The Hinge and the Fog

The Year the Air Turned Against Us

There are years one remembers by a scoreline and years one remembers by the smell of the air, and 1976, for those of us who lived it between the Navigli and the ring roads, belongs to the second and darker category. On the tenth of July a cloud of dioxin escaped the ICMESA chemical works at Seveso, in that gentle Brianza where the last of Milan's trams gives way to the first of Lombardy's vegetable gardens, and drifted across the hinterland that had fed the city its risotto for a century — one of the worst industrial accidents Europe had ever suffered, an invisible poison laid politely over ordinary life. The Lombard fog, which we had always cursed with affection, the way one curses an elderly relative at table, had acquired a sinister cousin, and the city spent its summer learning words no city should need.

It had already been a punishing year for the peninsula. On the sixth of May the earth tore itself open beneath Friuli and around a thousand people died in the rubble of the north-east; on the twentieth of June the country voted in the fever of the anni di piombo, the years of lead, and watched Enrico Berlinguer's Communists make historic gains while the Christian Democrats clung to the wheel, the lira all the while misbehaving like a colt nobody had broken. Against such a backdrop it takes either arrogance or mercy to write about football. I choose mercy, because football was where the ordinary Milanese went to breathe, and in 1976 breathing was not a thing to be taken for granted.

And what did our man find when he escaped to the stadium? Justice, of a sort, though wearing another city's colours. Torino won the Scudetto with 45 points, their seventh title and their first since the aeroplane fell at Superga in 1949 and carried the Grande Torino into legend; not even a heart striped red and black could begrudge them the poetry of it. Juventus finished second. Milan finished third, with 38 points, and third place, as we shall see, was at once a small miracle and a large deception — the miracle being that anyone in that boardroom stood still long enough to count the points at all.

Three Presidents and a Bench on Castors

Consider the arithmetic of chaos. Across the single season of 1975-76, Milan contrived to consume three presidents: Albino Buticchi until the 21st of December 1975, Bruno Pardi from the following day until the 3rd of May 1976, Vittorio Duina from the 4th of May onward. Institutions, like risotto, ask for slow stirring over a patient flame; Milan in those months was cooked on a blowtorch, by committee, with the pan changing hands between stirs. Duina at least would carry the club into the following season, which in that climate qualified as dynastic stability.

The bench fared no better, though its churn produced the year's most expensive irony. Gustavo Giagnoni had been sacked on the first of October 1975 after a poor start; the next day the club reached for its household god, installing Nereo Rocco as technical director, while the young Giovanni Trapattoni took the bench on an interim basis and held it until spring. From June 1976 the job passed to Paolo Barison — and Trapattoni, unwanted where he had been formed, boarded the train to Turin to manage Juventus, where a legendary era was about to begin. The reader who wishes to understand the next decade of Italian football need only hold on to this one fact: in 1976, Milan let Giovanni Trapattoni go.

A Spring of Small Mercies

And yet — here is the mystery the moralist must sit with — the team played. Fifteen wins, eight draws, seven defeats; forty-two goals scored, twenty-eight conceded; 38 points and third place, enough to book passage into the following season's UEFA Cup. Romeo Benetti wore the armband that spring, and Benetti was the captain such a year required, all iron and tendon, a man who treated midfield as a border to be policed rather than a salon to be decorated. A club dissolving above the waterline was held together below it by his kind of stubbornness.

Better still, the city itself was won, twice. On the seventh of December 1975 Milan had beaten Inter 2-1; in the return on the 28th of March 1976 the neighbours were put down again, 1-0, the goal belonging to Alberto Bigon, and the archive reel that preserves it — filed with bureaucratic tenderness as Inter-Milan 0-1, Bigon — remains one of the few documents of the year a rossonero may watch without wincing. Whatever was rotting in the committee rooms, beneath the Madonnina the derby of 1976 spoke only one language, and it was ours.

Flanders, and the Arithmetic of Regret

Europe told the harder truth, as Europe generally does. Milan had made honest progress through the UEFA Cup — Everton beaten, then Athlone Town, then Spartak Moscow — and arrived in March at a quarter-final against Club Brugge, Belgians of little romance and considerable order. In Flanders on the third of March the order prevailed: 2-0, the goals from le Fevre and Krieger. At San Siro on the seventeenth, before some fifty-five thousand of the faithful, Milan rallied as proud sides do — Bigon from close range, then a Chiarugi free-kick, and for a spell the night believed itself — until Hinderyckx replied for the Belgians, 2-1 on the evening, 3-2 on aggregate, and the stadium emptied like a bath.

One measures a wound by what the side that dealt it does next: Club Brugge marched on to that season's final, where Liverpool beat them. There is no disgrace in falling by a single goal to a side of that calibre. There is only the older, subtler ache — the suspicion that a club governed with the composure of its own midfield would never have needed to rally at all, and that the difference between a quarter-final and a final is rarely talent and nearly always order.

Lo Sciagurato Egidio

Every era is issued the centre-forward it deserves, and this Milan — romantic, declining, run by whichever president had most recently located the keys — was issued Egidio Calloni. Born on the first of December 1952, he was the number nine of the piece, and in 1975-76 he finished the club's top scorer with 13 league goals, 19 in all competitions. Read that sentence again, slowly. Through three presidents and a bench on castors, one young man scored enough to drag a mediocre side to third place in Italy. By every actuarial standard, a hero.

Folklore, however, has filed him under a different heading, and I confess the thumbprint on the file is my own. I called him lo sciagurato Egidio — the wretched Egidio — borrowing the name from a minor sinner in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, and the terraces went further still, christening his spectacular misses le callonate, as though they were a category of weather. For that was the paradox of the man: croce e delizia, cross and delight, the scorer of the goals that kept Milan afloat and the squanderer of chances so open they seemed to have been arranged by the municipality. He would lead the line again in 1976-77 and share the Coppa Italia's top-scorer honours with six goals in a campaign Milan ended by lifting the trophy; across four rossonere seasons he scored 31 goals in 101 league matches — 54 in 143 games once the cups are counted — roughly one every three games.

And yet he is remembered less for the tally than for the ache of the ones that got away, which tells us more about ourselves than about him. We forgive the mediocre everything and the gifted nothing; we count a man's spilled wine and never his harvest. Calloni carried a sick club on a young back through the most misgoverned season in its memory, and his reward was a nickname out of Manzoni. I gave it to him, and I do not entirely repent — literature must eat — but let this chronicle at least set the two columns side by side: the misses that made the legend, and the thirteen goals that made the season.

The Summer They Traded the Engine

Summer brought surgery. Benetti — the captain, the engine — was traded to Juventus, following Trapattoni to Turin as though the club were dismantling itself along the autostrada, and coming the other way in the exchange was Fabio Capello: iron swapped for intelligence, an engine for a metronome, the whole affair concluded in the manner of that era's market, which is to say between the clubs, over the players' heads, with the men themselves consulted about as thoroughly as the luggage — as neat an epitaph for the footballer's condition in those years as the archive offers.

Giorgio Morini arrived from Roma, Giorgio Braglia from Napoli; Luciano Chiarugi, scorer in the Brugge rally, departed for Napoli. And the vacant armband returned to the arm where sentiment had always insisted it belonged: Gianni Rivera, the golden boy, captain once more, with Bigon his deputy and Giuseppe Marchioro appointed to the bench. On paper it read as renewal — a metronome exchanged for an engine, an elder statesman restored, a new tactician installed. But paper, in the Milan of 1976, had a way of catching fire.

An Autumn the Colour of Slate

The new season began, in fact, with a whisper of what would eventually redeem it. In the Coppa Italia's opening group, from the end of August into September, Milan beat Catania 2-0, edged Lazio 2-1, drew 1-1 with Atalanta and dismissed Novara 3-0 — and progressed. Nobody in the thinning September light could know that this modest paperwork was the first page of a trophy: the Coppa Italia of 1976-77, which Milan would lift when its final arrived in the summer of 1977, Calloni and Braglia sharing the competition's golden boot at six goals apiece. File the detail away; the winter will need it.

Because the league, from October, turned the colour of slate. Marchioro's Milan beat Perugia 2-1 on the third of October and then forgot, for the remainder of the calendar year, how winning was done: goalless at Sampdoria, goalless with Fiorentina, beaten 3-1 at Napoli, beaten 3-2 at home by Juventus on the seventh of November — Benetti's Juventus now, Trapattoni's Juventus, and the reader may imagine with what serenity San Siro digested that — then 2-2 at Bologna, 1-1 in the derby on the 28th of November, 1-1 at Roma, 2-2 with Genoa, and, as a final indignity before the panettone, defeat 2-1 at Foggia on the nineteenth of December. Milan reached the winter break eleventh, with thirteen points. The season those grey months seeded would finish tenth, on 27 points, with a club-record seventeen draws and only five wins — the fewest of any Milan campaign in Serie A — and would drag old Rocco back to the bench in February 1977; but that reckoning belongs to the next chapter.

Europe, meanwhile, offered gallantry without reward. Dinamo Bucuresti were edged 2-1 on aggregate after a goalless night in Romania; Akademik Sofia were survived 5-4, the 4-3 defeat in Sofia redeemed by a 2-0 at San Siro; and then came Athletic Bilbao, who won 4-1 in the Basque country on the 24th of November and defended the ruins at San Siro, where Milan's 3-1 on the eighth of December fell precisely one goal short — 5-4 on aggregate, out at the round of 16. Bilbao, like Brugge in the spring, marched on to their edition's final. Twice in one calendar year, then, Milan were eliminated from Europe by the eventual finalist — a statistic that is either consolation or condemnation, depending on the hour of the night at which one considers it.

Verdict in the Fog

How, then, to file 1976? As a hinge, I think — the sort of year historians skip and novelists linger over. It was Rocco's twilight and Rivera's autumn; it was the year Trapattoni was let go and Capello was brought in, the year the armband passed from iron to gold; the year three presidents sat in one chair and the chair itself seemed the only fixed point. Milan ended it eleventh in the table and poisoned in the air, three years short of a star and four short of a scandal, holding unrecognised in its hands the group-stage stub of the first trophy this muddled age would actually win.

The verdict is this: a city can survive poisoned air, and did; a club can survive poisoned governance, and — narrowly — would. What neither can survive indefinitely is the poisoning of patience, and 1976 was above all the year Milan's patience was tested: by boardrooms with revolving doors, by a wretched and wonderful number nine, by draws that fell like drizzle off the Alps beyond the Madonnina. The fog would lift; it always does over Lombardy, usually around March. But those who stood in it that year, on the terraces and in the tribune, earned the right to say ever afterward that they had loved the Diavolo when loving him was an act of pure, unreasonable faith — which is, of course, the only kind worth writing down.