Barricades Outside, Unanimity Inside

Every Lecture Hall but One

By May, nearly every university in Italy stood occupied. Milan's Bocconi, with the fastidiousness of a house that counts its silver, was the notable exception; almost nowhere else held out. 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, in rooms where the cigarette smoke hung at shoulder height and nobody thought to open a window.

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. In the year Italy came apart at its seams, the rossoneri put together the most seamless season the club had yet known.

A New President, an Old Method

Nereo Rocco had come back to Milan, and with him 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 slow work done in the dark, the way slow work has always been done, and it was finished long before anyone was invited to look at it.

Above him sat a new president, Franco Carraro, in his first season in the chair; behind them both stood the summer the previous chapter has already counted out — Cudicini to the goal, Malatrasi to the defence, Kurt Hamrin to the wing, a market conducted with an eye for the essential and no patience whatever for the ornamental. What matters here is what those three were added to: Karl-Heinz Schnellinger — the West German who anchored the defence like a keel — with Rosato and Anquilletti at the back, Trapattoni and Lodetti in the middle to fetch and carry and bite, and Gianni Rivera, l'abatino, wearing the armband, 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. Set it out in chalk and you see the order of the clauses: Schnellinger holding the last line, Trapattoni and Lodetti patrolling the corridor in front of him, and the ball, once won, travelling 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.

Nine Points, and Four Sundays Left Over

The championship was not seized; it was assembled, month by month, at a temperature that never once rose. 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 with the flat, unhurried confidence of a car on the autostrada, and arrived in the condition in which it had set out. 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 stopped arguing with itself. 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 margin 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.

Read the season's numbers aloud, because they deserve it: 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 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 — which season the loan covered is not agreed on, and at this distance will not be — 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 that deserves the underlining: 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 — said of him: '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 be handed the ball in places other forwards only heard about afterwards — 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. He was, already in 1968, the beating heart of Milan's youth: the discarded one, scoring more than anyone in Italy.

From Sofia to Munich, the Long Way

Europe, meanwhile, was negotiated one crossing at a time, at the pace of a mule train. 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 in Győr on the 22nd of November, a 1-1 at San Siro on the 7th of December — and Milan passed on the away-goals rule, the two goals struck in Hungary counting double where it mattered. 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.

Three Minutes, Then Nineteen

The final was played on the 23rd of May, 1968, in the Feijenoord Stadion — De Kuip, the tub — in Rotterdam. Fifty thousand were inside it, and nobody who was there was counting. 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.

A Road Opened, and Left for Later

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. Where that road went, and what it cost to walk it, belongs to the accounts of the following year, and the next chapter keeps them in full; a chronicle should settle its debts in the twelvemonth they fall due.

In 1968 the double travelled the slow way: in newsprint, in the crackle of a transistor hunted through static for a scoreline, 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.

Italy would remember 1968 for the barricades. Inside San Siro they kept a shorter list: one goal against Brescia on the last day of March, four Sundays that no longer needed to be played, and three minutes in Rotterdam followed by sixteen more. The road out of that quarter of an hour ran to Madrid, and the boy nobody had wanted was already walking it.