One Goal in Madrid, Two Days in March

What Came Home from the Maracanã

The year opens on a sore champion: the world title lost at the Maracanã in November, and not cleanly. The three matches and the penalty and the referee's name have had their telling in the pages just behind this one, and need no second airing here. What concerns 1964 is only what came home in the hold — not the defeat, which a club can digest, but the grievance, which they turned over all winter in the tone a man reserves for a robbery no policeman intends to investigate. That is the condition to hold in mind, because a champion's winter is never restful: the world does not queue up to congratulate a champion, it queues up to measure him.

It should be said at once that the man who built the thing now being measured was no longer in the building. Nereo Rocco, the paròn, whose catenaccio is stitched into the Cup of 1963, had gone to Torino after that triumph and would not come back to Milan until 1967. The house he had helped raise still stood — Giuseppe Viani above the stairs as technical director, Felice Riva in the president's chair, Cesare Maldini wearing the captain's armband with Luigi Radice as his deputy — but the bench belonged to an Argentine. Luis Carniglia had taken his first official match in charge only on 15 September 1963, and he now held the least enviable commission in football: defending a crown won by another man's hands.

An Old Employer in the Draw

The defence of the European Cup had begun agreeably enough — IFK Norrköping put out in November and December, in two legs that belong to the closing pages of 1963 — and the holders went through to the quarter-final, where the draw produced Real Madrid — which is to say the competition's aristocracy and, for Carniglia, something uncomfortably close to family. He had won the European Cups of 1958 and 1959 from Real's bench, and the first of those finals had been won 3-2 against this very Milan. There is a novelist's symmetry in the man who once beat Milan for Madrid returning six years on to beat Madrid for Milan. Football is not a novelist. It declined the plot.

On 29 January 1964, in Madrid, the holders were taken apart 4-1, with the thoroughness the Castilian house has always reserved for visitors who arrive wearing a crown. On 13 February at San Siro, under the floodlights, Milan produced at last the evening the tie had deserved from the beginning: 2-0, a siege conducted in the old style, cigarette smoke hanging motionless in the white light above the terraces while the minutes burned down. It finished 4-3 to Madrid on aggregate. The Cup left Milan by a single goal, which is the cruellest of margins, because it licenses every man in the city to nominate the precise moment at which the goal was mislaid — Madrid's fourth, or one of the chances that died in February — and no two men ever nominate the same one.

Esonerato

The league, meanwhile, was declining to console anyone. On 1 March 1964 Bologna came to San Siro and won 2-1, and on 2 March the club dismissed Carniglia. Esonerato, said the communiqué — a word that carries no anger in it at all, only the sound of a decision already taken. From his first official match to his removal had run barely five and a half months. One may find this harsh, and it was; one may find it inevitable, and it was that too, for a club holding the Cup of Europe does not watch the crown leave in February and the scudetto drift away in March with a philosopher's composure.

There will be no dancing here, all the same, upon the Argentine's grave. Carniglia was a coach of genuine pedigree asked to inherit a masterpiece, and inheriting a masterpiece is the most thankless commission the game affords: preserve it, and the credit belongs to the departed master; alter it, and every blemish is yours alone. He preserved and altered in the wrong proportions — or perhaps in the only proportions available to him — and that was the end of it. The bench, in Italy, is a chair wired directly to the scoreboard; every man who sits in it knows the voltage and sits anyway, which is either courage or appetite, and is usually both.

Il Barone Takes the Bench

What happened next is the true heart of Milan's 1964, and it happened quietly, as the important things generally do. On 8 March 1964, one week after the Bologna defeat, the man who walked out to the Milan bench for his debut as head coach was Nils Liedholm — il Barone, the Baron, the elegant Swede of the old Gre-No-Li trinity, who had put away his boots as a Milan player only in 1961 and had never in any meaningful sense left. Some appointments read like transactions and some read like restorations, and this was emphatically the second kind: a club that had lost its way under a stranger handed the wheel to a man who knew every stone of the road, having laid a good number of them himself.

The Baron's manner from the bench was the manner he had kept in midfield: nothing hurried, nothing wasted, the game surveyed from above the way a landowner walks his own estate at evening. He was a chalkboard man in a trade that preferred megaphones. And the season he inherited would enter the almanacs for a curiosity: it would stand for the next sixty years as the only campaign in which both Milan and Juventus changed coaches midway, while Internazionale — Herrera's ascendant Internazionale — went off and took the European Cup of 1964 for themselves. The crown of Europe thus crossed the city without ever leaving it.

Fifty-One Points, and the Only Play-Off

The championship resolved itself into a novel in which, for once, neither Milanese house had the leading part. Milan finished third on 51 points — twenty-one victories, nine draws, four defeats, fifty-eight goals scored and twenty-eight conceded, a record that most seasons would convert directly into a scudetto — while above them Bologna and Internazionale arrived at the finish locked together on 54. Serie A, which had never before required a play-off to crown its champion and has never required one since, staged its first and only: on 7 June 1964 Bologna beat Inter 2-0, and the title went down the Via Emilia on a Sunday the peninsula followed from bar counters and open windows.

The list of the league's marksmen tells the same story of a championship that lived elsewhere: Harald Nielsen of Bologna finished on 21, Kurt Hamrin of Fiorentina on 19, Luís Vinício of Vicenza on 18. Milan's league scoring was led by the Brazilian Amarildo with 14, José Altafini a goal behind on 13, though across all competitions Altafini finished on 18, the old instinct undimmed. And moving among them, twenty going on twenty-one, was Gianni Rivera, l'abatino, playing as though he had read the game's entire literature and found it pleasant but incomplete; around him laboured the honest Lombard machinery of Giovanni Trapattoni and Giovanni Lodetti, the kind of players a connoisseur praises and a scoreboard ignores.

June closed the season's book with one further small, dry disappointment to set beside the large ones: on 3 June 1964, in the quarter-final of the Coppa Italia, Fiorentina beat Milan 1-0. Third in the league, out of Europe in February, out of the Coppa in June — set it down that way and 1964 reads like an obituary. But obituaries are for the dead, and Milan in the summer of 1964 was not dying. It was moulting.

The Baron's Autumn

The new season opened, it must be admitted, like comic opera. On 6 September 1964 Milan met Monza in the first round of the Coppa Italia and lost 2-1 — a result to file under education by embarrassment. Three days later, in the Fairs Cup, Strasbourg won the first leg 2-0 in France; the 1-0 recovered at San Siro on 30 September was a sum that fell short, and Milan were out of Europe in September, beaten 2-1 on aggregate. A lesser city would have panicked. Milan merely narrowed its eyes.

Then the league began to answer. On 15 November 1964 came the derby, and the derby finished 3-0 to Milan — three goals put past the newly crowned champions of Europe in the house the two clubs share, on one of those occasions for which San Siro's ordinary league congregation multiplies itself into a city. The Baron's Milan led Serie A into the winter, and Milan permitted itself the oldest of its luxuries, which is hope. What that winter's lead was worth by the following spring is not this chapter's count to make; the next one does it, and does it in a minor key.

Beyond the turnstiles, Italy itself was modulating into a minor key. The economic miracle that had filled the peninsula's garages and kitchens was cooling into the credit squeeze and recession of 1963-64; Aldo Moro's centre-left coalition governed in Rome; President Antonio Segni fell gravely ill in August, and in December Giuseppe Saragat was elected to succeed him. A country discovering that booms end is a country that watches its football harder, not more softly — the stadium being the one theatre where a working man's Sunday cannot be devalued — and Milan, carrying two footballing empires under one set of roofs, watched harder than anywhere on earth.

The Handover

No silverware entered the cabinet in 1964, and still the year does not belong among the barren ones, because its harvest was not a trophy but a succession. A club that had lost Rocco to Torino, the world title to Santos, the European crown to Madrid by a single goal and its Argentine coach in the first week of March found, inside seven days, the custodian who would tend the estate: a Swede who had already given Milan his playing life and now began to give it his thinking one. The story of this club has never been a procession of cups. It is a relay of custodians, each handing the fire to the next before the wind can get at it.

So 1964 was a year of margins — one goal, three points, two days in March — and margins are where football keeps its truth, because anyone can read a rout and only the patient can read a near miss. The great trophies of the era were won before it, and more would be won after it. What 1964 has instead is a short walk: an unhurried man crossing, on the eighth of March, a touchline he had crossed a thousand times in boots, and sitting down in the chair nobody wanted.