The Fog Between Two Ridges

The Morning After Glory

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like creditors, and 1964 presented itself at the gates of Milan with a ledger under its arm. The Rossoneri were the reigning champions of Europe, and a champion's winter is never restful, for the world does not queue to congratulate a champion but to measure him; and the measuring had begun before the calendar even turned, in the humid vastness of the Maracanã, where the Intercontinental Cup had been lost to Santos in the manner best calculated to leave a scar. Milan had won the first leg 4-2 at San Siro on 16 October 1963; Santos won the second 4-2 in Rio on 14 November; and the play-off of 16 November, staged before a crowd counted at more than 120,000 souls, went to the Brazilians 1-0, in an atmosphere the city would remember less for the football than for the refereeing, which Milan discussed all winter in the tone reserved for a robbery no policeman intends to investigate.

Honesty obliges the chronicler to open this chapter of the era of Rocco and the First Cups with an absence: Nereo Rocco, the paròn whose catenaccio is stitched into the Cup of 1963, was not there. He had left for Torino after that triumph and would not return to the shadow of the Madonnina 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 on the bench sat an Argentine, Luis Carniglia, whose first official match in charge had come only on 15 September 1963, and who now bore the least enviable commission in football: defending a crown won by another man's hands.

Madrid, and an Old Acquaintance

The defence of the European Cup had begun agreeably enough in the fog of late 1963. IFK Norrköping held Milan 1-1 in Sweden, then came to San Siro and were dismissed 5-2, and so the holders advanced 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. The record books credit the Argentine with the European Cups of 1958 and 1959 won 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; but football is not a novelist, and 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, Milan at last produced the evening the tie had deserved from the beginning: 2-0, a siege conducted in the old style, the terraces doing the arithmetic aloud as the minutes burned down. The arithmetic held firm at 4-3 for 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 — in Madrid's fourth, in the chances that perished in the February fog — and no two men ever nominate the same one.

The Two Days of March

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, as the communiqués put it, a word with the dry click of a lock being turned. From his first official match to his sacking 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.

The chronicler declines, all the same, to join any dance 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 the ledger closed. 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 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 hung up his boots as a Milan player only in 1961 and had never in any meaningful sense left. There are appointments that read like transactions and appointments that read like restorations, and this was emphatically the second kind: the club, having lost its way under a stranger, handed the wheel to a man who knew every stone of the road because he had 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 like a landowner walking his own estate at evening. 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 Inter — the neighbours, Herrera's ascendant neighbours — went off and took the European Cup of 1964 for themselves. The crown of Europe thus crossed the city without ever leaving it, which is the sort of joke history plays on Milan roughly once a generation, always with the same perfectly straight face.

Bologna's Miracle, and a June of Closed Doors

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.

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's account read 18, the old instinct undimmed. And moving among them, twenty going on twenty-one, was Gianni Rivera, l'abatino, the little abbot, 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 the reader is invited 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 arithmetic without hope, 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. That the spring of 1965 would end with Milan second on 51 points, 52 goals scored and 23 conceded, three points behind Herrera's Inter, belongs properly to the next chapter; but the sting merits its footnote here, for connoisseurs of cruel symmetry: twenty-one wins, nine draws, four defeats — the identical line, match for match, that had yielded third place the season before. Same virtue, same points, different heartbreak. Serie A grades on a curve.

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, city of fog and risotto and two footballing empires, watched harder than anywhere on earth.

The Verdict of the Fog

No silverware entered the cabinet in 1964, and yet the chronicler declines to file it among the barren years, 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 to the guillotine of March found, within the space of a single week, the custodian who would tend the estate: a Swedish Baron who had already given the club his playing life and now began to give it his thinking one. Those who follow the Rossoneri from the far side of the world's clocks — and Adelaide knows better than most what it costs to love this club across the meridians — understand that the story of Milan is not a procession of cups but a relay of custodians, each handing the fire to the next before the wind can get at it.

The verdict, then. In 1964 Milan finished third with the record of a champion, surrendered Europe by one goal, dismissed a coach who carried two European Cups in his luggage, and set a legend on the bench within the week; it put three past Inter in November and would lose the scudetto to them by three points in spring. It 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 but only the patient can read a near miss. The great trophies of this era were won before 1964, and more would be won after it; 1964 itself was the fog that lies between two bright ridges, and any Lombard will tell you what the tourist never learns: the fog is not the absence of the landscape. It is the landscape, deciding what to show you next.