Silenced Until the Thirtieth of June

The Eighty-Seventh Minute at the Sant'Elia

The twelfth of March, the Sant'Elia in Cagliari, the eighty-seventh minute. Gigi Riva lets fly from inside the area; the ball strikes Anquilletti's arm on its way through; Michelotti points to the spot. Riva takes the kick himself, because Sardinia that afternoon had a taste for theatre, and Cagliari win it 2-1. Decisions like that arrive at every club in every season and are usually forgotten by the Wednesday. This one was not forgotten, because of where it fell in the calendar: four clubs were still alive in the championship, the run-in had begun, and Milan came home from Sardinia with nothing at all.

Outside the stadiums the country was in a bad temper. Italy would go early to the polls on the seventh of May; Giulio Andreotti held the premiership; and the season that history has since filed under the anni di piombo, the years of lead, was already doing its work. In Milan the news came in over the lunchtime bulletins in workshops and front rooms, one ear on the politics and one on the football, and football remained what it has always been for the Milanese: the one liturgy that could still fill a Sunday with something other than argument. Behind it ran the oldest grievance in the house — the conviction, held in the city the way a grudge is held in a family, that the men with the whistles did not love Milan — and behind that the national dispute over Rivera and Mazzola, the staffetta, the relay, that had divided Italy's dinner tables since the World Cup final of 1970.

Rivera Speaks, and the Desks Answer

Gianni Rivera did not swallow it — the abatino, the little abbot, captain and conscience of the side. He erupted, publicly, against the game's authorities and against Campanati, the president of the referees' association, saying in effect that the logic of it all was that Milan were meant to lose this title, that so long as such men governed the whistle Milan would win nothing, and that this was the third championship being taken from them by such means. It was not a tactical observation. It was a j'accuse, delivered by the most elegant right foot in Italy against the most solemn desks in Italian football.

The desks answered as desks do. The federation's disciplinary commission opened its proceedings, and in mid-April, in one of those airless rooms where the ashtrays fill faster than the minute-book, it handed down a suspension running to the thirtieth of June — a sentence of rare severity for words alone. The captain was removed from the run-in of a title race his club would lose by one point, and from the national team besides.

You may believe Michelotti saw a handball or you may believe he imagined one; you may find Rivera's words intemperate or merely loud enough to carry. Nobody has ever explained satisfactorily how punishing the accuser settled the question of the accusation. Rivera sat. Milan played on without him. And the sentence, with the comic timing Italian football keeps in reserve for its morality plays, was due to run out on the thirtieth of June — five days before Milan had a final to play in Rome.

White Hart Lane, the Fifth of April

Europe had its own itinerary that spring, and its own lesson. Milan's first campaign in the new UEFA Cup had cleared three rounds before Christmas, as the previous chapter records; the rossoneri travelled it like merchants of the old Lombard fairs, taking what each city would give, and the spring's own share of the road opened with Lierse of Belgium, put away 2-0 and then held 1-1. Efficient, unsentimental, entirely without romance — and it carried Milan to a semi-final in April against Tottenham Hotspur.

At White Hart Lane on the fifth, the tie turned inside forty minutes. Romeo Benetti had put Milan ahead on twenty-five, and an away goal in England is worth carrying home; then Perryman equalised, Sogliano was sent off just past the hour, and on sixty-five minutes Perryman struck again — 2-1 to Tottenham, Milan reduced to ten men and to hope. A fortnight later at San Siro, Mullery scored early for the English, Rivera answered from the penalty spot on sixty-eight, and the night closed 1-1: out, 3-2 on aggregate, by the margin of a single goal, which was fast becoming the club's official unit of suffering. The consolation, such as it was, is that Tottenham went on to lift the trophy itself. Milan had gone out to the eventual winners — narrowly, honourably, and pointlessly.

The Last Sunday of May

The championship of 1971-72 went the way the best and cruellest championships go, to the final day, the twenty-eighth of May, with three clubs still breathing. When the last whistles had sounded, Juventus stood at forty-three points; Milan and Torino at forty-two; Cagliari at thirty-nine; and further down, at thirty-six, Fiorentina kept company with an Inter that no longer frightened anyone, while Roma trailed on thirty-five. No play-off was needed. Juventus, champions for the first time in five years, were clear by the width of a single point — which is to say by the width of a referee's thumb, or a post, or a linesman's arm. Every milanista that summer had his preferred instrument of measurement, and most of them had chosen it on the twelfth of March.

Milan finished second, level on points with Torino. What a placing cannot show is the architecture of that side. Rocco's Milan scored thirty-six goals and conceded seventeen — seventeen, across an entire championship, the meanest defence in the league, a team that made ninety minutes feel to its opponents like an appointment endlessly postponed. And there sits the season's awkward question. A side that surrenders seventeen goals has done everything the old science asks of it, and still the title went to Turin. When a defence has been perfected and the prize escapes anyway, a club begins looking elsewhere for its explanations; in the spring of 1972 Milan did not have to look far, having already said out loud where it was looking.

Rome, the Fifth of July

The year refused to leave matters there. The Coppa Italia, so often treated by the grandees as an inconvenience, had been taken seriously enough to tell you that Rocco wanted something in the cabinet for his labours: a first group topped with three victories and a draw, then a second-round group containing Torino, Inter and Juventus — the whole aristocracy of the north — negotiated with four victories and two draws, and topped as well. And so to the Stadio Olimpico on the fifth of July, against Napoli, in the full heat of the Roman summer, with the captain, his sentence expired as of the thirtieth of June, restored to the armband like a blade returned to its rightful owner.

The final was settled by two strokes of the era's plainest prose. Four minutes into the second half Prati let fly and Panzanato, interposing himself, turned the shot past his own goalkeeper — and no ordinary goalkeeper, but Dino Zoff, beaten by a teammate's touch as he would rarely be beaten by an opponent's genius. Then, on seventy-eight minutes, Roberto Rosato, a defender by trade and by temperament, beat his man and drove home a right foot of quite unnecessary violence: the sort of goal Rocco's teams were not supposed to own, scored by the sort of man who was not supposed to score it. Two-nil; a second Coppa Italia in the club's history; a passage booked into the Cup Winners' Cup for the season to come. Five days after his ban expired, Rivera lifted a trophy in Rome. The moral was left as an exercise for the federation.

Rocco Goes Up a Floor

That summer the house rearranged itself, quietly, in the Milanese manner. Nereo Rocco went upstairs — technical director now, surveying the workshop from the landing — and the bench passed to Cesare Maldini, his pupil, his defender, his continuation by other means. The chalk changed hands; the handwriting on the board did not change greatly. Rivera kept the armband, with Schnellinger as vice-captain, the German's granite standing guard beside the abatino's silk. And in the boardroom a new figure arrived with the smell of oil and money about him: Albino Buticchi, a petroleum man from La Spezia, who in July took the presidency from the lawyer Federico Sordillo. Much of what Buticchi did afterwards would be argued over for years. That his reign began here is not in argument, nor that its first season would carry the club to the cups of 1973.

The squad turned over with the same discretion. From Fiorentina came Luciano Chiarugi, a forward with mischief in his boots; from Genoa the defender Maurizio Turone; from Varese, Dario Dolci. And one great figure left by the door marked age and illness: Fabio Cudicini, the Ragno Nero, the Black Spider whose dark jersey had draped itself across the Milanese goalmouth for years, ended his career after kidney trouble, and the gloves passed to Villiam Vecchi. Chiarugi would justify the outlay at once, though the final accounting of what he and Rivera scored across the season then beginning is kept, with the rest of that spring's accounts, for the chapter that follows. Rocco's Milan, in its final evolution, was learning how to spend.

Milan 9, Atalanta 3

And spend it did. The new championship opened on the twenty-fourth of September with Palermo dismissed 4-0, paused for a goalless afternoon at Ternana, and then, on the fifteenth of October at San Siro, produced an afternoon that has stood untouched ever since: Milan 9, Atalanta 3. Twelve goals in a single fixture — the highest-scoring match in the history of Serie A, never equalled from that day to this. Prati took a hat-trick, opening on sixteen minutes and closing on the ninetieth; Bigon scored twice, Rivera twice, Benetti and Chiarugi once apiece; and Atalanta, to their eternal credit, kept coming forward, so that Divina, Ghio and Carelli turned the thing from an execution into a gunfight in which both parties were armed. That this happened at the house of catenaccio — the same Milan that months earlier had conceded seventeen goals in an entire championship — is the sort of joke football tells when it thinks the moralists have gone home.

The autumn ran on at the pace of a side that had remembered its appetite. A 2-2 draw carried back down the autostrada from Juventus at the end of October; Vicenza beaten 2-0; a stumble at Fiorentina, 3-1, to prove mortality; and then, on the nineteenth of November, the derby: Milan 3, Inter 2, the bragging rights of the city settled in a match with goals enough for everybody. Roma were held goalless in Rome, Sampdoria beaten 3-1, and on the tenth of December Milan went back to the Sant'Elia, where the year had first gone wrong, and won 1-0 — no protests, no penalties, merely a debt collected at the correct address. Lazio were beaten 3-1, Napoli held 0-0 on Christmas Eve, and on the thirtieth of December Torino were edged 1-0, so that the calendar closed with Milan at the top of the table, level with Juventus of all possible companions, exactly where the spring had insisted they belonged.

Europe had resumed as well. In the Cup Winners' Cup, earned in Rome in July, the Luxembourgers of Red Boys Differdange were beaten 4-1 away in September and 3-0 at San Siro; in the round of sixteen Legia Warsaw held Milan 1-1 in Poland before San Siro settled the return 2-1 in November, and only after extra time. The reader who knows the story knows where this campaign was headed — to a spring of 1973 that would bring the Cup Winners' Cup itself against Leeds United, and another Coppa Italia against Juventus, and also, at Verona on the final day, a wound that carries its own name. That is the next chapter's burden. In 1972 the omens were all fair, and even omens deserve one evening of innocence.

The Coccarda on the Shirt

Two verdicts, then, and this chronicle declines to choose between them. Against Milan: a scudetto lost by a single point to Juventus, with a defence that conceded seventeen goals and deserved better; a European semi-final surrendered by one goal to the eventual winners of the competition; a captain silenced until midsummer for the offence of saying, too loudly, what half of Lombardy was muttering into its Sunday wine. For Milan: a second Coppa Italia, won in Rome with Zoff beaten and Rosato thundering; the succession settled — Rocco to the landing, Maldini to the bench — without a pane of glass broken; a nine-goal October afternoon that nobody in Serie A has matched in all the seasons since; and a New Year's Eve spent looking down at the rest of Italy from the top of the table, with only Juventus for company on the summit.

1972 was the year Milan lost by the smallest of margins and answered in the largest of numbers; the year the club learned that a grievance, however well founded, fills no cabinets, and that the surest reply to a referee's thumb is nine goals on an autumn afternoon. Somewhere between the point that got away and the twelve-goal afternoon lies the whole character of this club — aggrieved and abundant, secretive in one season and extravagant in the next, capable of suffering by one and winning by six. And on the rossonero shirts all that autumn, stitched above the heart, there was a coccarda in the national colours, the badge of the cup they had won in July. For a championship missed by a single point there is no badge at all.