The Year Cut in Two

The Fog Lifts on a Divided City

There are years that come to Milan the way the fog comes off the Navigli, from every direction at once and with no particular hurry, until the Madonnina disappears above the rooftops and a man must navigate his own city by memory. 1972 was such a year. Italy had gone early to the polls on the seventh of May; Giulio Andreotti held the premiership; and in the streets the season that history would file under the anni di piombo — the years of lead — went about its grim bookkeeping. In the industrial capital, where the factories set the rhythm and the fog kept the secrets, football remained what it has always been for the Milanese: the one liturgy that could still fill a Sunday with something other than argument.

And what a liturgy Milan offered that year, though it was a rite celebrated in two distinct registers. The spring belonged to the old faith of Nereo Rocco, the catenaccio in its twilight, all bolts and vigils and the arithmetic of the goal denied; the autumn, astonishingly, would belong to abundance. Between the two seasons ran the oldest grievance in the house — the conviction, nursed like a stove through a Lombard winter, that the men with the whistles did not love Milan — and behind it the national quarrel over Rivera and Mazzola, the famous staffetta that had divided Italy's dinner tables since the World Cup final of 1970. To understand 1972 you must hold both halves in one hand, as you hold a risotto and its saffron: the injustice and the consolation, the point that was lost and the cup that was won.

One Point, Weighed in Lead

The championship of 1971-72 was decided the way the best and cruellest championships are decided, on the final day, the twenty-eighth of May, with three clubs still breathing on the ledger. When the accountants closed the book, 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, a post, an afternoon's fog — choose your own instrument of measurement; every milanista that summer had his favourite.

The tables will tell you Milan finished second, level on points with Torino, and the almanacs may order those two as they please; what no almanac can dispute is the architecture of that Milan. Rocco's side scored thirty-six goals and conceded seventeen — seventeen, across a whole championship — the meanest defence in the league, a house so well bolted that opponents grew old in the corridor. And here lies the moralist's paradox of the season: a team that surrenders seventeen goals has done everything the old science asks of it, and still the title went to Turin. When defence has been perfected and the prize still escapes, a club begins to look elsewhere for explanations, and Milan, in the spring of 1972, did not have far to look.

The Abatino's J'accuse

Go back to the twelfth of March, to the Sant'Elia in Cagliari, the eighty-seventh minute of a match Milan would lose 2-1. Gigi Riva lets fly in the area; the ball strikes Anquilletti's arm; the referee, Michelotti, sees a handball where Milan saw only misfortune, and points to the spot. Riva himself converts the winner, because fate in Sardinia had a sense of theatre. It is the kind of decision that happens to every club in every season, and the kind that, arriving in the late chapters of a four-horse title race, tastes not of bad luck but of design.

Gianni Rivera — the abatino, the little abbot, captain and conscience of the side — did not swallow it. 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 of the football establishment.

The desks answered as desks do. The federation's disciplinary commission opened its proceedings and in mid-April handed down a suspension that ran until 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 be heard; but no one has ever satisfactorily explained how punishing the accuser settled the question of the accusation. The abatino sat, Milan bled, Juventus counted. And the ban, with the exquisite comic timing that Italian football reserves for its morality plays, expired on the thirtieth of June — five days before Milan had a final to play.

White Hart Lane and the Narrow Art of Going Out

Europe, meanwhile, had offered its own itinerary and its own lesson. This was Milan's first campaign in the new UEFA Cup, and the rossoneri travelled it like merchants of the old Lombard fairs, trading results city by city: Digenis Akritas Morphou dispatched 4-0 and 3-0; Hertha of Berlin beaten 4-2 and lost to 2-1 away, which sufficed; Dundee handled 3-0 before a 2-0 defeat in Scotland that mattered not at all; Lierse of Belgium put away 2-0 and held 1-1. It was efficient, unsentimental catenaccio commerce, and it carried Milan to a semi-final in April against Tottenham Hotspur.

At White Hart Lane on the fifth, the tie turned on an hour of misfortune compressed. Romeo Benetti had given Milan the lead on twenty-five minutes, and the away goal sat in the ledger like money in the bank; then Perryman equalised, Sogliano was sent off just past the hour, and on sixty-five minutes Perryman struck again — 2-1 to Tottenham, and 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, thin as a winter broth, was that Tottenham went on to lift the trophy itself. Milan had gone out to the eventual winners — narrowly, honourably, and pointlessly.

Rome, the Fifth of July

But 1972 refused to end its first act in bitterness. The Coppa Italia, so often treated by the grandees as a chore, had been navigated with a seriousness that told you 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 ledger — negotiated with four victories and two draws, and topped. And so to the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, on the fifth of July, against Napoli, in the thick of the Roman summer, with the captain, his sentence served as of the thirtieth of June, restored to the armband like a blade returned to its rightful owner.

The final was decided by two strokes of the era's plainest prose. Four minutes into the second half Prati let fly and Panzanato, interposing himself, deflected 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 powerful right foot, as if to demonstrate that in Rocco's Milan even the bolts could shoot. Two to 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 raised a trophy. The moral was left as an exercise for the federation.

The Old Locksmith Climbs the Stairs

That summer the house rearranged itself, quietly, in the Milanese manner. Nereo Rocco went upstairs — technical director now, the old locksmith of catenaccio surveying the workshop from the landing — and the bench passed to Cesare Maldini, his pupil, his defender, his continuation by other means. 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. The chronicles would come to argue about much that Buticchi did afterwards, as chronicles will; they do not argue that his reign began here, 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 repay his fee with interest — twenty-two goals in all competitions across the season then beginning, seven of them in the Cup Winners' Cup alone, enough to finish that competition's leading scorer — while Rivera would head the side's Serie A account with seventeen. The locksmith's Milan was learning, in its final evolution, how to spend.

Twelve Goals in October

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 the record books have been guarding jealously 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 attacking, so that Divina, Ghio and Carelli made the scoreline look less like an execution and more like a banquet at which the guests, too, were occasionally fed. That this feast was served by 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 are not listening.

The autumn ran on with the rhythm of a side that had remembered its appetite: a 2-2 draw carried home 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 city's bragging rights secured in a match with goals enough for both cathedrals. Roma were held goalless in Rome, Sampdoria beaten 3-1, and on the tenth of December Milan returned to the Sant'Elia in Cagliari, scene of March's crime, and won 1-0 — no protests, no penalties, merely the quiet satisfaction of 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 year closed with Milan at the top of the table, level with Juventus of all companions, exactly where the spring had insisted they belonged.

Europe, too, had resumed. 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, though only after extra time, in the November fog. 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. But that is the next chapter's burden. In 1972 the omens were all fair, and even omens deserve their evening of innocence.

The Ledger of a Split Year

How, then, to enter 1972 in the great ledger? On the debit side: 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. On the credit side: 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 no one 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.

The verdict writes itself, as the best verdicts do. 1972 was the year Milan lost by the smallest of margins and answered in the largest of numbers; the year the club discovered that 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 banquet lies the whole character of this club — aggrieved and abundant, bolted and baroque, capable of suffering by one and winning by six. Wherever rossoneri gather to keep these vigils, under the Madonnina or beneath clocks set to the far side of the world, the entry for 1972 reads the same: paid in full, with interest promised for the spring.