The Double in the Year of the Barricades

The Year the City Kicked Its Doors In

Some years enter history on tiptoe; 1968 came through the door with its boots on. By May, nearly every university in Italy stood occupied — Milan's Bocconi, with the fastidiousness of a house that counts its silver, a notable exception — and the revolt of the students had begun to braid itself into the older, deeper anger of the factories, the two currents feeding one another in that confluence which the historians, looking back past the wreckage, would mark as the antechamber of the Years of Lead. Milan was not a spectator to this ferment; Milan was its capital. The city that had taught Italy how to work was now teaching it how to argue, and it argued in the piazzas, in the assembly halls, at the factory gates, under a sky that in winter still lowered its Lombard fog over the Navigli like a lid over a pot left too long on the stove.

And yet, on Sundays, there remained one parliament in the city where the motions still passed by acclamation. Better than forty-six thousand souls, on the average, climbed into San Siro that season — clerks and turners and students who had shouted themselves hoarse at one another all week — and for two hours they voted unanimously, for the Devil. It is a fact worth savouring, the way one savours the first spoonful of a risotto that has been stirred with patience: in the year Italy came apart at its seams, the rossoneri stitched together the most seamless season the club had yet known.

The Old Master and the New President

Nereo Rocco had come back to Milan, and with him came the conviction — unfashionable then, unfashionable now, correct always — that football matches are lost before they are won, and that a team, like a farmhouse, is built from the foundations upwards. He returned and immediately delivered the double; but the word 'immediately' cheats him of his craft, because nothing Rocco did was immediate. It was cured, like the best lard of the valleys, slowly and in the dark.

Above him sat a new president, Franco Carraro, in his first season in the chair; around him, a summer market conducted with a butcher's eye for the essential cut. In came Fabio Cudicini, a goalkeeper of long arms and longer silences; in came Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, the West German who would anchor the defence like a keel; in came Saul Malatrasi, a defender of prudence; and in came, from Fiorentina, Kurt Hamrin, a Swedish winger — proof that Providence occasionally reads the transfer lists. These were added to what the house already held: Rosato and Anquilletti at the back, Trapattoni and Lodetti in the middle to fetch and carry and bite, and Gianni Rivera, l'abatino, the little abbot, captain and conscience, to make the whole contraption think.

The system was catenaccio, and I will not apologise for it, because catenaccio is not cowardice; it is grammar. First the sentence must not collapse; only then may it aspire to poetry. Schnellinger bolted the door, Trapattoni and Lodetti patrolled the corridor, and when the ball was won it travelled — by the shortest honest route — to Rivera, who lifted his head in that manner of his, as of a man reading a page the rest of us had not been handed, and released Hamrin or Sormani or the boy Prati into the spaces the opponent had forgotten to insure.

A Scudetto Stirred with Patience

The championship was not seized; it was reduced, the way a good broth is reduced, over months and at low heat. In September the tone was set at SPAL's ground, where the home side were beaten 4-1 on the 24th of the month, for those who keep diaries — away from home this Milan travelled not as a guest but as a bailiff. On the 7th of January, in the cold heart of winter, Roma came to San Siro and left with three goals in their luggage and none to declare.

By spring the table had assumed the shape of a verdict. On the 24th of March, Atalanta were dismantled 3-0 on their own field; a week later, on the 31st, Brescia arrived at San Siro and were beaten by a single goal, 1-0, and with that modest arithmetic the ninth scudetto was mathematically sealed — with four rounds still to play, which is the sporting equivalent of finishing the examination and leaving the hall while the others are still chewing their pens.

The final ledger deserves reading aloud: forty-six points from thirty matches; eighteen won, ten drawn, two lost; fifty-three goals scored against twenty-four conceded; nine points clear of Napoli, the runners-up, in an age when a victory still paid only two. Two defeats in an entire season, and one of them, with the irony the gods reserve for the mighty, administered by little Varese — a slap delivered, one supposes, so that the champion should remember his mortality. It was the ninth title; the tenth, and the star that comes with it, would keep Italy waiting until 1979. But that is another chapter, and 1968 had no need to borrow glory from the future.

Pierino la Peste

Every triumphant army carries one soldier the recruiting office once tried to send home, and in this Milan he wore the number of a centre-forward and the face of a boy. Pierino Prati was born on the 13th of December, 1946, in Cinisello Balsamo, just north of the city, close enough to San Siro to hear it on a clear Sunday; he came up through Milan's own nursery, where he was first a goalkeeper, then a left winger, then at last a centre-forward — a curriculum that reads like a man walking through a house and trying every room until he finds the one with his name on the door.

Milan, in their wisdom, did not rate him enough to keep him. The teenager was loaned down to little Salernitana — the archives quarrel over the precise season, as archives will — and there, despite a broken tibia, he scored something like ten goals in nineteen matches and helped lift the club to promotion. This is the part of the story the moralist must underline: the boy did not sulk in the provinces; he worked, in the manner of the Lombard hinterland, where complaint is considered a form of idleness.

Recalled to Milan, he found in Rocco a coach who trusted experience the way a peasant trusts old boots, and who was not easily convinced by youth. But Rocco looked, and Rocco — who never in his life paid a compliment that had not first been made to suffer — delivered his verdict: 'Non sa giocare — ma sa fare i gol ed è quello che conta.' He can't play, but he knows how to score, and that is what counts. There has rarely been a blessing more backhanded or more fertile. Fed by Rivera's passing — and to be fed by Rivera in 1968 was to dine at the best table in Italy — Pierino la peste, the pest, the nuisance, the boy nobody had wanted, finished as capocannoniere of Serie A with fifteen league goals at the age of twenty-one, and something like twenty-two across all competitions. Within a year the same boy would score three in a European Cup final and carry the match ball home under his arm like a loaf of bread. But already in 1968 he was the beating heart of Milan's youth: the discarded one, scoring more than anyone in Italy.

The Long Road to Rotterdam

Europe, meanwhile, was being negotiated with the patience of a mule train crossing the Alps. The Cup Winners' Cup opened gently: Levski Sofia were beaten 5-1 at San Siro on the 20th of September, 1967, and held to 1-1 in Sofia three weeks later, on the 11th of October — six goals to two on aggregate, and no call for drama.

The drama arrived punctually in the next round, against the Hungarians of Győri ETO. The tie finished 3-3 across the two legs — a 2-2 and a 1-1 — and Milan passed on the away-goals rule; the record-keepers bicker over which draw was played in which city, but the arithmetic of the rule itself testifies that the 2-2 was Milan's evening in Hungary, and arithmetic, unlike memory, does not drink. Then came Standard Liège, and the tie turned into a siege in the medieval manner: 1-1 on the 28th of February, 1-1 again on the 13th of March, until on the 20th of March a play-off was required, and Milan, having measured their man twice, won it 2-0.

The semi-final was the examination that mattered: Bayern Munich, holders of the trophy. On the 1st of May — the workers' day, in the workers' year — San Siro watched Milan win 2-0; a week later, on the 8th, in Germany, the return finished 0-0, which was not a failure of ambition but its completion, for Rocco's teams defended a lead the way a notary defends a signature. Two-nil on aggregate, the holders dethroned, and the road ran clear to Rotterdam.

Twenty Minutes in De Kuip

The final was played on the 23rd of May, 1968, in the Feijenoord Stadion — De Kuip, the tub — in Rotterdam, before a crowd the ledgers count variously at fifty thousand and at fifty-three thousand and change; on such discrepancies do archivists build careers, and we shall not detain them. Rocco sent out the season in miniature: Cudicini in goal; Anquilletti, Schnellinger, Rosato and Scala across the back; Trapattoni and Lodetti to do the carrying; and ahead of them Hamrin, Sormani, Rivera with the armband, and Prati. Opposite stood Hamburger SV, and between the two, with a Spaniard's ceremony, the referee Ortiz de Mendíbil.

Kurt Hamrin required three minutes to open the account and nineteen to close it. Two goals from the Swede before the match had properly introduced itself — the third minute and the nineteenth — and the remaining seventy-odd were an exercise in administration, conducted by Rivera with the detachment of a man signing documents he has already read twice. Milan 2, Hamburg 0; and the Coppa delle Coppe, the Cup Winners' Cup, came to the club for the first time in its history.

There is a particular justice in the identity of the scorer. Hamrin had been brought from Fiorentina in the summer for exactly such evenings — the winger signed to finish what the Lombard machine began — and in Rotterdam he repaid the entire fee in a quarter of an hour. Football is seldom so tidy; when it is, one should raise a glass and refrain from asking too many questions.

Autumn, and the Shape of Things to Come

The reward for the scudetto arrived in the autumn wearing the gravest of Europe's crowns: the European Cup, the champions' own competition, which Milan entered in September as lords of Italy. Malmö FF were dispatched 5-3 on aggregate across September and October; and then the times themselves intervened, for several clubs of the East withdrew from the tournament — 1968 was not tender with anyone's calendar — and Milan passed the second round without kicking a ball. The campaign thus begun would end, though the reader of this chapter is not yet supposed to know it, in Madrid, with Ajax beaten 4-1 and three of the goals belonging to a boy from Cinisello Balsamo.

No rossonero shirt had yet been seen in Australia; the first crossing would not come until 1980, when an end-of-season tour carried the Devil to Sydney and Melbourne, to Adelaide — where a South Australian eleven was beaten 3-1 — and on to Perth: names that belong to a much later chapter. In 1968 the double travelled south the slow way, in newsprint and on the airwaves and in letters home read aloud at kitchen tables, wherever Lombards and Sicilians and Calabrians had carried the Devil in their luggage. A club is never merely eleven men and a stadium; it is also every emigrant who unfolds a week-old newspaper and finds, in the small print of a league table, a reason to stand a little straighter.

So let the verdict be entered. In the year Italy occupied its universities and Milan the city rehearsed its furies, Milan the club answered disorder with construction: a championship won by nine clear points and sealed with a month of Sundays to spare; a first Coppa delle Coppe taken in twenty minutes of Swedish precision; a discarded boy crowned king of Italy's scorers at twenty-one; an old master proving that patience is not the opposite of daring but its foundation. History remembers 1968 as the year of the barricades. At San Siro they remember it as the year the house was set in order — and the year the Devil, having bolted his own door, went out and began knocking once more upon Europe's.