Schnellinger at Ninety, Rivera at a Hundred and Eleven

The Cabinet and the Street

Two trophies stood in the cabinet as the decade turned: the European Cup, won over Ajax in Madrid, and beside it the Intercontinental Cup, taken from Estudiantes de La Plata in October 1969. Which is to say that Nereo Rocco's rossoneri entered 1970 as champions of the world, with a captain, Gianni Rivera, who was the reigning Ballon d'Or — the first Italian-born footballer ever to hold it, and only the second Italian after Sívori. No club in Europe carried more prestige into the new decade.

Outside the cabinet, the country was in the street. The bomb that had torn through Piazza Fontana in December 1969 still hung over every conversation in every bar in the city, 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.

Seen from the trophy cabinet, then, a club at its summit, with two silver arguments already settled in its favour. Seen from the league table, something else entirely; and it is with the table that an honest account must begin.

Thirty-Six Points from Thirty Matches

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 no disgrace — though the Fairs Cup's one-club-per-city rule, with Inter placed above them, meant it bought no European ticket at all — and for the champions of the world it is a demotion by degrees. Nine points ahead of them, improbably and rather gloriously, stood Cagliari on forty-five, surprise champions from the island and champions of Italy for the only time in their history; Inter finished five points better off than Milan, Juventus two, which is to say four and seven behind the Sardinians. Gigi Riva thundered to the Capocannoniere title with twenty-one goals, while the defence behind him conceded a record-low eleven all season. Pierino Prati did his duty, twelve goals in the league and seventeen in all competitions. But the side never came together, and Rocco — chalk in one hand and a cigarette in the other, reading a season the way other men read a timetable — had known it long before the table said so.

The explanations were not mysterious. The glories of the previous autumn had cost blood; what Madrid in May and Buenos Aires in October took out of these men is set down in the chapter before this one, and a tally of that kind does not improve for being read twice. But the defence of the 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.

Two Number Tens, One Shirt

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 it. 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 l'abatino 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 misunderstanding 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. What the partisan cannot say must still be set down: 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. 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.

Benetti Arrives, Lodetti Departs

Rocco spent the summer changing the personnel. 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 squad list, and Rocco's were the hardest-headed in Italy; but even he must have felt the small cruelty of the trade, which repays the makers of legend with a ticket to somewhere else.

Rocco explained nothing and apologised to nobody. 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 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. Two men the crowd had not known how to pronounce in August, and the captain it had argued about all summer, in a single afternoon, against Inter. 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 under the floodlights of the San Paolo that the score-sheet 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. Both figures stand; 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 column of defeats still empty: 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. In twelve months the club had climbed from fourth place to first without losing a league match on the way.

The Year's Furniture

A winter title is a promise and not a payment. What the spring did with that promise — the points, the placing, the whole accounting of it — is business for the head of the following year's chapter, and it would be a discourtesy to this autumn to turn to that page while its own column of defeats is still empty.

Set the year's furniture out one last time. The Intercontinental Cup in the cabinet; the Ballon d'Or on the captain's shelf; half a squad rebuilt in a single summer and sent through an entire autumn without a defeat. And one wound, inflicted by no opponent at all but by the caution of Italy itself. Ninety and a hundred and eleven: two minutes in Mexico that belong to this club for as long as the game is remembered — and six more it has never been able to give back.