Not Triumph, but Its Rumour

The City Drank; the Club Sipped

There are years that arrive with trumpets and years that arrive leaning on a stick, and 1984 came to Milanello using the second kind of entrance. The city beyond the gates had never been louder. This was la Milano da bere, the Milan you could drink, a capital of silk ties and aperitivi where money moved along the Navigli faster than the barges ever had, and where the decade seemed to have been invented specifically so that Milan the city could show it off. Italy wore the crown of world champions, won in Spain two summers before, and 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 the feast sat the Associazione Calcio Milan, sipping carefully, like a man whose doctor is somewhere in the room.

The convalescence was real, and the wounds were shameful, which is worse than painful. The Totonero betting scandal of 1980 had thrown the club into Serie B; a bounce-back had been followed, with a cruelty only the football calendar can arrange, by a second relegation in 1982; and now, under president Giuseppe Farina, the Diavolo was learning to stand in mid-table the way an invalid learns to stand between parallel bars — grateful for the support, humiliated by the need for it. Nobody at San Siro spoke of scudetti that January. They spoke of dignity, which is the currency of clubs that have recently had none to spend.

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, Milan's 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 beneath the same low Lombard sky, at the same San Siro, before the same patient, wounded, endlessly faithful crowd.

A Winter Painted in Half-Tints

The winter Milan of 1984 drew football matches the way the fog draws the outline of the Madonnina: softly, persistently, never quite finishing the job. The year began at Udine on 8 January with a 3-3 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 — but then came the grey procession: 1-1 at Verona, 1-1 with Roma, 1-1 at Catania. Twelve draws the season would count by its close, and most of them tasted of the same risotto reheated.

The exception was administered on 19 February, when Juventus came to San Siro and won 3-0 — the champions-elect delivering 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 could only watch the summit from the foothills and resume the procession: 1-1 at Sampdoria, 0-0 at Lazio, and on 18 March a spring derby with Inter that finished 0-0 and which history has agreed, by mutual consent of both halves of the city, to forget. A 2-2 at Fiorentina followed, as if to confirm the season's signature.

By then the bench had changed its tenant. In March it emerged that Ilario Castagner, the coach who had steered the first twenty-four rounds, had agreed to join Inter for the following season — and Farina, whatever his other failings, 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 inherited 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 as it had opened, at Udine, this time a 1-2.

The final ledger read ten wins, twelve draws, eight defeats; thirty-seven scored, forty conceded; thirty-two points, dead level with Sampdoria and Hellas Verona. Sixth, say the reckonings that use the head-to-head arithmetic the league then favoured; eighth, say those that order the tied trio by goals — and there is something fitting in a season so grey that even the record books squint at it. The top scorer was Oscar Damiani, the veteran who had already dragged the club up from Serie B, with seven league goals and eleven in all competitions: an honest artisan's harvest in a year that starved its artists. The Coppa Italia supplied a final, 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 fell through the trapdoor whose hinges the rossoneri knew too intimately.

The Parable of Luther Blissett

Every age of Milan keeps one cautionary tale in its pantry, and the tale of 1983-84 wears the honest face of Luther Blissett. In June 1983 the club had paid Watford around one million pounds for him, and the fee was not madness: he had just finished as the English top flight's leading scorer, twenty-seven goals, a forward of generous heart and headlong running. Castagner made the classic coach's promise — ‘Once he starts to score he won't stop’ — and in the overture the prophecy held, for 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: that is the whole cruel arithmetic. Milan's football that year was patient, possession-minded, defensively organised — a cuisine of slow simmering — and Blissett was a striker built for the open English gallop, a man who needed the dish served fast and steaming. 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. 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 which 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 — half the outlay, a full stop after a single season. And then the strangest coda in all the club's long book: years later a collective of writers in Bologna adopted ‘Luther Blissett’ as a shared pseudonym and published, under his name, the acclaimed novel Q. 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's Third Coming

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 so thoroughly Milanese by adoption that the fog itself seemed to part for him out of professional courtesy. His return was more than an appointment; it was a declaration that the era of merely surviving was over, and that 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.

October, and the Madonnina Smiles

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 old half-tint manner — 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. But on thirty-three minutes Di Bartolomei — the Roman, playing his first autumn beneath the Madonnina — equalised, and just past the hour Mark Hateley rose and headed the winner. The chroniclers still quarrel over whether the clock said 63 or 64, and the very pettiness of the dispute measures the size of the moment: nobody litigates the minute of a goal that does not matter. 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 those below it, to hang in the October air like a verdict being read out.

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. The table agreed: Milan sat in the upper reaches as 1985 approached. The direction of travel had changed, and everyone in the city could feel it, the way one feels the fog beginning, imperceptibly, to thin.

The Verdict of December

Spring would confirm what autumn had promised: fifth place, thirty-six points, and a ticket back to Europe through the 1985-86 UEFA Cup — modest words, unless you had spent the early decade watching this club fall down stairs. Virdis finished that campaign as leading scorer with nine league goals and thirteen in all competitions, ahead of Hateley with seven and eight, Di Bartolomei with six and nine, and Sergio Battistini with five and eight: a harvest shared among many hands, which is how the Baron always preferred his harvests.

And just over the rim of the year, on 20 January 1985 at Udine, a boy of sixteen named Paolo Maldini would step onto a Serie A pitch for the first time. He ripened out of sight through all of 1984, the greatest fruit of the rebuild, unmentioned in the season's despatches — and history loves nothing better than the treasure the inventory missed.

Let the verdict be plain. The year 1984 built no monuments: it won nothing, it paraded nothing, and its president, Farina, was already overspending toward the scandal that would end his reign in 1986, in the same season that a certain Silvio Berlusconi would buy the club and change the scale of everything. But 1984 was the hinge on which the door of the Long Decade turned — the year Milan stopped falling. From the drawn, foggy winter of Galbiati's caretaking to the October Sunday when Hateley climbed above the past, the club travelled further than any trophy could measure. And in every place where the rossoneri kept their vigil — along the Navigli, and far beyond, wherever the world's clocks make loyalty expensive — the faithful went to bed after the derby with a feeling they had almost forgotten: not triumph, exactly, but its rumour, coming up the stairs.