Two Farewells and a Fourth Cup

Fog on the Navigli, Lead in the Air

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like bailiffs, and 1977 came to Milan with papers to serve. The city that once perfumed its winters with roast chestnuts and its springs with scudetto arithmetic 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, and the terrorists of both extremes filled the newspapers with worse. Milan, the most industrious of Italian cities and therefore the most fiercely contested, carried its unrest the way it carries the fog off the Navigli — everywhere, into everything, into the lungs — and a man walking to San Siro that winter did so with his collar up and his eyes down.

Through that fog 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 grown grey 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 the season's final ledger would read like an actuary's confession rather than a sporting record. What follows is the story of 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.

The Arithmetic of Anxiety

Consider the numbers of that 1976-77 championship as you would consider a risotto stirred for three hours and never served: 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. 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 the arithmetic turns actuarial. 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, the patriarch who had built the great European Milan of the sixties and who now returned, older and wiser, not to conquer a continent 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 furniture in a burning decade. Fabio Capello had arrived from Juventus for 1976-77 with Romeo Benetti travelling the opposite road — a prisoner exchange between rival duchies — while Giorgio Morini came from Roma, Giorgio Braglia from Napoli, Massimo Silva from Ascoli, and Luciano Chiarugi took his dribbles south to Naples. Up front laboured Egidio Calloni, whom Gianni Brera had cruelly baptised lo sciagurato Egidio — the hapless 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 statistic that measures, with cruel precision, exactly where the goals were not.

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, letting the past prosecute the present without a word of commentary required. A city that could no longer safely fill its piazzas had filled San Siro instead, and been given ninety minutes of mutual apology.

History, which loves an irony the way Lombardy loves butter, appended a footnote: 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 — shared a league stage for the final time in a match with nothing in it whatsoever. The gods of the calendar have a sense of humour, though on that afternoon nobody in Milan was laughing.

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 made it, in a year like that one, all the sweeter.

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, now 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.

New Hands, Old Ghosts

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. History obliges the chronicler to note, with a shiver he cannot suppress, 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: the hand that took the wheel that May would later 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.

Seville Teaches a Lesson

Europe, it must be said, had already shut one door before the year began: the UEFA Cup campaign of 1976-77 had ended in the round of sixteen against Athletic Bilbao — a 4-1 beating away that a 3-1 win at San Siro could not repair — and those ties fell in late 1976, 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. Call it the first round or the round of thirty-two — the almanacs quarrel over the label while agreeing entirely on the pain. 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.

An Autumn at the Summit

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 carried off the silverware. 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. The campaign would eventually settle at fourth place, with thirty-seven points and a ticket to the following season's UEFA Cup — but that is the next chapter's business. 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 business — and a city that had spent twelve months reading of bullets could spend New Year's Eve reading a league table that finally made sense.

One word, since this chronicle is written under southern stars, for the milanisti of Australia: no rossonero boot had yet touched their continent in 1977, though the wait was shorter than anyone knew — the tour of May and June 1980 that would carry the Diavolo to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth was only three years off — and so whoever loved Milan under the Southern Cross that year followed the fourth cup and the autumn summit as exiles follow everything: at a distance measured in oceans and time zones, loving the club more, not less, for the impossibility of seeing it.

The Verdict

Weigh the year, then, as the fog weighs on the Navigli — evenly, on everything. It began with a great club three points from the trapdoor, playing seventeen handshakes in thirty matches; it produced, in a single July night, a fourth Coppa Italia, the last bow of Nereo Rocco and the last steps of Sandro Mazzola; it changed presidents in May, appointing without knowing it the author of a future disgrace; it was schooled in Seville; and it ended with a Swedish baron restoring elegance, a derby won as guests in their own house, and first place in Serie A while Italy's year of lead burned itself out in the streets. Not a great year, 1977, but a hinge: the door of the miserable mid-seventies beginning, at last, to swing. The city had lead in its air; the club, for the first time in years, had spring in its step — and if history was already writing, in the new president's ledger, a bill that would one day come due, the fog was kind enough, that December, to hide it.