The Four Days That Broke a Kingdom

A City of Fog and Fuel Queues

There are years that history writes in a steady hand, and there are years it scrawls in a fever, crossing out its own sentences, and 1973 in Milan belongs unmistakably to the second kind. Italy sat deep in the anni di piombo, the Years of Lead, when politics was conducted as often with explosives as with speeches, and the governments of Giulio Andreotti and then Mariano Rumor passed across the national stage like waiters carrying trays through a brawl. By the autumn the oil shock had arrived from the deserts to squeeze the industrial North, and from December the state decreed austerità: fuel rationed, and Sundays without cars, so that the boulevards along the Navigli fell suddenly, eerily quiet, and a Milanese could hear his own footsteps on the way to the tram as his grandfather once had. The fog still came down off the plain as it always does, wrapping the Madonnina in her grey shawl, and beyond the fog, on the good days, the Alps stood white and indifferent, as they stand over everything we do.

In such a year football was not a distraction; it was the last reliable liturgy. The factories might strike, the lira might tremble, the newspapers might carry photographs a man preferred not to explain to his children — but on Sunday there was San Siro, shared by the two Milanese tribes like a cathedral with two altars, and there was Milan, and there was Gianni Rivera with the captain's band on his arm, and for ninety minutes the world made a kind of sense. It is important to understand this before we come to what happened in May, because what happened in May could only wound a people so deeply if the thing being wounded was, in truth, a faith.

And Milan, in the spring of 1973, had every reason for faith. The side that Nereo Rocco had built and that Cesare Maldini now drilled — the Englishman must pause here over Italian titles, for the sources themselves quarrel gently about who was head coach and who technical director, Maldini the coach of record with Rocco the presiding spirit above him, and we shall let the two men share the kitchen as they shared it in life — that side was chasing everything at once. The league, where they led. The Cup Winners' Cup, where they had marched to a final against Leeds United. The Coppa Italia, still to be settled in the Roman summer. Three pots on the stove, and the whole city leaning over them, inhaling.

The Feast Before the Famine

The season that ran into 1973 had already produced one dish so extravagant it still sits alone on the menu of Italian football. On 15 October 1972, at San Siro, Milan had beaten Atalanta 9-3 — twelve goals in a single afternoon, a scoreline from the age of moustaches and leather balls, and to this day the highest-scoring match Serie A has ever staged. There was something almost Lombard about the excess of it, a risotto with too much butter served without apology, and it announced a team that had rediscovered its appetite.

The appetites had names. Luciano Chiarugi had come down from Fiorentina that summer, a winger with a conjurer's feet, and he would finish the campaign with 22 goals across all competitions, seven of them in Europe, where no man in the Cup Winners' Cup scored more. Maurizio Turone had arrived from Genoa to add iron to the defence — remember his name, for fate remembered it. And above them all floated Rivera, the Abatino grown into full authority, who at an age when playmakers are supposed to be conserving themselves scored 17 goals in Serie A to share the capocannoniere crown with Pulici of Torino and Savoldi of Bologna — a number ten standing level with the league's leading marksmen, which is rather like discovering that the conductor has also played the trumpet solos. Around him: Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, the German veteran with a Teuton's calm and a Milanese's irony; Romeo Benetti, who tackled the way the fog rolls in, totally and without negotiation; Alberto Bigon, Angelo Anquilletti, Roberto Rosato, Giulio Zignoli, Giuseppe Sabadini — remember his name too. In goal, with poor Fabio Cudicini's great career ended by his kidneys, stood the young Villiam Vecchi, of whom more shortly, because in the mud of Greece he would have his one immortal night.

Above the dressing room, the institution itself had a new face: Albino Buticchi, president since July 1972, an owner of the new commercial breed presiding over a club still run, in its soul, by the old Triestine ways of Rocco. Milan finished the league season with 18 wins, 8 draws and 4 defeats, 65 scored and 33 conceded, 44 points from 30 matches. Hold that number — 44 — the way you would hold a lottery ticket that missed by a single digit.

The Battle of Salonicco

On 16 May 1973, in the Kaftanzoglio Stadium of Thessaloniki, before 40,154 souls and on a pitch that the rain had turned into something between a marsh and a battlefield, Milan met Leeds United for the Cup Winners' Cup. The Italians would come to call it La Battaglia di Salonicco, and battles it resembled more than football: Don Revie's Leeds were the most physically remorseless side England had produced in a generation, and the mud made every duel a wrestling match with drowning as a secondary hazard.

The match was decided almost before it had begun. In the fifth minute, with the mud already ruining boots and reputations alike, Chiarugi stood over a free-kick and bent it home. One goal, scored by the season's great acquisition, in his seventh European strike of the campaign. What followed for the remaining hour and a half was not a defence of a lead so much as a siege withstood, and the hero of the siege was Vecchi, the young goalkeeper, who on that filthy surface kept everything out with the composure of a man twice his experience. The eleven names deserve their roll-call, as garrison lists do: Vecchi; Turone, Sabadini, Anquilletti, Rosato, Zignoli; Sogliano, Benetti; Rivera; Bigon, Chiarugi. Milan 1, Leeds 0, and the second Cup Winners' Cup in the club's history came home to Via Turati.

And yet the night carried a stain that honesty obliges us to record. The Greek referee, Christos Michas, officiated in a manner that persuaded even the neutral crowd of his partiality; the Thessaloniki public pelted Milan's lap of honour with missiles, an ugly benediction for a European triumph. Leeds asked UEFA for a replay and were refused. Years later Michas would be banned from football for life for match-fixing — though, let it be said plainly, his conduct in this particular final was never formally investigated — and decades on, a British member of the European Parliament, Richard Corbett, would petition UEFA to strip Milan of the trophy. UEFA declined. The moralist in this correspondent, who loves the game precisely because it is played by fallible men and judged by more fallible ones, will say only this: Milan's players won the cup that was placed in front of them, on the pitch they were given, past the referee they did not choose; and if the gods wished to punish anyone for Salonicco, they did not wait long, and they did not punish the guilty.

Fatale Verona

Four days. That is the span between the mud of Thessaloniki on the sixteenth of May and the sunshine of Verona on the twentieth, and in those four days lives the whole tragedy of this chapter, the way a whole opera can live in a single held note. Milan returned from Greece leading Serie A by one point with one round to play. Juventus lurked a point behind; Lazio, remarkable Lazio, sat on 43 as well before the final round, so three claimants circled a single crown. The arithmetic was brutally simple: avoid defeat at Hellas Verona, mid-table Verona, and the scudetto — the tenth, the one that would hang the star above the badge — belonged to Milan.

The club, knowing what four days means to legs that have just fought a European war in a swamp, asked for the fixture to be postponed. The request was refused. Here the moralist stirs again, because a month earlier there had been another refusal of sorts: in the match against Lazio, the celebrated referee Concetto Lo Bello had annulled a Chiarugi goal that seemed to all the world a valid one, and in a title decided by a single point every disallowed goal becomes, in retrospect, a signature on the death certificate. Titles are lost across thirty rounds, not one afternoon — this is the sermon every professor of calcio delivers — and yet some afternoons insist on taking the whole blame.

What happened at the Bentegodi has entered the language of Italian football as la Fatale Verona — fatal Verona — a phrase that needs no explanation to any Milanese over a certain age, the way certain battlefield names need no explanation to certain nations. Sirena scored for Verona on 17 minutes. On 25 Sabadini, the honest full-back, turned the ball into his own net, and on 29 Luppi made it three. Rosato pulled one back for Milan on 32, but Luppi struck again on 70, and on 72 Turone — Turone, brought from Genoa to be the defence's iron — added the second own goal of the afternoon. Two Milanese defenders scoring for Verona in a single match: no novelist would dare it. Sabadini and Bigon scored to dress the corpse, and it finished Verona 5, Milan 3. Rocco's word for his players that day was cadaveri — corpses — and it was not an insult but a diagnosis, the grief of a man who had asked flesh to do what flesh cannot do twice in four days.

And in Rome, of course, at the same hour, Juventus were beating Roma 2-1, Cuccureddu's winner arriving three minutes from time, the kind of goal that comes like a tax demand, punctual and pitiless. Juventus 45 points, Milan 44. The title, led by one point at breakfast, gone by vespers. Two trophies won in a fortnight, and the only one Milan truly wanted handed to Turin by a defeated body that the calendar, the federation, and perhaps Lo Bello's whistle had each helped to weaken. The reader may distribute the blame as he pleases; the club simply carried the wound, and carries it still, folded into the family album between triumphs, because a great house keeps its griefs as carefully as its silver.

A Roman Night's Consolation

Football, whatever else one says against it, does not allow a man to bleed indefinitely; there is always another fixture, and sometimes the fixture is merciful. On the first of July 1973, at nine o'clock of a warm Roman evening at the Stadio Olimpico, Milan met Juventus — Juventus, of all clubs, the freshly crowned thief of May — in the final of the Coppa Italia. If the gods had staged Verona, they at least possess a sense of dramatic symmetry.

Bettega scored for Juventus after a quarter of an hour; Benetti answered from the penalty spot five minutes into the second half, driving the ball as he drove through midfields, without sentiment. One goal each through ninety minutes and through the extra thirty, and so the matter went to penalties, that lottery which is not a lottery at all but a public examination of nerve. Milan's examinees passed one after another: Schnellinger, the German imperturbable; Benetti again; Chiarugi, naturally; Biasiolo; Magherini. And Juventus, the champions of Italy, missed through Anastasi, through Bettega, through Spinosi — three misses, as if the scudetto had exhausted their account with fortune. Five to two on penalties, and the Coppa Italia, the third in Milan's history, came back north on the summer train.

It was consolation, and consolation is not nothing; a season that yields the Cup Winners' Cup and the Coppa Italia is, by the cold ledger, a fine season. But every Milanese knew, sipping his espresso over the July newspapers, that the ledger lies. The year's true accounting had been written at Verona, and no Roman night, however sweet — and beating Juventus on penalties is among the sweeter vintages the game bottles — could quite wash the taste of the Bentegodi from the city's mouth.

Autumn of the Holders

The new season opened in the autumn with Milan wearing two holders' crowns and a haunted expression. The squad shuffled as squads do: Franco Bergamaschi, Ottavio Bianchi, the goalkeeper Pierluigi Pizzaballa and Enrico Lanzi arrived; and Pierino Prati — Prati, the Peste of gentler years — departed for Roma, while Silvano Villa and Lino Golin went to Foggia. On the bench the old arrangement continued its slow rotation, Rocco the technical director with the Italian chronicles recording that Cesare Maldini would formally join him on the bench from the ninth matchday of the league, in mid-December — the historians disagree politely about the exact division of the kitchen, but the two cooks were the same two cooks.

In Europe the defence of the Cup Winners' Cup was conducted with the competence of a company that knows its trade. Dinamo Zagreb were dispatched 3-1 at San Siro in September — Bigon twice, Chiarugi once, a Lalic goal for the Yugoslavs — and 1-0 in Zagreb in October, Chiarugi again after seven minutes, four-one on aggregate. Then Rapid Wien: a goalless evening at San Siro that pleased nobody, redeemed in Vienna in November when Bigon scored twice before half-time, 2-0, and Milan passed into the quarter-finals still holding the cup they had won in the Greek mud.

The domestic autumn was greyer, grey as the December Sundays when the cars were banned and the petrol was rationed and San Siro filled with men who had walked or ridden bicycles through the austerity fog. There were creditable away wins at Roma and Napoli, a 2-2 with Juventus that settled nothing and avenged less, and — the calendar has a novelist's cruelty — a home fixture against Verona in December, won 2-1, a small coin pressed into a very large debt. But the derby of 2 December went to Inter, 2-1 at the shared cathedral, the sort of defeat that makes an austerity winter feel longer; Lazio beat Milan 1-0 on the year's final Sunday; and in the Coppa Italia the holders were quietly shown the door, third in a group with Bologna, Inter and Atalanta, five points and no appeal. Milan closed the girone di andata fifth, with 18 points, a team of cup-fighters who had somehow misplaced the patient greed that leagues demand.

The Verdict of the Bentegodi

For our friends in Adelaide, who keep the rossonero faith at the world's antipodes and who gather before dawn to watch this club as their grandfathers gathered at San Siro, an honest note: Milan did not come to Australia in 1973. The Diavolo's first landfall on that far continent was still seven years away — the great tour of May and June 1980 that would bring the rossoneri to Adelaide itself. The Milan of 1973 travelled no further than Thessaloniki and Vienna; his longest journey that year was the four days from Greece to Verona, and it proved longer than any flight across the hemispheres. Distance, the Adelaide faithful know better than anyone, is measured in what it costs you — and by that measure no supporter ever travelled further than Rocco's cadaveri travelled that May.

How, then, to judge 1973? The trophy cabinet says: a triumph — a European cup and a national cup, Chiarugi's 22 goals, Rivera's 17, Vecchi's night of nights, a 9-3 still unmatched in the annals of Serie A. The heart says: a catastrophe — a scudetto lost by one point, by one refused postponement, by one annulled goal, by two own goals scored by honest men with exhausted legs. Both witnesses are telling the truth, and that is precisely what makes the year unbearable and unforgettable at once.

This correspondent's verdict, delivered with the fog settling over the Navigli and the Alps invisible beyond the Madonnina, is this: 1973 was the year Milan proved that a team can be too brave for its own calendar. They fought a battle in the mud on a Wednesday and were asked to win a kingdom on the Sunday, and they could not, because they were men and not the marble they resembled in Thessaloniki. Juventus took the title and took it legally; Verona took its place in our darkest folklore; and Milan took two cups and a lesson written in the oldest ink the game possesses — that glory and grief are not opposites but neighbours, sharing a landing, borrowing each other's salt. The Fatale Verona remains a wound. But show me a club without wounds, and I will show you a club without a history worth the telling.