Mud on Wednesday, Corpses by Sunday

Sundays Without Cars

By December the boulevards of Milan carried no cars at all. The state had decreed austerità — fuel rationed, Sundays handed back to pedestrians — and a Milanese walking to the tram could hear his own footsteps on the paving as his grandfather once had. The oil shock had come up out of the deserts in the autumn and closed its hand around the industrial North; and through all of it Italy was living inside 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 crossed the national stage like waiters carrying trays through a brawl. Above the roofs, in their clutter of chimney pots and water tanks, the December light was the colour of tin; beyond them, on the clear 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 and the placards go up at the gates, 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. Understand this before we come to May. What happened in May could only wound a people so deeply because the thing it wounded was, in truth, a faith.

And Milan, in the spring of 1973, had every reason for faith. Nereo Rocco had built the side and Cesare Maldini drilled it; the Italian titles are slippery here, Maldini the coach of record and Rocco the presiding spirit above him, and the two men shared the kitchen in the chronicles 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 Appetites Had Names

The autumn had already put twelve goals into a single San Siro afternoon; the previous chapter set that table and cleared it, and this one begins with the appetite it left behind. 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 a shutter comes down, 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 a man holds a betting slip that missed by one result.

The Battle of Salonicco

On 16 May 1973, in the Kaftanzoglio Stadium of Thessaloniki, before 40,154 souls and on a pitch 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 a battle it resembled more than a football match: 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.

It 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, his seventh European strike of the campaign. What followed for the remaining hour and a half was not the 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. 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 meant to punish anyone for Salonicco, they did not wait long, and they did not punish the guilty.

Fatale Verona

Four days. That is the distance from the mud of Thessaloniki on the sixteenth of May to 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 came home 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 condition 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. And a month earlier there had been a refusal of another kind: in the match against Lazio, the celebrated referee Concetto Lo Bello annulled a Chiarugi goal that looked valid to everyone in the ground, and in a title decided by a single point every disallowed goal becomes, in hindsight, a signature on a 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, 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.

Five Penalties to Two, at Nine in the Evening

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 share of 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, on paper, a fine season. But every Milanese knew, over his espresso and the July papers, that the paper was lying. The year's truth 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.

Holders, and Fifth by Christmas

The new season opened 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 precise division of the kitchen is not agreed; the two cooks were the same two cooks.

In Europe the defence of the Cup Winners' Cup was conducted with the competence of a firm 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 those December Sundays when the cars were banned and the petrol rationed and San Siro filled with men who had walked or cycled to the turnstiles and then climbed the cold concrete of the terraces. 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 a rationed 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 in the second-round group, third behind Bologna with Inter and Atalanta for company, five points against the nine that carried Bologna through, 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.

Neighbours on the Same Landing

The Milan of 1973 travelled no further than Thessaloniki and Vienna; its longest journey that year was the four days from Greece to Verona, and it proved longer than any flight across the hemispheres. Distance 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, is such a year to be held in the hand? The trophy cabinet says triumph: a European cup and a national cup, Chiarugi's 22 goals, Rivera's 17, Vecchi's night of nights, the 9-3 that had gilded the autumn. The heart says catastrophe: a scudetto lost by one point, by one refused postponement, by one annulled goal, by two own goals scored by honest men with emptied legs. Both witnesses are telling the truth, and that is precisely what makes the year unbearable and unforgettable at once.

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 had resembled in Thessaloniki. Juventus took the title and took it legally. Verona took its place in our darkest folklore. 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.

On the twentieth of May Milan gathered at its radios as it always did, and the afternoon came in from two cities at once, and both cities were wrong. Forty-four points. The tenth star stayed in its box, and the two cups in the cabinet never once looked at it.