The Final Nobody Came To

Sundays Without Engines

Petrol first, but only in passing: the engineless Sundays that opened 1974 — the oil shock, the rationing, the boulevards decreed back to pedestrians — were walked down at length in the chapter before this one, and there is no sense in walking them twice. Austerity is a northern virtue in theory and a northern grievance in practice, and the Milanese bore it as they bear every instruction that arrives from Rome — with a raised collar, a shortened stride, and the private conviction that this, too, would pass.

It was a year in which the nation wrote its diary in a single month. On 12 May the Italians went to the polls and voted to keep the divorce law — a watershed, the moment a Catholic country admitted to itself that it had become modern — and on 28 May a bomb in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia said plainly what the years of lead were made of, and how short the walk is from a ballot box to a coffin. Between those two dates, on the 8th, Milan lost a European final that almost nobody attended. Set beside a referendum and a massacre it is the smallest of the three; be patient with it anyway. Football writes a nation's history in the margin, and the margin of May 1974 says more about what was ending at Milanello than any communiqué the club dared to publish.

For this was the trough of the wave. The Milan of Rocco — the Milan of the European Cups of 1963 and 1969, the Milan that had taught catenaccio to sing — was dissolving grain by grain, and nothing had yet arrived to replace it. The mid-seventies would be a fallow, unsettled stretch for the Rossoneri, a long corridor between two lit rooms, and 1974 was the year the door closed behind them. A reader who wants triumphs is advised to skip ahead a decade. A reader who wants to know what the red and black cost, and why the faithful kept paying, should stay for this one.

Six Lashes in Amsterdam

The year opened with a lesson, and like most true lessons it was administered without mercy. Milan, holders of the Cup Winners' Cup, met Ajax, masters of everything else, in the European Super Cup — two legs in January to settle which of Europe's crowns sat on the harder head. The first leg, on 9 January at San Siro, offered the illusion of a case for the defence: a mere 12,856 came out into the cold — austerity keeps a man from his petrol and sometimes from his football — and Luciano Chiarugi, the season's one reliable flame, scored on 77 minutes under the Swiss whistle of Rudolf Scheurer. One to nil. A small lead, carried to Holland the way a man carries a candle into a gale.

On 16 January, at the Olympisch Stadion in Amsterdam, the gale arrived. Jan Mulder on 26 minutes, Piet Keizer on 35, Johan Neeskens on 71, Johnny Rep on 81, Gerrie Mühren from the spot on 84, Arie Haan on 87: six goals, six strokes of the cane, delivered before 15,350 Dutchmen who must have felt they were watching not a match but a demonstration, the way a professor demonstrates a theorem he stopped finding difficult years ago. Six-nil on the night, 6-1 on aggregate, and a line that still stings to copy out: the worst defeat ever suffered by an Italian team in the final of a UEFA competition. The referee that night, one notes with the historian's cold shiver, was Rudi Glöckner of the German Democratic Republic. The East Germans had entered Milan's 1974 early, and merely as witnesses. They would return as executioners.

What did Amsterdam prove? That the football of the future was being played by someone else. Milan had built its greatness on the arts of position and patience, on defending as a form of intelligence; Ajax played as if the pitch belonged to them by deed and the ball by birthright. One does not enjoy being schooled at that age, with those medals in the cabinet. But the six goals were not an accident of a cold night, and the record should say so plainly. They were a diagnosis.

The Paròn Leaves the Table

Every family has the dinner at which the father pushes back his chair, folds his napkin, and leaves without raising his voice, and for the family of Milan that dinner came in February. Nereo Rocco — the Paròn, the great Triestine hands behind the European Cups of 1963 and 1969, serving that season not as coach but as technical director, a patriarch promoted upstairs — resigned around the 12th of the month. Behind the resignation lay an unresolved dispute with the president, Albino Buticchi, and behind the dispute lay the thing a proud man forgives least readily: the knowledge that the club was already courting Torino's Gustavo Giagnoni for the seasons to come. Rocco did not wait to be replaced at his own table. He left, and by the following season he was at Fiorentina, wearing another family's colours the way a widower wears a new coat — correctly, and without love.

The bench he left behind had already become a relay station. The season had begun with Rocco as technical director; from the ninth matchday, on 16 December 1973, Cesare Maldini joined him on the bench and then carried the burden alone; and from early April the whistle passed to Giovanni Trapattoni, a loyal son of the house, promoted in mid-crisis the way armies promote lieutenants during a retreat. Three hands on one tiller in a single voyage: no ship steers true like that, and this one did not. Through all of it one man stayed exactly where he was — Gianni Rivera, captain, no longer golden in his years but still golden in the wrist, obliged to lead a crew that changed its officers by the month.

There is a lesson sitting here, and it is worth stopping for. Clubs devour their fathers; it is in their constitution. But there is a price for it, paid not in the week of the rupture but in the years after, and Milan would pay it in full: the Paròn's departure was not a change of personnel but a change of era, and everyone at San Siro seemed to know it except the minutes of the board meetings.

Thin Broth in Serie A

The league season is best told in its own plain numbers. Milan came out of the winter break fifth — the sums of the andata are the previous chapter's business — and then the spring came apart. Thirty points from thirty matches: 11 won, 8 drawn, 11 lost, 34 goals scored and 36 conceded, a symmetry almost perfect and perfectly damning, a broth boiled so thin you could read the newspaper through it. Seventh place. For a club that had ruled Europe twice in a decade, seventh is not a position; it is an accusation.

There were mouthfuls of the old flavour. On 17 February, Roma were beaten 2-0, and for an afternoon San Siro remembered what appetite felt like. Then, on 24 March, came the derby, and the derby was a massacre: Internazionale five, Milan one. There is no dressing that wound in tactical analysis. A derby lost by four goals is not a defeat but a public reading of the will, the cousins gathered to hear what remains of the estate. The Coppa Italia had offered nothing either, but that door had been shut on the holders back in the autumn, and the autumn is told in the pages before this one.

And yet certain names deserve their line. Chiarugi, all flame and unpredictability, finished with 17 goals in all competitions, 11 of them in the league — the one forward who kept producing while the house changed managers around him. Angelo Anquilletti, that most unglamorous and indispensable of defenders, played more than anyone: 29 times in the league, 43 in all. And the people — this is the part that matters most — the people still came. An average of 47,466 on the San Siro concrete for a seventh-place team in an austerity winter. Love, in the Milanese dialect of it, is not a declaration. It is attendance.

Near-Silence at De Kuip

Through all of it, the club had one thread of silk left in its pocket: the Cup Winners' Cup, which it held, and which it set about defending with the last of the old craft. The route to the final was serious work seriously done. Its first half — Dinamo Zagreb, then Rapid Wien — was counted out goal by goal in the preceding chapter; what belongs here is what followed. PAOK of Salonika were taken 3-0 at home and survived 2-2 away; and in the semi-final Borussia Mönchengladbach — German, gifted, dangerous — were beaten 2-0 before the return was lost 0-1, the aggregate held with clenched teeth. The holders had reached the final again. On paper, the dynasty had one breath left in it.

The final was played on 8 May 1974 at De Kuip, the Feyenoord stadium in Rotterdam, under the Dutch referee Arie van Gemert, and the first calamity of the evening was visible before a ball was kicked: the stands. Some 4,641 souls rattled around a bowl built for tens of thousands. A Cold War final against the East Germans of 1. FC Magdeburg had drawn almost no one; the vast concrete sang with its own emptiness. Milan came out led, as ever, by Rivera, with Trapattoni — a month in the job — on the bench, and a patched line-up that leaned on the young Aldo Maldera, a child of the house, and on Alberto Bigon, sent out with the rest to defend the family silver. It is one thing to lose a final in a furnace of eighty thousand. It is another to lose one in a cathedral where every shout you make comes back to you as your own.

On 42 minutes, Enrico Lanzi, a Milan defender doing a defender's honest work, turned the ball into his own net. On 74, Wolfgang Seguin scored Magdeburg's second. Nought-two, and the cup was gone — surrendered by its holders in near-silence, the way valuable things are usually lost: not torn away, but let slip. Lanzi's own goal, struck in front of those thinly peopled, echoing terraces, is the small private wound at the centre of Milan's 1974, and this chronicle refuses to make it a scapegoat. Own goals are football's tax on defenders who put their bodies where the danger is; the deserters pay nothing. But the image will not leave: an era that began in the roar of Wembley and the delirium of Madrid ended with a deflection applauded by no one, in the wrong net, in the rain of history if not of meteorology.

Give the victors their due, precisely measured. Magdeburg's triumph made them a singularity: the only club of the German Democratic Republic ever to win a European trophy, a distinction that half a century has not altered and now never will. Some chroniclers, in their enthusiasm, promoted them further, calling them the first Eastern European winners of a UEFA competition. That is simply wrong: Slovan Bratislava of Czechoslovakia had lifted the Cup Winners' Cup in 1969. The truth needs no inflation. One European cup, won by one club of a vanished country, taken from the hands of the great Milan in front of four and a half thousand people: history rarely writes anything stranger, and never anything lonelier.

An Autumn in Plain Italian

Defeats of that calibre are followed either by denial or by demolition, and to its credit the club chose demolition. The summer of 1974 rebuilt the squad from the spine outwards, and the transfer register of those months is worth reading entry by entry. Enrico Albertosi arrived from Cagliari to stand between the posts, a goalkeeper of theatrical authority; Aldo Bet came from Verona and Luciano Zecchini from Torino to remake the defence; Duino Gorin and the young striker Egidio Calloni came down from Varese. And one departure outweighed all the arrivals in tonnage of sentiment: Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, the great German who had guarded Milan's flank for some nine seasons, left for Tennis Borussia Berlin. With him went the last foreign passport in the dressing room. For the first time since 1944-45, Milan would field an entirely Italian roster — a club speaking, for a season, in plain Italian, as if the years of Babel and glory needed to be sweated out in the mother tongue.

The bench, at last, stopped revolving: Gustavo Giagnoni, the man the club had been courting since the winter of Rocco's leaving, took charge, with Buticchi still in the president's chair. The autumn's results read like a convalescence chart. On 6 October, a goalless draw with Sampdoria — the pulse steady, no more. On 13 October, defeat in Turin to Juventus, 2-1 by the accounts that have come down to us, though those accounts do not all agree. Then the strength returned: Ascoli beaten 2-0 on 24 November, and on 22 December a 3-0 dismissal of Bologna to carry into Christmas like a parcel of good panettone. The season those months began would end, the following spring, in an honest recovery — but the counting of it, the place and the points and the ticket it earned, belongs to 1975, and the next chapter will do it line by line. Not a resurrection, then; call it, for now and from inside the December of it, a recovery of appetite. As for the boy from Varese, he would finish that season as Milan's top scorer, and his totals carry a coincidence too good to spend twice here: set them beside Chiarugi's, printed a few pages back, when the following year's pages lay them out, and see.

Small Sorrows

No year is judged alone, and 1974 least of all. That summer, West Germany hosted the World Cup and won it; Italy travelled, played, and was home after the first round, the whole peninsula's football pride sent back like a badly addressed letter. The country outside the stadiums queued through austerity, voted for divorce, buried its dead in Brescia, and carried on — because carrying on is the Italian art form that underlies all the others. In such a year, the collapse of a football dynasty is a small sorrow. But small sorrows are the ones a man actually lives with, daily, at the table and on the tram and in the morning queue at the newsstand, and the rossonero people lived with this one for a long time.

So the old Milan did not fall in battle, which would have been bearable. It went by administration: a father let go in February, a bench passed from hand to hand, six strokes taken in Amsterdam almost without reply, a derby lost like an estate sale, and at the last the family silver slipping into the wrong net in Rotterdam. Read to the end, though, and the same twelve months hold the opening sentence of the next book: an honest autumn, a rebuilt spine, a boy from Varese scoring the old numbers, a ticket back into Europe — and, in the world's far cities, the scattered faithful who would learn the scores days late and grieve them anyway. Four thousand six hundred and forty-one had watched the cup leave. Forty-seven thousand four hundred and sixty-six came, fortnight after fortnight, to watch a team that was going nowhere at all.