The Year of the Six Minutes

The Fog Over the Madonnina

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like verdicts, and 1970 came to Milan wearing both faces at once. The city woke each morning that winter under a Lombard fog that seemed thicker than usual, and not only for reasons of meteorology: the bomb that had torn through Piazza Fontana in December 1969 still hung over every conversation in every bar along the Navigli, and the industrial anger of the autunno caldo — the Hot Autumn of strikes and factory unrest — had carried itself intact into the new decade. In May the Republic would answer with the Statuto dei Lavoratori, the Workers' Statute; in December it would pass, through the Fortuna-Baslini law, the first divorce statute in its history. Italy was renegotiating its soul, clause by clause, and Milan — the grey, laborious, secretly sentimental capital of that renegotiation — did what Milan always does: it went to work, and on Sundays it went to the football.

And what football it had to go to. The rossoneri of Nereo Rocco began 1970 as champions of the world — the Intercontinental Cup, taken from Estudiantes de La Plata in October 1969, sat in the cabinet beside the European Cup won over Ajax in Madrid — and their captain, Gianni Rivera, was the reigning Ballon d'Or, the first Italian-born footballer ever to hold it and only the second Italian after Sivori. Seen from the roof of the Duomo, with the Madonnina gilded above the fog and the Alps standing beyond her on the clear days, no club in Europe carried more prestige into the new decade. Seen from the league table, the picture was less flattering; and it is with the table, as always, that the honest chronicler must begin.

A Spring of Thin Broth

The 1969-70 championship, whose second half ran through the spring of 1970, ended with Milan fourth: thirty-six points from thirty matches, thirteen won, ten drawn, seven lost, thirty-eight goals scored and twenty-four conceded. Fourth place is not disgrace, but for the champions of the world it is a kind of fasting — a plate of thin broth set before men who had dined, only months earlier, at the high tables of Madrid and Buenos Aires. Nine points ahead of them, improbably and rather gloriously, stood Cagliari, surprise champions from the island; Inter finished five points better off, Juventus two. Pierino Prati did his duty, twelve goals in the league and seventeen in all competitions, but the meal never quite came together, and Rocco — who understood better than any man alive that a risotto must be stirred at the moment it demands and not a minute later — knew the pot had been left too long on the stove.

The explanations were not mysterious. The glories of the previous autumn had cost blood. Milan had beaten Estudiantes 3-0 at San Siro on 8 October 1969, Sormani twice and Combin once, and had then travelled to Buenos Aires a fortnight later to lose 2-1 — Rivera scoring — and to lift, for the first time in the club's history, the title of champion of the world. Behind those two nights lay the 4-1 destruction of Ajax at the Bernabéu that had made them champions of Europe for the second time. But the defence of that European crown had already ended before the calendar turned: Feyenoord, met in the second round in late 1969, were beaten 1-0 at San Siro and won 2-0 in Rotterdam, and the Dutchmen went on, with a certain grim logic, to win the 1970 European Cup themselves. So Milan passed the year as champions of the world and former champions of Europe — a title and an epitaph carried in the same suitcase.

The Night of the Azteca

Then came Mexico, and with Mexico the argument that divided Italy more neatly than any referendum. Ferruccio Valcareggi, entrusted with the national team, possessed two number tens of genius and the caution of a man holding two lit candles in a paper house: he resolved the problem with the staffetta, the relay — Sandro Mazzola of Inter to start, Gianni Rivera of Milan to enter for the second half. That the reigning Ballon d'Or should be rationed like wartime bread struck the Milanist half of the nation as heresy; the Interist half found it prudent; and the country divided along a line that ran, as such lines in Italy always do, straight through the middle of the dinner table. Pierino Prati travelled too, so Milan's stake in the expedition was doubled — and, as events arranged themselves, tripled, for the tournament's greatest night would belong to two men of the rossoneri wearing different shirts.

On 17 June 1970, in the thin air of the Estadio Azteca, Italy met West Germany in the semi-final the world has agreed to call the Game of the Century. Consider the geometry of what happened. In the 90th minute, with Italy ahead and the match all but folded away, the equaliser that dragged it into extra time was scored by Karl-Heinz Schnellinger — Milan's own German defender, who in all his years of service had never once scored for West Germany. He chose that minute, of all the minutes of his life, for his first. Extra time became a fever dream, goal answering goal in the altitude, until in the 111th minute the ball arrived at the feet of Rivera, and the little abbot — the abatino, as his critics called him, meaning it unkindly and being wrong — struck the winner. Italy 4, West Germany 3. Two Milanisti had written the two decisive lines of the century's game, one for the country of his birth against the country of his employment, the other against the very logic of the relay that rationed him; and for one night the staffetta looked like a quarrel between men who had simply not been paying attention.

Six Minutes

Four days later, on 21 June 1970, Italy played Brazil in the final, and Valcareggi kept Rivera on the bench. Not merely for the first half, as the relay decreed; not merely into the second, as the relay promised; but until the match was already lost — Italy trailing, Brazil ascending towards a 4-1 triumph that no substitution on earth was going to interrupt — when the coach at last sent on the most decorated footballer in Europe for the final six minutes, give or take whatever the timekeeper's conscience allows. The accounts quibble over the precise minute; no account quibbles over the wound.

Those six minutes entered Italian football's permanent inventory of griefs. The moralist is obliged to record what the partisan cannot: that a nation which had just produced the most beautiful player on the continent chose, at the hour of its greatest examination, to be ashamed of him. Prudence over poetry; the abacus over the abbot. It is an old Italian argument — older than football, older perhaps than Italy — and in the summer of 1970 it wore the number ten of Milan. The protagonist of the wound was ours. Rivera came home from Mexico with a runners-up medal, the winning goal of the greatest match ever played, and six minutes of a World Cup final; and being Rivera, he came home to lead.

Rocco Resets the Table

Rocco, meanwhile, had spent the summer doing what a great cook does after a disappointing service: he changed the shopping. In came Romeo Benetti from Sampdoria, Giulio Zignoli from the champions Cagliari, Silvano Villa from Alessandria and Giorgio Biasiolo from Vicenza — names the San Siro public did not yet sing. Out went men it had sung for years: Giovanni Lodetti to Sampdoria, Angelo Benedicto Sormani — twice a scorer in the world-title tie against Estudiantes — to Napoli, Saul Malatrasi to SPAL. There is no sentimentality in a well-run kitchen, and Rocco's kitchens were the best-run in Italy; but even he must have felt the small cruelty of the ledger, which repays the makers of legend with a ticket to somewhere else.

The wisdom of the surgery would be measured, as such wisdom always is, on Sunday afternoons. It was measured quickly.

An Autumn Without Defeat

The new championship opened in September with two draws that deceived nobody who was watching closely — 1-1 at home to Lazio on 27 September, then 1-1 at Foggia a week later with Rivera scoring — and then the machine engaged its gears and won five in a row. Sampdoria were beaten 3-1 at San Siro on 11 October, Villa scoring twice and Benetti, with the particular relish of the recently transferred, scoring against the club that had just sold him. On 25 October Milan went to Turin and beat Juventus 2-0, Villa and Prati the scorers; and on 8 November came the derby.

Inter arrived at San Siro and were dismantled 3-0. Note the scorers, for they are the whole story of Rocco's summer vindicated inside ninety minutes: Biasiolo, the unknown from Vicenza; Villa, the unknown from Alessandria; and Rivera, the most discussed man in Italy, adding the signature. The new boys and the little abbot, in a single afternoon, against the neighbours. A week later Milan went to Florence and won 5-2 — Combin twice, Prati twice, Biasiolo again — and on 22 November Prati took all three goals himself in a 3-1 defeat of Vicenza. The attack that would finish the season with fifty-four goals, the most prolific in the division, was in full voice, and Prati was on his way to nineteen in the league and twenty-two in all competitions.

Late November brought a draw away at Varese, mid-December another at home to Verona — Villa and Combin the scorers — and then, on 20 December, a strange evening in Naples that the record book gives as Napoli 0, Milan 2, though the men on the pitch had settled it at 1-0 and it was the giudice sportivo who added the second, after firecrackers rained down from the terraces of the San Paolo. The chronicler records both figures and notes that only one of them was ever scored. A final 1-1 at Torino on 28 December, Villa once more, closed the calendar year with the ledger still unstained: eleven rounds played, not one lost. The girone d'andata itself ran on into late January, and when it closed on 24 January 1971 Milan stood at the head of the table as campione d'inverno — winter champions, the whole first half of the championship navigated without a single defeat, twenty-four points banked against the spring. Between the fog of one winter and the fog of the next, the club had climbed from fourth place to first without losing a league match along the way.

The Verdict

History, which has no manners, obliges the honest chronicler to append the postscript: the unbeaten run lived until 7 March 1971, when Inter took the return derby 2-0 at San Siro and, in due course, the scudetto — forty-six points to Milan's forty-two, first place to Milan's second, with the consolation that second place carried the club into the first edition of the new UEFA Cup. The winter title, as the old men along the Navigli will tell you between one glass and the next, is a promise and not a payment.

But judge the year on its own evidence. In 1970 Milan held the title of champions of the world; its captain held the Ballon d'Or; its German defender and its number ten decided, between the 90th and the 111th minute of a night in Mexico, the greatest match ever played; its old coach rebuilt half a squad in one summer and sent the new one through an entire autumn unbeaten; and its deepest wound — those six minutes at the Azteca — was inflicted not by any opponent but by the caution of Italy itself. A club is measured by its triumphs, but it is loved for its wounds. In 1970 Milan collected both and carried them home through the fog with the same unhurried stride; which is, when everything has been weighed, the very definition of a great house.