Six Years, Ended in the Air

The City Drank; the Club Sipped

La Milano da bere — the Milan you could drink. The decade had coined the phrase for itself, and in 1984 the city wore it without a blush: silk ties, aperitivi at six, money moving faster than anybody thought to ask about. Italy held the world championship, won in Spain two summers before. Serie A, its doors newly reopened in full to the foreign virtuosi, was the richest league on earth, the theatre of which every great footballer dreamed. And in the middle of that long feast the Associazione Calcio Milan sat with its glass barely touched, like a man who knows the doctor is somewhere in the room.

The convalescence was real, and the wounds were shameful, which is worse than painful. The Totonero scandal of 1980 — a catastrophe conducted in the small handwriting of betting slips — had put the club into Serie B; the bounce-back had been followed, with a cruelty only a football calendar can arrange, by a second relegation in 1982; and now, under president Giuseppe Farina, the Diavolo was learning to hold itself upright in mid-table the way an invalid learns to stand between parallel bars, grateful for the support and humiliated by needing it. A club can be upright and still not be walking. Nobody at San Siro spoke of scudetti that January. They spoke of dignity, which is the word clubs reach for when they have lately had none.

A calendar year, for a football club, is a creature with two heads. From January to May, 1984 was the tail of the 1983-84 championship, the first campaign back among the elect after the Serie B penance; from September to December it was the opening movement of 1984-85, under a coach whose name we shall come to with the reverence it has earned. Both halves were played on the same concrete terraces of San Siro, in front of the same patient, wounded, unreasonably faithful crowd.

A Slow Train, and a Coach Already Gone

Milan drew its matches that winter the way a slow train takes a plain: correctly, at length, and without ever quite arriving. It began at San Siro on 8 January with a 3-3 against Zico's Udinese that spent goals like a sailor on shore leave, and a week later Avellino were beaten 1-0 at San Siro — a win, an actual win — before the procession resumed: 1-1 at Verona, 1-1 with Roma, 1-1 at Catania. Twelve draws the season would count by its close. On the terraces the scarves went up the way a picket line raises its placards, more from stubbornness than from hope, and by half past four everybody knew the shape of the afternoon.

The exception was administered on 19 February, when Juventus came to San Siro and won 3-0 — the champions-elect giving a lesson in the difference between recovering and having recovered. Those Juventini would clinch their twenty-first scudetto on 6 May with a 1-1 draw at Avellino, ahead of Roma; Milan watched the summit from the foothills and took up the procession again: 1-1 at Sampdoria, 0-0 at Lazio, and on 18 March a spring derby with Inter that finished 0-0 and which both halves of the city have since agreed to forget. A 2-2 at Fiorentina followed, as if to sign the season's name to it.

By then the bench had changed its tenant. In March it emerged that Ilario Castagner, who had steered the first twenty-four rounds, had agreed to join Inter for the following season — and Farina, whatever else may be said of him, was not a man to keep a departing guest at the head of his table. Castagner was dismissed. His assistant Italo Galbiati inherited the final six rounds and, with them, an April of penance: 0-2 at home to Napoli on the first of the month, 0-2 at Genoa a fortnight later, a goalless afternoon with Ascoli, a 2-1 defeat at Torino. May offered one small mercy — Pisa beaten 2-1 at San Siro on the sixth, of which more shortly — before the season closed at Udine on the thirteenth, 2-1 to Milan against the same opponent it had opened against, and for once the right result.

Ten wins, twelve draws, eight defeats; thirty-seven scored, forty conceded; thirty-two points, dead level with Sampdoria and Hellas Verona. Sixth, if the tied trio are separated by their meetings with one another, which is how the league then did it; eighth, if they are separated by goals. Both figures are printed, and both describe the same lukewarm season. The top scorer was Oscar Damiani, the veteran who had already dragged the club up out of Serie B, with seven league goals and eleven in all competitions, the other four struck in the cup: an honest artisan's harvest in a year that starved its artists. The Coppa Italia supplied a last characteristic wound — a quarter-final against Roma, 1-1 in the capital, then 1-2 at San Siro with the decisive goal arriving in extra time, so that even the elimination was administered in instalments. Below Milan, Genoa, Pisa and Catania went down through the trapdoor the rossoneri had twice fallen through themselves.

Five Goals, and a Borrowed Name

The million-pound Englishman, then, whose signature the previous chapter recorded and whose comedy it left to this one: reigning top scorer of the English First Division with twenty-seven goals, a forward of generous heart and headlong running. The fee was not madness, and Castagner made the classic coach's promise: 'Once he starts to score he won't stop'. In the overture the prophecy held: Blissett struck around nine goals in five early matches across the pre-season and the Coppa Italia, and San Siro permitted itself a smile.

Then Serie A began and the music stopped. Five league goals in thirty appearances, and that was the whole of it. Milan's football that year was patient, possession-minded, defensively organised, a game of short steps and half-turns; Blissett was built for the open English gallop and needed the pitch longer than Italy would ever allow it to be. He was never a fraud, only an honest workman set down in the most suspicious defensive culture on earth, at a club still relearning the top flight after Serie B: the distance between an English penalty area and an Italian one, in 1983, was wider than the distance between Watford and Milano. Starved of space he began to miss, and the misses became folklore: a penalty sent clean over the San Siro bar, a failure from close range in the derby against Inter, and a crop of mocking Italian nicknames that stuck to him like burrs to a wool coat. Out of the struggle the terraces distilled a legend of their own — that Milan had bought the wrong man, that they had meant to sign his Watford teammate John Barnes and had confused the paperwork. The evidence calls the tale apocryphal, and it should be printed only as what it is: a fable the disappointed tell to make disappointment bearable. Yet cruelty was never the whole story. Livorno's supporters, of all people, hung a banner in his honour — gratitude, as we shall see, for a spring goal against their neighbours Pisa — and Blissett himself supplied the era's most quoted line when he joked that for all the money in Milan a man could not find Rice Krispies in the city; a quip, he would spend years patiently explaining, that had been a joking reply to a silly question, and that followed him more loyally than any defender ever managed.

There was one high note before the end. On 6 May 1984 his winner beat Pisa 2-1 at San Siro — the goal that helped usher Livorno's oldest enemies toward the trapdoor, and earned him that Tuscan banner — a flash of the Watford lightning arriving, as such flashes do, too late to change the weather. That summer Milan sold him back to Watford for about £550,000, little more than half the outlay, a full stop after a single season. Then time performed for him the rehabilitation the penalty area had refused: in retrospect he became a cult hero, remembered with a tenderness the scorelines never showed him. And then the strangest coda in all the club's long book: years afterwards a collective of anarchist writers in Bologna adopted 'Luther Blissett' as a shared pseudonym and published, under his name, the acclaimed novel Q, so that Luther Blissett went on scoring, so to speak, in bookshops long after the boots were hung up. Football forgets its disappointments; literature, capricious goddess, occasionally adopts them. No scudetto-winner of that decade has his name on so many bookshelves.

The Baron, and the Men Farina Bought

Farina understood that a convalescent must eventually be made to run, and in the summer of 1984 he reached for the one man who had already taught this club to dance twice. Nils Liedholm arrived from Roma for his third stint on the rossonero bench, five years after he had delivered the star of 1979 — the Baron, calm as an alpine lake, a Swede the city had long since stopped calling foreign. The appointment was also an announcement: the era of merely surviving was over, and the club intended to remember what it was for.

Around him Farina assembled a squad with the urgency of a man spending against the clock. Pietro Paolo Virdis came from Udinese; Mark Hateley from Portsmouth, all shoulders and spring; Ray Wilkins from Manchester United, a midfielder of cultivated patience; Agostino Di Bartolomei followed his coach north from Roma; and Giuliano Terraneo arrived from Torino to keep the goal. Out went Eric Gerets and Luciano Spinosi, and out — back down the road to Watford — went Blissett; the irony that Milan replaced one Englishman with two was lost on nobody in the city's bars, where such ironies are the small change of conversation.

The armband, through shipwreck and refit alike, stayed where it belonged: on the arm of Franco Baresi, the young captain who had gone down to Serie B with the club and come back up with it, and who now watched the new men arrive with the level gaze of a landlord greeting tenants. Whatever this rebuilt Milan would become, its spine had never left.

The Twenty-Eighth of October

The new Milan cleared its throat in the Coppa Italia in the last days of August: 2-1 at Parma, 1-1 with Brescia, 2-0 at Carrarese, 1-1 with Como, 0-0 at Triestina — seven points, first place in the group, passage secured with the unhurried air of a side rehearsing rather than straining. The run thus begun would carry all the way to the final the following spring, where Sampdoria waited with a heartache that belongs to the next chapter; in the warm September of 1984 it was simply evidence that the machine turned over.

The league opened in the manner the winter had taught — 2-2 with Udinese on 16 September, 0-0 at Fiorentina — before Cremonese were beaten 2-1 at San Siro, and then came a result that read like a certificate of citizenship: 1-1 away to Juventus, a point taken in Turin by a team that two years earlier had been playing in Serie B. Roma, the Baron's old house, were beaten 2-1 at San Siro on 14 October; Napoli held Milan goalless a week later; and so the calendar arrived, with a dramatist's timing, at 28 October.

Derby day at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, and it began in the old key of sorrow: Alessandro Altobelli put Inter ahead in the tenth minute, and six years of derby melancholy prepared to renew their lease. On thirty-three minutes Di Bartolomei — the Roman, in his first Milanese autumn — equalised. Just past the hour, on sixty-three minutes or sixty-four, Mark Hateley rose and headed the winner. Milan 2, Inter 1: the first derby victory in roughly six years, the signature moment of Hateley's debut autumn, and a header that seemed to hang in the October air a beat longer than physics allows, long enough for the terraces to understand what they had been handed.

The comedown came, as comedowns do: 0-2 at Torino a fortnight later, a goalless afternoon at Avellino, a 0-1 home defeat by Sampdoria, 0-0 at Verona, 2-2 with Atalanta — and then the year's last word, spoken at Ascoli on 23 December, turned out to be a kind one after all: 1-0 to Milan, Tassotti arriving in the eighty-eighth minute to carry the points home for Christmas. Milan sat in the upper reaches of the table as 1985 approached. The direction of travel had changed, and in the bars of the city the talk had changed with it.

What the Inventory Missed

Spring would confirm what autumn had promised. What the confirmation came to — the placing, the points, the names at the head of the scorers' column — is the next chapter's to count.

1984 built no monuments. It won nothing, it paraded nothing, and its president was already spending toward the scandal that would end Farina's reign in 1986 — the same season in which a certain Silvio Berlusconi would buy the club and change the scale of everything. What the year did was stop the falling. From the drawn winter of Galbiati's caretaking to the October Sunday when Hateley climbed above six years of sorrow, the club travelled further than any trophy can measure; and the people who came down the concrete steps of the Meazza that evening, out into the last of the light, carried home a thing they had not been able to carry since the betting slips: not triumph, exactly, but its rumour, coming up the stairs.

And just over the rim of the year, a boy of sixteen named Paolo Maldini was ripening out of sight. Through all of 1984 he went unmentioned in a single despatch, unpriced in a market that was buying Englishmen by the pair — the son of a Milanese house, waiting in a queue nobody had thought to number. What the following year would ask of him, and what he would make of the asking, belongs to the following year's chapter. The inventory missed him.