Twelve Draws and a Shoot-Out at Marassi

Forty-Two to Forty-Six

Twelve times in thirty Sundays that season, Milan came off the pitch with a single point and nobody in particular to blame for it. When the last of them had been played out, the table of 1970-71 read: Internazionale forty-six, Milan forty-two, Napoli third on thirty-nine, Juventus fourth on thirty-five, all of it counted in the old honest currency of two points for a win. Four points, in that currency, is not a landslide. It is a season of small hesitations, and the record says precisely where they lived: fifteen victories, three defeats, and twelve draws — twelve afternoons on which Rocco's Milan proved almost impossible to beat and very nearly as impossible to reward. One of the three defeats carried a date the city did not need writing down. On the 7th of March 1971 Milan crossed San Siro as nominal guests for the return derby and lost it 2-0 to Internazionale, and the unbeaten run Milan had carried out of the autumn and all the way through the girone d'andata — the winter title banked in January, the promise the previous chapter left standing — ended there, in ninety minutes, at the hands of the one opponent capable of making the manner of it worse. Inter took the scudetto in due course; first place to Milan's second.

This is the tax that prudence levies, and Nereo Rocco understood it better than any man alive, having built his church on the rock of the ungiven goal. A side that loses three times in thirty and still watches Internazionale parade through the city is a side that has confused solidity with sufficiency, and it has to be said, though it is said with affection — the way you scold a friend who has done every difficult thing right and left the easy one undone. Appetite was not the trouble: Pierino Prati struck nineteen league goals that season, twenty-two in all competitions, leading the line with that loping hunger of his. And the second place carried one consolation folded inside it, worth far more than it looked in May — it qualified Milan for the inaugural UEFA Cup, the new continental tournament waiting on the other side of summer.

It is worth remembering what city this was. The Milan of 1971 lived inside the early years of lead, the anni di piombo, with the wound of Piazza Fontana still open from December 1969, with strikes rolling through the factories and tension organised into strategy. Football did not float above any of that; it was the Sunday parenthesis inside it, two hours in which a divided city agreed at least on the shape of its arguments, and a scoreline passed down a factory bench belonged to the season as surely as anything that happened at San Siro. That the league went to Internazionale that year was, for the rossoneri half of the city, one grief among larger ones — but grief is not diminished by proportion, and nobody who stood on those terraces would insult it by pretending otherwise.

Genoa, the Twenty-Seventh of June

The Coppa Italia of 1970-71 deserves its own small chapter in the anthology of exquisite Milanese suffering. Milan and Torino finished the final group stage level, inseparable by every honest measure, and so the federation sent them to Genoa, to the Stadio Luigi Ferraris at Marassi, on Sunday the 27th of June 1971, to settle by playoff what a season could not. Consider the date. The end of June, the city already emptying toward the coast and the mountains, two exhausted teams asked for one more afternoon's work in the heat of a Ligurian summer. They produced a nought-nought that survived regulation, survived extra time, and delivered everyone to the newest and cruellest of football's inventions: the penalty shoot-out. Torino converted five. Milan converted three. The cup went to Turin, and Milan went home with the special hollowness of the team that was never actually beaten.

I hold no brief against the penalty as an instrument of justice inside a match, where it punishes a crime; as a means of deciding a whole competition it is the lottery dressed in the robes of the tribunal, and at Marassi in 1971 Milan learned the difference in the most personal way available. There is a fine irony sitting in the records to sharpen the taste. The tournament's top scorer that year, with seven goals, was Gianni Rivera — l'abatino, Ballon d'Or of 1969, crowned the Coppa's leading marksman for the second time in his career. The best goalscorer in the competition finished it holding nothing at all. If you wish to explain to a young supporter what it means to love this club, you could do worse than begin on that evening in Genoa, where excellence and reward parted company politely, like strangers stepping off the same tram.

The Thirty-First of May, in Dark Suits

Institutions have their seasons too, and Milan's boardroom turned before the players had cleared their lockers. On the 31st of May 1971 Franco Carraro's presidency ended and Federico Sordillo's began — a handover conducted in the manner of Milanese business, which is to say in dark suits, briefly, and while the city's attention was elsewhere. Sordillo would hold the chair through the whole of the 1971-72 season before Albino Buticchi took it in 1972; presidents in that era changed rather faster than the men who played for them. Only this needs noting: whichever name was printed on the club's letterhead, the chalkboard still belonged to Rocco, and by 1971-72 the old fox had Cesare Maldini standing beside him as his assistant — the captain of Wembley now apprenticed to the trade of the bench, a succession being taught rather than announced.

The summer market, meanwhile, did its quiet surgery. Out went Néstor Combin, to Metz. In came Giuseppe Sabadini to harden the defence, Riccardo Sogliano for the midfield, and a young forward named Alberto Bigon, of whom more would soon be heard, since by the end of the 1971-72 season it would be Bigon — not the established princes — who finished as the side's top scorer with fourteen league goals, nineteen in all competitions. Around them the intake of the previous summer, Romeo Benetti and Giorgio Biasiolo, Silvano Villa and Giulio Zignoli, was settling into the squad's connective tissue. On paper it was ordinary husbandry, the annual pruning of a great house's garden. But one departure that summer was not ordinary at all, and it deserves to be lifted out of the transfer lists and set down on its own.

The Art of Subtraction

Giovanni Trapattoni was born in Cusano Milanino on the 17th of March 1939 — the northern outskirts, which is to say inside the club's own catchment — and for thirteen seasons Milan was the only great club he ever knew. The counts give him around 274 appearances in Serie A and 351 in all competitions, but no total has ever known what to do with a player like Trap, because his art was subtraction: the removal of the opponent's best idea before it could become a fact. He was the hard-running foil to Rivera's grace, the man who did the week's labour so that the poet might do the Sunday's poetry, and when the great tests came he did not shrink from them. A starter at Wembley in 1963 and at the Bernabéu in 1969, on the two nights Milan first and then again lifted the European Cup, he is remembered above all for the evenings he was sent out to mark the two most dangerous men of the age — Eusébio at Wembley itself, Pelé when Santos came to San Siro — and came back with his dignity and theirs intact.

In the summer of 1971 he left for Varese. There was no thunder in it; that was never his register. He would play only ten more Serie A matches there before his legs told him the truth, and he retired at thirty-three in 1972 — at which point he began the other career, the one on the bench, that would in time make 'Trap' one of the most decorated managers the game has ever produced. That glory belongs to other chapters and, it must be said with a wince, to other cities. What belongs to 1971 is the farewell itself: the last bandiera of the golden era folding his flag quietly and carrying it out through the side door while the club's face was turned toward the new season. Great cycles do not end with the famous defeat. They end with a departure like this one, barely noticed at the time and understood only later. The fixture list, which keeps a Lombard sense of irony, then sent Milan to open the autumn's league campaign away at Varese, of all towns — the very address to which Trap had taken his boots. Milan won there 1-0 on the 3rd of October, and the two points travelled home along the road that had carried him out of the city, the autostrada indifferent to both errands.

Monza in August, Roma in December

The new season began before the summer had properly ended. On the 29th of August 1971 Milan went to Monza for the first competitive fixture of 1971-72 and won it 1-0, and the Coppa Italia group that followed was dispatched with the flat competence of a man doing the jobs nobody thanks him for — Novara beaten 2-0 at San Siro on the 8th of September, Mantova 2-0 on the 12th, a 1-1 fetched from Catania's Cibali on the 19th. This was housekeeping, and Rocco's houses were always kept.

The league was a rougher country. After the win at Varese came a 2-0 over Fiorentina and a 2-0 at Vicenza, and then, on the 31st of October, San Siro witnessed something it had not rehearsed: Juventus came to Milan and won 4-1. A four-goal concession at home is not a defeat, it is an autopsy conducted in public, and the terraces emptied that evening under the floodlights in the particular silence Milan keeps for humiliations it intends to remember, not a scarf raised on the way out. What one asks of a Rocco team is not that it never bleeds but that it clots quickly, and this one did: 2-0 at Sampdoria on the 7th of November, a goalless standoff with Cagliari on the 14th, and then, on the 28th of November, the afternoon the season turned its face to the light — Internazionale 2, Milan 3, the derby taken in the nominal home fixture of the other tenants of San Siro. A derby of five goals is a rarity in any catenaccio decade, and to win one is to own the whole city for a week.

December, in the Milanese manner, gave and took with the same hand. On the 5th, Mantova came to San Siro and left with a 1-0 win that even the sober chronicles record as undeserved, one of those afternoons when fortune reads from a different libretto than the play; the wise supporter filed it away all the same, for the larger argument between Milan and the refereeing class was a pot that would boil over — though not until the spring of 1972, and that storm, with Rivera at its centre, belongs to the next chapter and must not be smuggled into this one. Milan answered as champions-in-waiting answer, with their boots: 2-0 at Bologna on the 12th of December, and then, on the 19th, a 3-0 dismantling of Roma at San Siro to close the calendar year — with Rivera wearing the armband as he had all year, the German Karl-Heinz Schnellinger standing vice-captain behind him, and the table warm enough to heat the winter.

Sixty-Four Teams, and a Second Leg in Trieste

Europe, meanwhile, had found room for one more tournament. The UEFA Cup arrived in the autumn of 1971 as a field of sixty-four teams, and Milan, admitted by way of that second place which had tasted so bitter in May, discovered that a silver medal has its uses. The first round paired the rossoneri with Digenis Akritas Morphou of Cyprus, and the tie was as unequal as the geography suggested: 4-0 at San Siro on the 22nd of September, then 3-0 in the return on the 29th — a second leg staged not in Cyprus at all but in Trieste, at the Cypriots' own request, one of those charming administrative arabesques the old European competitions produced, so that Milan completed a 7-0 aggregate away from home without ever leaving Italy.

The second round offered sterner Germanic fare. Hertha of Berlin came to San Siro on the 20th of October and were beaten 4-2 in a match generous by the standards of the age, and though the Germans took the return 2-1 in Berlin on the 3rd of November, the tie came home 5-4 on aggregate — the narrow, managed survival being exactly the kind of result Rocco would have carried home in his breast pocket like a good cigar. Then in the third round came Dundee, and the work was done early: 3-0 at San Siro on the 24th of November, an evening thorough enough that the 2-0 the Scots took back at Dens Park on the 8th of December read as consolation rather than revival, and Milan passed 3-2 on aggregate — three rounds of the new competition cleared before the year was out. The road would run on deep into the spring of 1972 before it ended in heartbreak; but that heartbreak had not yet been written as the year closed, and in December 1971 the only visible fact was a Milan marching through Europe under the floodlights with the old continental appetite fully restored.

Two Trophies Lost, Three Rounds Won

So what was 1971, weighed honestly? A year without silverware, certainly: the scudetto lost by four points to Internazionale, the Coppa lost by two penalty kicks to Torino, and the trophy cabinet obliged to live on its memories for another twelve months. It is lazy work to file such years under failure and move on. The careful one notices what was being assembled meanwhile: a second place that bought passage into Europe's newest tournament, and three European rounds cleared before Christmas; a Coppa Italia campaign begun in August whose ending the next chapter keeps; Bigon rising, Benetti hardening, Cesare Maldini learning the bench at Rocco's elbow while Sordillo settled into the president's chair.

And threaded through all of it, the human matter that outlasts tables: Rivera at his peak, top scorer of a cup he did not win, with storms gathering around him that 1972 would break; and Trapattoni gone to Varese with thirteen seasons folded into his suitcase, the last flag of the first golden age carried out quietly while the next one was still being stitched. On the 19th of December the last home crowd of the year came down the steps of San Siro with three goals to keep them warm and nothing to put in the cabinet, and north of the city a wing-half of thirteen Milan seasons was learning to pull a different shirt over his head. The road between them stayed open all winter, in both directions.