The Year of Janus

The Year of Janus

The Romans, who understood doorways better than any people before or since, gave the first month of the year to Janus, the god with two faces, one turned toward what has been and one toward what is coming; and if ever a football year deserved his patronage it was Milan's 1981, which began in the unfamiliar mud of Serie B — the first Serie B in the club's whole history, the wages of Totonero — and climbed out of it by June at the first attempt, only to spend its autumn opening a Serie A campaign that would end, the following May, in a second relegation. Between the two faces sat a single summer, brief as a Lombard thaw, in which everything seemed possible and almost nothing was done well.

To understand the shame you must first measure the stage. Serie A in 1981 was the richest league on earth, and Italy itself stood one year short of the World Cup it would win the following summer; the peninsula was tuning its orchestra for a triumph, and Milan — Milan of the fog and the Navigli — soon to be twice relegated within three years — sat in the cheap seats. The city went on making money and risotto as it always has, the Madonnina went on glinting when the fog permitted, and the red-and-black half of Milan spent its winter learning the geography of Taranto and Rimini, towns that had never before had June business with the Diavolo.

Spring in Purgatory

Purgatory had at least been furnished with serious men. Massimo Giacomini sat on the bench; Gaetano Morazzoni sat in the president's chair — a placeholder, in truth, for Felice Colombo, banned by the Totonero verdict yet still holding his majority stake, an arrangement with all the elegance of a man forbidden to enter his own restaurant who goes on writing the menu from the pavement. Aldo Maldera wore the armband. Around them stood a squad remade by necessity: Bigon and Chiodi sold to Lazio, Capello retired hurt, Albertosi banned; in their places came Tassotti from Lazio, the goalkeeper Piotti from Avellino, Cuoghi from Modena — and among them, already, the boy Franco Baresi, of whom more, and sadder, later.

The spring told its story in instalments. Taranto were dismantled 4-0 at San Siro on 10 May; Cesena held Milan goalless a week later; Pisa, impertinently, came to Milan on 24 May and won 1-0; Lazio took a point at the end of the month, and at Rimini on 7 June the sides shared four goals under the Adriatic sun. Roberto Antonelli's fifteen goals had carried the season on their back; Ruben Buriani's forty-two appearances had stitched it together thread by thread. And on 14 June, against a Monza already condemned to drop, a single goal at San Siro made the arithmetic safe: Milan were going home.

Whereupon, this being Milan in the early eighties, even the going home was botched. Giacomini, who had steered thirty-seven of the thirty-eight matches, resigned in mid-June over disagreements with the board; Italo Galbiati was handed the final afternoon, and Milan lost it, 1-0 at Pescara's Stadio Adriatico on 21 June — champions all the same, with 50 points from eighteen wins, fourteen draws and six defeats, forty-nine scored against twenty-nine conceded, two points clear of Genoa and Cesena, who came up alongside them. Even the title of purgatory, you notice, was collected with a defeat and a resignation. The gods of that era had a taste for finishing every dish with vinegar.

A Ghost in Rossonero

Two days after Monza, San Siro hosted a vision. On 16 June, in the Mundialito per club staged for the cameras of Silvio Berlusconi's Canale 5, Johan Cruyff — thirty-four years old and fresh from a season with the Washington Diplomats — pulled the red-and-black shirt over his head and wore it for forty-five minutes against Feyenoord. The match finished 0-0 and the Dutchman touched few balls and left no mark on it, giving way to Francesco Romano at the interval while the Guerin Sportivo sharpened the question of whether Cruyff was finished; and yet the evening said more about the future than any scoreline of the year, for it put together in one frame the two forces that would define the decade to come: the greatest imagination in European football, and the television money that would one day buy the club outright.

Berlusconi would not buy Milan for another five years, but his instinct for spectacle was already circling the place like gulls over the Darsena; Colombo, meanwhile, was living out his last months as owner, and in January 1982 the club would pass to Giuseppe Farina. The summer market was conducted in the same key of almost: Milan tried for Cruyff and failed, tried for Zico and failed, and settled instead for Joe Jordan of Manchester United, Adelio Moro from Ascoli and Dario Dona from Varese, with Maurizio Venturi following from Brescia once the autumn had set in. To the bench came Luigi Radice, a Milan player of the fifties and sixties fresh from rescuing Bologna, a serious man handed an improvised instrument. The mood in the city was euphoric, and euphoria, as every innkeeper on the Navigli knows, is simply the interval before the bill.

Lo Squalo

Of all the purchases, one at least was unforgettable. In July Milan paid Manchester United 700 million lire for Joe Jordan, twenty-nine years old, with 500 million more promised to the player across a two-year contract; a thousand supporters met him at Linate beneath a banner reading 'Welcome, Big Joe', and at his first press conference the granite Scot announced, in substance, that he had few teeth left but enough of them to bite Inter. Milan surrendered to him on the spot, and has never entirely taken the surrender back.

The nickname followed the dentistry. Lo Squalo — the Shark — was born of the two upper incisors Jordan had lost in his early Leeds years, a boot to the mouth as he went down to head a low ball; off the pitch he wore a prosthetic like any respectable citizen, and before matches he pulled it out, so that the snarl, the long hair and the heavy frame composed together something genuinely oceanic. In a pre-season romp over Asiago on 30 July, won fourteen-nil, he needed only ten minutes to score his first two goals in rossonero, and for a few warm weeks Milan permitted itself to dream of a September of goals.

September had other plans. His official debut came in the Coppa Italia against Verona on 23 August, a 2-0 defeat on the neutral grass of Mantua; his Serie A debut at Udine on 13 September ended goalless; his first league goal did not arrive until the 1-1 with Como in November. Two goals in twenty-two league matches would be the season's cruel ledger — and yet the Curva adored him, because he never once stopped running, and to a support that had lately been lied to by cleverer men, honest running is a kind of poetry. When the season failed him, the ultras answered with a banner of their own, declaring that the Shark still bit for them. They were right, as it happens; but his redemption belonged to another Serie B, the promotion year of 1982-83, and that is a story for a later chapter.

The Autumn of Zeros

The alarm had rung before the league even began. In the Coppa Italia's opening group, played out across late August and the first days of September, Milan lost 2-0 to Verona, thrashed Pescara 5-0, edged SPAL 1-0 and drew 2-2 with Inter — and finished third, a single point behind Inter and Verona, eliminated before the championship's first Sunday. An exit before the season proper is the kind of result that fools nobody except the man who drafts the press release.

Then the league arrived, and with it the zeros. Goalless at Udine on 13 September; goalless with Fiorentina a week later; one single, precious win at Napoli on 27 September — and then the ledger darkened: beaten 1-0 at home by Juventus on 4 October, goalless at Bologna, beaten 1-0 in the derby by Inter on 25 October, humiliated 3-0 at Catanzaro on the first of November. The 1-1 with Como on 8 November brought Jordan's goal and no comfort; Ascoli won 1-0; a point was salvaged at Roma; Genoa left San Siro with a goalless draw on 13 December, and Avellino won 2-0 on the 20th to close the calendar. By late November Milan lay last in Serie A, with six points from nine matches and — here is the figure that condemned an entire summer's planning — two goals scored. Not two a game: two, strung across an autumn like the beads of a very short rosary.

For consolation there was the Mitropa Cup, a venerable old competition now peopled by second-tier and provincial sides, which Milan entered rather as a nobleman takes lunch at a railway buffet. Haladas were beaten 2-0 at San Siro on 4 November; Osijek held Milan 1-1 in Yugoslavia on 25 November; and in the fullness of time — 12 May 1982, Vitkovice beaten 3-0 at San Siro — the thing would actually be won, the lone trophy of the whole grey era. History keeps its ironies well sharpened, and this is among the tartest: the club of the European Cups spending a winter polishing Mitteleuropa's silver.

The Boy Who Grew Thin

And at the centre of the collapse sat a mystery crueller than mere form. In early October, around the Juventus match, Franco Baresi — twenty-one years old, the libero on whom any serious Milanese future had to be built — fell ill. He lost weight, visibly and alarmingly; he was sent from examination to examination; and the position he vacated, which is not a position at all but a way of thinking, could not be filled by purchase or promotion, because in all of Italy there was no second Baresi and there never would be.

What exactly ailed him remains, in the tellings, a fog worthy of the city itself: English accounts speak of a rare blood disease, while the Italian narratives describe a mysterious wasting, tests that at least ruled out the incurable, and corridor speculation that ran from pubalgia all the way to the whispered end of a career. What is beyond dispute is the absence — some three and a half months of it — and the sight of a defence that had learned to think through him being suddenly obliged to think for itself, with the results tabulated above. He returned in the new year, too late to stop the slide. The moral is older than football and Milan kept learning it the hard way: build your house upon one young man's health, and you have built it upon the weather.

The Distant Faithful

It is worth pausing on what following the Diavolo from abroad meant in 1981: no satellite feed, no highlights with breakfast, only results arriving days late in the agate type of the sports pages and letters from cousins in Lombardy that took a fortnight to say what the heart already feared. For the emigrant milanista, the Serie B title mattered twice over — once as a result, and once as proof, carried across two oceans, that the fall of 1980 was not final. They could not know that a second fall was already being prepared; distance, for one merciful summer, let them enjoy the promotion neat, without the vinegar.

A Verdict in the Fog

So how should 1981 be judged? Generously, first: the club won the only competition it absolutely had to win, at the first attempt, by honest graft — fifty points of it — and gave its people back their top-flight Sundays. Then honestly: the summer that followed was improvised where it needed to be designed; a shark was bought when the team wanted for a brain; a serious coach inherited a squad whose one irreplaceable player fell mysteriously ill in October; and after nine rounds the champions of Serie B stood last in Serie A with two league goals to their name and a cup exit already filed before the season proper had begun.

January 1982 would bring Farina; May would bring the second relegation; and further off, invisible from the December fog, waited the television magnate whose cameras had already borrowed San Siro for one June evening of Cruyff. 1981, in the end, was Janus honest to both his faces: it opened the door out of purgatory and, with the same hand, propped open the door leading back in. The lesson it left behind — that promotion is a result, but resurrection is a project — would take the club the better part of a decade to learn; and like every true Milanese lesson it would be learned in the fog, at considerable expense, and remembered forever.