought a sterner examiner in Ipswich Town, champions of England, and Milan came through that one as well, with something in the club's stride quietly altered by the doing of it. The scores are not this chapter's to keep. Neither are Galatasaray, nor Dundee, nor what waited at the far end of the road: the following year's chronicle inherits the whole of that journey, and will have need of every night in it.

And the world turned around the football, as it always does. In October, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, a church throwing open its windows to the century; in December the state gathered the electricity industry into the newborn ENEL, the nationalisation of light itself, the work of Italy's first centre-left governments; and a country still learning what prosperity felt like discovered that everything — liturgy, kilowatts, football — was suddenly negotiable. Across the city, meanwhile, Helenio Herrera's Inter was gathering itself for the pounce: what the league season beginning that autumn with the reshaped squad would eventually cost Milan — in the table, and on the bench — is an account the next chapter settles in full. In 1962 the balance of the city still tilted, unmistakably, rossonero.

What the Year Left on the Board

1962 holds its shape without help. An eighth scudetto, taken from fourth place at the turn with thirty-one points from a possible thirty-four in the return half. Four goals against Torino on the April afternoon that decided it, a boy abbot conducting and Altafini striking twice. A share of the scoring crown, and then a country withdrawing its love from its best centre-forward at a speed that dishonours the withdrawer far more than the withdrawn. A European overture in September, the champions of England examined and passed in November, and Rocco's Milan already breathing the thin air of the continent. The sixties would belong to both Milans; Inter's share was being assembled that very autumn, two miles and one league table away. But when the floodlights at San Siro went out on the last of those November nights and the terraces emptied of their smoke, what remained on the ground was this: a Triestine with chalk dust on his cuff, a boy who did not care for mud, and a road running west that nobody had yet dared to name aloud.