The Coin, the Courtroom and the Captain

A Coin Spinning in the Fog

There are years in which football conducts itself like a science, all cause and consequence, and years in which it behaves like a casino at closing time; for Milan, 1966 belonged from first to last to the second faculty. Consider the scene that March evening — the second of the month — at San Siro: a European tie that had already consumed three hundred minutes of honest labour, two legs and a playoff and half an hour of extra time, brought down at the end to a small disc of metal spinning under the floodlights. The referee tossed it. Ron Harris, the captain of Chelsea, called. The call came down right, and Milan were out of the Fairs Cup — not beaten, which a professional can digest with his grappa, but merely unlucky, which no Lombard stomach has ever digested well.

The tie deserved a nobler arithmetic. Milan had won the first leg 2-1 at San Siro on the ninth of February, lost the return by the same score at Stamford Bridge a week later, on the sixteenth, and so the two clubs came back to Milan on the second of March to settle the matter a third time. Barry Bridges put Chelsea ahead after ten minutes, and for eighty more the tie leaned English; then, at the very death — the last minute of the scheduled ninety, the tie's final breath — Giuliano Fortunato met a corner and Milan were level. Extra time gave nothing to anyone. Then came the coin, and the British Pathé cameras carried the verdict home in a newsreel titled, with admirable economy, "Chelsea beats A.C. Milan on the toss of a coin."

A moralist is obliged to note that Milan had no right to feel swindled, for they had entered the spring trading in the same currency. Back in November 1965 they had passed Strasbourg only when a 1-1 playoff went to a coin that fell, that night, for Milan; they had then edged the Portuguese of CUF Barreiro by a single goal in another playoff; and now the same spinning instrument, having carried them through the autumn, dismissed them in the spring. Fortune is a moneylender of the old Milanese school: she advances generously and collects with interest. It should be said, in fairness to the goddess, that Liedholm had gone into the Chelsea legs fielding boys from the youth team — a detail that tells you more about the club's condition in 1966 than any philosophy of luck ever could.

A House Under Dust-Sheets

To understand that thinness one must climb the stairs from the dressing room to the boardroom, where the lights had been dimmed for months. Felice Riva, the president, had been arrested on the eighth of October 1965 over the bancarotta of his cotton mills, and the club passed into the careful hands of Federico Sordillo, who governed as a regent governs — keeping the silver polished, signing nothing rash — until Luigi Carraro assumed the presidency on the twentieth of April 1966. A football club can survive many things, but it cannot easily be brave while its ownership sits in a courtroom's shadow; Milan spent the whole calendar year convalescent, financially and administratively, a great house under dust-sheets waiting for the family to come home.

The bench told the same story in miniature. Three men occupied it across the year: Liedholm, the old Swedish master, through the spring; Giovanni Cattozzo, who took over late in that 1965-66 season; and Arturo Silvestri, entrusted with the new campaign in the autumn. Nereo Rocco, whose name gives this era its title and its meaning, was elsewhere, and would not return to Milan until 1967 — a fact the whole city seemed to know and to wait upon, the way one waits for the fog over the Navigli to lift because it always has before.

The league table, that pitiless accountant, recorded the consequences. Milan finished the 1965-66 championship seventh of eighteen, with 38 points from 34 matches — thirteen won, twelve drawn, nine lost, 43 goals scored and 33 conceded — while across the city Internazionale collected their tenth scudetto with 50 points, Bologna taking 46 and Napoli 45. Seventh place, three years after the club had stood on the roof of Europe. The Coppa Italia had already gone by then, surrendered 3-1 to Fiorentina on the sixth of January, a quarter-final lost while the Epiphany decorations still hung. Amid the leanness one man kept the kitchen warm: Angelo Benedicto Sormani, the Brazilian-born centre-forward brought from Sampdoria, scored 21 goals in Serie A and 24 in all competitions that season — a single generous ingredient, like the saffron in an otherwise frugal risotto, without which the plate could not have been served at all.

Middlesbrough, or the Education of the Abatino

Summer brought no holiday from irony. Italy travelled to the World Cup in England under Edmondo Fabbri and, on the nineteenth of July at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, lost 1-0 to North Korea and went out at the group stage — a defeat that entered the national vocabulary at once and has never left it. Nations, like men, are rarely undone by their enemies; they are undone by their own certainties, and Italy had travelled certain.

Milan's future captain lived every minute of it. Gianni Rivera — l'abatino, the little abbé, as the sterner pens of Milan had christened him — was in Fabbri's squad and on the field for the Korean catastrophe, and he did not hold his tongue afterwards: he was openly critical of the coach's defensive system, and Gianni Brera, no great distributor of absolutions, judged him the one Italian to emerge from the disaster with credit. There is a lesson folded in there about our national game: the bolt — the catenaccio — is an instrument, not a creed, and an instrument applied to the wrong door locks its owner out in the cold. Rivera, twenty-two years old, came home from Middlesbrough to receive, that same summer, the armband of his club; he carried the shame of his country and the trust of his city in the same suitcase, and it is arguable which weighed more.

The Captain Packs His Bags

And the armband had a history, because it came from the arm of Cesare Maldini. In the summer of 1966, with no fanfare worth the name, the elegant libero from Trieste ended twelve seasons in the red and black. He had arrived in 1954; he had worn the captaincy since 1961; and on the twenty-second of May 1963 he had climbed the steps at Wembley to lift the European Cup after the 2-1 defeat of Benfica — the first captain of the first Italian club ever to win it. Men like that do not leave a club so much as recede from it, the way the Alps recede behind the Madonnina on a clear morning: still there, simply further away.

By 1966 the great side he had anchored was ageing and being taken apart, and Cesare read the hour correctly, as a libero must. He handed the armband to Rivera and moved to Torino — where Nereo Rocco, the coach who had shaped him, was then working — for a single season before retiring in 1967. In his luggage went four scudetti and that European Cup; in the dressing room he left behind a standard of bearing that outlived any contract.

The farewell reads differently now than it read then. Cesare was the father of Paolo and, in time, the grandfather of Daniel — the first link in a dynasty that would define this club for the next half-century, a bloodline of captains the way certain Lombard towns are bloodlines of luthiers or of cooks. But in 1966 nobody spoke of dynasties. In 1966 a veteran defender simply packed his bags for Turin, shook the necessary hands, and closed the door quietly behind him. Only later did the sound of that closing door reveal itself as the striking of a torch.

Seeds Under the Frost

While the captain departed, the club — convalescent, but not comatose — went to market. The summer window of 1966 brought Roberto Rosato from Torino and Angelo Anquilletti from Atalanta to rebuild the defence; Anquilletti, little heralded on arrival, would still be wearing the shirt in 1977, which is the kind of bargain that never makes a headline and always makes a team. Alongside them arrived a young forward named Pierino Prati, of whom a great deal more would be heard. Out went Maldini and Nevio Scala; and the spine that remained — Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, Giovanni Trapattoni, Giovanni Lodetti, Amarildo — was, on honest inspection, not the spine of a seventh-place club at all, but of something waiting.

The autumn of 1966 opened the 1966-67 championship under Silvestri, and honesty compels the ledger: that season would close with Milan eighth — 37 points, eleven wins, fifteen draws, eight defeats, 36 goals scored and 32 conceded — the club's worst league placing of the entire decade, while Juventus took a thirteenth title with 49 points, a single point ahead of Inter, who contrived to lose 1-0 at Mantova on the final day. Fifteen draws: the number of a team that had stopped losing its head without yet remembering how to win.

And yet in that same grey autumn something was quietly planted. Milan set out in the Coppa Italia on a road that would end, on the fourteenth of June 1967, at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, with a 1-0 victory over Padova of Serie B — Amarildo the scorer, Rivera the competition's top scorer with seven — and the first Coppa Italia in the club's history finally in rossonero hands. The trophy belongs to 1967 and will be honoured there; but a chronicler of 1966 is entitled to note where the seed went into the ground. Every risotto begins with a soffritto that nobody applauds.

The Arno, the Fog and the Verdict

The year had one more blow in it, and it fell on the whole peninsula. On the fourth of November the Arno burst its banks and the great flood took Florence — streets, libraries, church floors, centuries of art — in a tide of mud that Italy watched with a grief that had nothing to do with football and that put every coin toss in its proper place. The country was still riding the long tail of its economic boom, and Milan the city was that boom's industrial and financial heart, its factories and banks running hot; Milan the club, by contrast, whispered through the year on half its voice. A city roaring and its Diavolo convalescing: 1966 held both truths without embarrassment.

For the faithful who would one day gather on the far side of the world, in Adelaide and beyond, the ledger of 1966 offers nothing local: no rossonero boot touched Australian grass that year, and the pilgrimages between Milan and the southern hemisphere belonged to a future nobody at San Siro could yet have imagined. The devotion, though, was already the same article — only the time zones were missing.

So let the verdict be written. 1966 gave Milan a coin lost in the fog, a presidency settled in a courtroom's shadow, a captain's quiet departure, seventh place and then the promise of eighth, a national humiliation at Middlesbrough and a nation's heartbreak on the Arno. A miserable inventory — and yet the honest chronicler, reading it a second time, finds the future hiding in every line: Rivera with the armband, Rosato and Anquilletti closing the back door, the boy Prati on the doorstep, a cup run germinating under the frost, and beyond the fog, already turning towards home, Nereo Rocco. The year taught the Diavolo the oldest Lombard lesson: fortune is not a strategy, and patience is not surrender. Milan endured 1966 the way the land endures November — certain, on no evidence but memory, that there would be a spring.