The Quiet Hinge

Four Points, and a City Divided by Fog

There are springs in Milan when the fog refuses to lift from the Navigli until nearly noon, and the spring of 1971 was one of them in every sense that matters, because when the Serie A table finally came into focus it showed the scudetto sitting on the wrong side of the city. Internazionale, forty-six points; Milan, forty-two; Napoli a distant third on thirty-nine and Juventus fourth on thirty-five, all of it computed in the old honest arithmetic of two points for a win across thirty Sundays. Four points, in that currency, is not a landslide. It is a season of small hesitations, and the ledger tells you precisely where they lived: fifteen victories, three defeats, and twelve draws — twelve afternoons on which Rocco's Milan proved almost impossible to beat and almost as impossible to reward.

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 only three times in thirty and still watches the neighbours parade is a side that has confused solidity with sufficiency, and the moralist is obliged to say so, though he says it with affection, the way one scolds a friend who has cooked the risotto perfectly and forgotten the wine. Up front there was no shortage of appetite: Pierino Prati struck nineteen league goals that season, twenty-two in all competitions, leading the line with that loping hunger of his. But the second place had one consolation written into it, and it would prove a door rather than a window — 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 this; it was the Sunday parenthesis inside it, the two hours at San Siro when a divided city agreed at least on the shape of its arguments. That the derby of the league table went to Inter that year was, for our half of the Madonnina's congregation, one grief among the city's larger ones — but grief is not diminished by proportion, and nobody who stood on those terraces would insult it by pretending otherwise.

Marassi, or the Arithmetic of Cruelty

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, and two exhausted teams asked to produce one more verdict in the heat of a Ligurian summer. They produced instead 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 within a match, where it punishes a crime; as an instrument for deciding a whole competition it is the lottery dressed in the robes of the tribunal, and 1971 taught Milan the difference at Marassi in the most personal way. And 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 himself, the Ballon d'Or of 1969, captain and conscience of the side, crowned the Coppa's leading marksman for the second time in his career. The competition's best goalscorer finished it holding nothing but the arithmetic. 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 leaving the same tram.

The Chairmen Change While the City Looks Away

Institutions have their seasons too, and Milan's boardroom turned before the players had even 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 with dark suits and no opera, 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; the presidencies of that era passed like courses at a long dinner, each one convinced it was the main dish. The moralist notes only this: whatever plate was set at the head of the table, the kitchen 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 art of the bench, a succession being seasoned slowly, the way all good Lombard cooking is.

The summer market, meanwhile, did its quiet surgery. Out went Nestor 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 maturing 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 taken out of the transfer lists and set down on its own, because it closed an era the way a door closes in an empty house.

Trap Leaves by the Side Door

Giovanni Trapattoni was born in Cusano Milanino on the 17th of March 1939, which is to say he was born practically inside the club's catchment of fog and tram-lines, and for thirteen seasons Milan was the only great club he ever knew. The accountants give him around 274 appearances in Serie A and 351 in all competitions, but accountancy has never 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 arithmetic so that the poet could do the 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 again lifted the European Cup, remembered forever 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. But 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 of the golden era's bandiere folding his flag quietly and carrying it out through the side door while the club's face was turned toward the new season. Every great cycle ends not with the famous defeat but with a departure like this one, barely noticed at the time, understood only later. The fixture computer, which has a Lombard sense of irony, then arranged for Milan to open their league campaign that autumn 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 same road he had taken out.

Autumn of the Old Fox

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 efficiency of a man settling small debts — Novara beaten 2-0 at San Siro on the 8th of September, Mantova 2-0 on the 12th, a 1-1 draw fetched from Catania's Cibali on the 19th. This was housekeeping, and Rocco's houses were always kept. That the same competition would end, though the reader must wait for it, with Milan lifting the Coppa itself at the Olimpico in July 1972 gives the autumn's tidy sweeping its proper flavour of foundation.

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 filed out through the fog that evening with the particular silence Milan reserves for humiliations it intends to remember. 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 on the cousins' own nominal Sunday of the shared San Siro. A derby of five goals is a rarity in any catenaccio decade, and to win one is to be handed, for a week at least, the keys to the entire city.

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 scandal, 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.

A New Cup for the Old Appetite

Europe, meanwhile, had invented a new pot to cook in. The UEFA Cup arrived in the autumn of 1971 as a tournament of sixty-four teams, and Milan, admitted by way of that second place which had tasted so bitter in May, discovered that silver medals too can open doors. The first round paired the rossoneri with Digenis Akritas Morphou of Cyprus, and the tie was as unequal as 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 abroad 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 all the way to the semi-finals before Tottenham Hotspur ended it in the spring of 1972; 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 with the old continental appetite fully restored.

One notes, for the record of this Australian house, that in 1971 the Diavolo's map still stopped at the edges of Europe: Milan would not set foot on Australian soil until the tour of May and June 1980, the journey that would at last bring the rossoneri to Adelaide itself, so the supporters who would one day gather in this city's small hours were, in this chapter, still an unimagined congregation. The pilgrimage, in 1971, ran the other way — the emigrant's radio straining across hemispheres for a scoreline from San Siro. Every club has its faithful beyond the horizon; few have ever been asked to love across quite so many meridians.

The Verdict of the Year Between

So what was 1971, weighed on honest scales? A year without silverware, certainly: the scudetto lost by four points to the cousins, the Coppa lost by two penalty kicks to Torino, and the trophy cabinet obliged to live on its memories for another twelve months. The lazy chronicler files such years under failure and moves on. The careful one notices what was being assembled in the gloom: a second place that opened Europe's newest door, and three European rounds cleared before Christmas; a Coppa Italia campaign begun in August that would end with the cup itself the following July; Bigon rising, Benetti hardening, Cesare Maldini learning the bench at Rocco's elbow while Sordillo settled into the president's chair.

And threaded through it all, the human ledger that matters more than the tables: Rivera at his peak, top scorer of a cup he did not win, captain of a city's better half, with storms gathering around him that 1972 would break; and Trapattoni gone to Varese with thirteen seasons folded in his suitcase, the last flag of the first golden age carried out quietly while the new one was still being stitched. Years like this one are the hinges of history, and hinges are never polished — they are simply the reason the door opens. In 1971 Milan's door swung between the era of the first cups and whatever was coming next, and if you put your ear to the fog that December, on the Navigli, outside San Siro, you could hear it turning.