Seventeen Handshakes and a Cup in July

Tear Gas and Television Aerials

Collar up, eyes down: that is how a man walked to San Siro in the winter of 1977. The city that had once perfumed its winters with roast chestnuts and its springs with the smell of a title race now smelled of tear gas and burnt newsprint. The anni di piombo — the years of lead — had reached their fever; the Movement of 1977 filled the piazzas with students and striking workers, whose placards the terrorists of both extremes would shoulder off the front pages with worse. Milan, the most industrious of Italian cities and therefore the most fiercely contested, argued with itself all that year, and on every roof of every block the television aerials stood in ranks, waiting for the evening news to say what had happened this time.

Through those months stumbled a football club which had mislaid its greatness the way a distracted uncle mislays his spectacles: certain they exist, certain they are somewhere in the house, patting every pocket with mounting alarm. This was still the Milan of Gianni Rivera, captain and Golden Boy, greying in service; still the club that had ruled Europe within easy living memory; and yet it entered 1977 playing a football so cautious, so constipated by fear, that a man might have read the Monday table with a magnifying glass and found no evidence Milan had played at all. What follows is how a wretched winter turned, by July, into a trophy and two immortal farewells — and, by December, into the view from the top of the table.

A Lock on an Empty Cupboard

The numbers of that 1976-77 championship are best set down cold: thirty matches, five victories, seventeen draws, eight defeats; thirty goals scored, thirty-three conceded; twenty-seven points and tenth place, a mere three points above the trapdoor to Serie B. Seventeen draws in thirty — more than half a season spent shaking hands, and a club record at that; the five victories, for their part, are the fewest of any Milan campaign in Serie A. The defensive science of the great years had at least been a lock with treasure behind it; this was a lock on an empty cupboard, defended with the desperation of men who suspected as much.

The bench changed hands in midwinter, as benches do when a great club begins counting downwards. Giuseppe Marchioro carried the side until the sixth of February 1977; from the seventh, the club summoned the one man whose very silhouette promised safety. Nereo Rocco, the old Paron who had built the great European Milan of the sixties, came back older and wiser — not to conquer a continent this time, but to keep a great house from sliding into the river. He did precisely that, and then, as we shall see, he did one thing more.

The squad itself told the story of a club rearranging its furniture in a burning decade: the previous summer's traffic, Fabio Capello arriving as Romeo Benetti left, was set down in the preceding chapter, and to that list the season added only Massimo Silva, brought up from Ascoli. Up front laboured Egidio Calloni, whom Brera had cruelly baptised lo sciagurato Egidio — the wretched Egidio — and who finished as the club's top scorer with fifteen goals in all competitions, of which only five arrived in the league: a figure that measures, with cruel precision, exactly where the goals were not. Six of the others came in the Coppa Italia, enough to share that competition's top-scorer honours with Giorgio Braglia.

Derbycidio

On the twenty-seventh of March 1977, Milan and Inter contrived between them a goalless draw of such studied sterility that it earned a word of its own. Beppe Viola, the television chronicler of Milanese football, pronounced it a derbycidio — the murder of a derby — and on La Domenica Sportiva he performed the most elegant act of criticism the medium has known: rather than dwell on the match, he aired footage of the 1963 derby instead, and let the past prosecute the present without a word of commentary required. A city that could no longer safely fill its piazzas had packed the concrete terraces of San Siro instead, and been given ninety minutes of mutual apology.

History added a footnote of its own. This dreary nil-nil was the last championship derby to feature both Sandro Mazzola and Gianni Rivera on the same pitch — the two poles of Italian football's longest argument, the question that had divided dinner tables for a decade and more, sharing a league stage for the final time in a match with nothing whatever in it. The fixture list had arranged that without being asked, and on that afternoon nobody in Milan found it funny.

The Third of July

And yet the same fixture, replayed three months later with a cup on the table, produced one of the tenderest nights in the club's long memory. On the third of July 1977, at San Siro, Milan and Inter met in the final of the Coppa Italia — the only final of that competition the two Milanese clubs had ever contested between themselves to that point — and Milan won it 2-0, both goals in the second half, Aldo Maldera striking in the sixty-fourth minute and Giorgio Braglia in the eighty-ninth. It was the club's fourth Coppa Italia, joining those of 1967, 1972 and 1973 in the cabinet, and it was won not by princes but by honest tradesmen, which in a year like that one made it sweeter still.

But the scoreboard was the least of the evening. On the Milan bench sat Nereo Rocco for the last time: the Paron, recalled in February to steady a mediocre side, signing off his life's work at the club by beating Inter, with a trophy for punctuation — a full stop written in silver. And across the pitch the night claimed its second farewell, for this was also the last match of Sandro Mazzola's playing career, and the Inter captain is remembered as taking his leave of the game by quoting Dante's Divine Comedy: a Milanese derby ending, fittingly, somewhere between inferno and paradiso.

The Paron would be dead within two years — February 1979 — and so the third of July 1977 stands in the club's memory the way a last family photograph stands on a sideboard: everyone smiling, nobody knowing. The goals belonged to Maldera and Braglia; the night belonged to the two departing giants; and the cup, at least, belonged to Milan.

The Hand That Took the Wheel

Institutionally the year was a relay race run in dark corridors. Vittorio Duina surrendered the presidency on the twenty-ninth of May 1977, and from the thirtieth the club belonged to Felice Colombo. It must be noted here, with a shiver that cannot be suppressed, that this same Colombo would become the central figure of the Totonero betting scandal of 1980, the affair that would send Milan down to Serie B in disgrace; but in the spring of 1977 nobody knew, and it would be a poor historian who convicted a man three years before his offence. Let the record simply show that the hand which took the wheel that May would one day steer the ship onto the rocks.

The happier appointment came in the summer. For 1977-78 the bench passed to Nils Liedholm, and this was less a hiring than a homecoming: the Swede had worn the shirt from 1949 to 1961, had first taken the Milan bench in the mid-sixties, and now returned with that unhurried baronial calm of his — the manner of a man who has never once been seen to run for a tram, because the tram, sensing rank, waits. The market gave him Ruben Buriani and Roberto Antonelli, both plucked from Monza, while Giorgio Braglia — scorer in July's final, such is football's gratitude — would be sold on to Foggia once the autumn window opened. Rivera remained captain, with Alberto Bigon his lieutenant, and the old house began, cautiously, to air its rooms.

One Round in Andalusia

Europe, it must be said, had already shut one door before the year began: the Bilbao exit already recorded in the previous chapter closed the UEFA Cup campaign of 1976-77, and those ties fell in the last weeks of that calendar year, so 1977 opened with Milan locked out of the continent entirely. Only July's cup bought a new key.

That key opened the Cup Winners' Cup, and the Cup Winners' Cup lasted precisely one round — the first round, or the round of thirty-two if you prefer the newer name for it. On the fourteenth of September 1977, at the Benito Villamarín in Seville, Real Betis won 2-0, García Soriano striking in the thirteenth minute and Eulate in the seventy-third; a fortnight later, on the twenty-eighth, San Siro roused itself for the recovery and managed two-thirds of one, Ugo Tosetto and Fabio Capello scoring against a reply from López — 2-1 on the night, 2-3 on aggregate, and out. Andalusia had taught Lombardy that a cup won in July confers a passport, not an exemption.

Ten Unbeaten, and a Derby Won as Guests

But the league — the league was another country. Liedholm's Milan opened 1977-78 with ten matches unbeaten, six victories and four draws, and rose on that tide to first place in Serie A: an altitude the club had not breathed in what felt, after the suffocations of the previous winter, like a geological age. The early weeks were all patience — 1-1 with Fiorentina on the eleventh of September, 2-2 with Genoa a week later, 1-1 with Juventus on the twenty-fifth — before the victories began arriving like courses at a long Lombard lunch: 3-1 over Vicenza at the start of October, 2-1 over Roma, 2-0 over Foggia.

Then, on the sixth of November 1977, the derby — and this time no derbycidio but a 3-1 Milan victory, taken while top of the table and taken, by the small comedy of the fixture list, as the nominal away side in their own San Siro: guests in their own dining room, and they still ate first. November added a 1-0 over Bologna and a 2-0 over Pescara; December offered a 2-2 with Perugia, a 0-1 defeat to Torino on the eighteenth, and a 1-1 with Atalanta on the very last day of the year. Where that campaign finally came to rest is a reckoning the following year's chapter will keep. What matters here is that 1977 closed with Milan at the top of the table, Juventus clawing level on points only on the year's very last afternoon, the overtaking itself still a January matter.

New Year's Eve

This is what 1977 handed over at the door. A club three points above the trapdoor, and top of the table by December. Seventeen handshakes in thirty matches, and one night in July worth the other twenty-nine. A fourth Coppa Italia taken off the neighbours. The last time Nereo Rocco ever sat on the Milan bench, and the last match of Sandro Mazzola's career. A president installed in the spring whose name the club would one day learn to say quietly. A schooling in Seville. A Swede on the bench with the patience of a man the trams wait for. And a derby won 3-1 by the nominal visitors in their own house.

Not a great year, 1977. A hinge: the door of the miserable mid-seventies beginning, at last, to swing. Italy's year of lead burned itself out in the streets, and on the thirty-first of December the rooftops stood cold and still above a city that had spent twelve months reading about bullets — and that would open its papers in the new year to find, at the top of Serie A, the name of its own oldest club.