The Boy in the Fog

Fog on the Navigli

There are years that announce themselves with trumpets and years that arrive like the fog off the Navigli, sliding under the doors of the bars, settling on the shoulders of men waiting for trams, and 1985 came to Milan in the second manner: quietly, greyly, with the Madonnina barely visible above a city that was making money hand over fist everywhere except, it seemed, at its oldest and proudest football club. This was Craxi's Italy, an Italy of new suits and louder television, sure of itself in the way a man is sure of himself just before the bill arrives; and it was Farina's Milan, a great house in reduced circumstances, still paying in instalments of dignity for the sins of the Totonero years, and living — though nobody in the fog could have told you so — through the last full calendar year of its old regime.

The team was administered, like a trust held for absent heirs, by Nils Liedholm, the old Swede returned for his third spell in the Milanese dugout, a man who treated a football match the way a Lombard cook treats risotto: no hurry, constant stirring, and the serene certainty that whatever the fashion of the moment, patience is the one ingredient that cannot be substituted. The armband belonged to Franco Baresi, the young lord of the last line, who captained this mid-table Milan with the bearing of a man guarding an empire that existed, for the moment, chiefly in the memory. Between them they kept upright a club that its own balance sheet was quietly trying to pull down.

The Boy at Udine

On the twentieth of January, in the icy quiet of a mid-table away day at Udinese, Sergio Battistini felt something give and looked to the bench, and Liedholm — who had forgotten more football than most men ever learn — turned to a boy of sixteen and sent him into a Serie A match as casually as a father sends a son to the cellar for another bottle. The boy's name was Paolo Maldini. The match finished 1-1, which is the kind of scoreline Udine in January deserves; it was his only league appearance of the whole 1984-85 campaign; and no trumpet sounded, because the fog does not announce what it is carrying.

He was, of course, the son of the house — the boy of Cesare Maldini, Milan captain turned Milan coach, footballing aristocracy of the sort that cannot be bought, only bred. And when the new season opened in the autumn, Liedholm did not file the January cameo away as a curiosity: he installed the boy at right-back in the starting eleven and handed him the number 3 shirt his father had once worn, which at a club like Milan is not a squad number but a deed of inheritance. Twenty-five seasons would flow from that afternoon in Udine. The quietest debut of the grey years turned out to be the beating heart of everything that followed.

Fifth, and Ahead of Juventus

The spring accounts of 1984-85, when they were finally totted up, read like the ledger of a prudent notary: twelve wins, twelve draws, six defeats; thirty-one goals scored and twenty-five allowed; thirty-six points and fifth place in a sixteen-team league of thirty rounds. It was not poetry, but it was solvency of a footballing kind, and in that particular season solvency wore a strange glamour, because the scudetto went to none of the great courts but to Hellas Verona — the provinces risen, the map of calcio redrawn for a year by the unfashionable. Milan watched the coronation from mid-table like an old duke at a merchant's wedding, applauding correctly and feeling the floor shift beneath the parquet.

There was one satisfaction, and Milanese satisfaction, being Lombard, is dry: Milan finished level on thirty-six points with Juventus and were placed ahead of them on the head-to-head — a 3-2 victory and a 1-1 draw across the two meetings — which is the sort of small arithmetical revenge a diminished aristocracy learns to savour like the last of the good wine. The goals had come from Pietro Paolo Virdis, the Sardinian huntsman, nine in the league and thirteen in all competitions; from Mark Hateley, the Englishman, seven; and from Agostino Di Bartolomei, the grave Roman brought from Roma the summer before, six from midfield. And fifth place carried a passport: Milan would return to Europe in the autumn, in the UEFA Cup, for better and for worse.

Brussels

But no honest chronicle of 1985 may pass from spring to summer without stopping, hat in hand, at the twenty-ninth of May. In Brussels that evening, at the Heysel stadium, before the European Cup final had even begun, thirty-nine people — most of them followers of Juventus — died, and Italian football, which had spent the decade quarrelling over points and percentages, was made to learn what an actual tragedy weighs. The pall of that night lay over everything the game did for the rest of the year; it lay over San Siro as it lay over Turin; and every account of trophies won and lost in 1985, this one included, is written — whether the writer says so or not — in the margin of that page.

Two Nights of Summer

The Coppa Italia had offered Milan a way to gild the season, and Milan carried it all the way to the final, which the compressed calendar of that year pushed to the very end of June and the first days of July, into the sort of heat Lombardy reserves for punishing those who have not yet left for the sea. On the thirtieth of June, before some forty thousand at San Siro with Redini the referee, Sampdoria took the first leg 1-0, Souness striking in the twenty-fourth minute — a Scotsman deciding a Milanese evening, a detail the moralist records without further comment.

Three nights later at the Luigi Ferraris in Genoa, before 42,043 under Agnolin's whistle, the tie was settled: Mancini from the penalty spot on forty-one minutes, Vialli on sixty-one, and Virdis — the Sardinian huntsman again — replying on sixty-six like an apology delivered after the guests have already risen from the table. Sampdoria won the night 2-1 and the cup 3-1 on aggregate, and it was, the detail that stings and instructs, the first Coppa Italia in their entire history. There is a particular melancholy in being the table over which another club's first great feast is served; Milan tasted it in the Genoese heat and went home to a summer of reckoning.

Pablito in the Grey House

The reckoning produced a name that made the whole city look up from its espresso: Paolo Rossi. In the summer of 1985 Milan signed, from Juventus of all houses, the hero of Italy's 1982 World Cup, the Golden Boot and Ballon d'Or of that miraculous month — Pablito himself, hope incarnate, arriving to lead a line alongside Virdis and Hateley. A club that cannot afford to buy a future will sometimes buy a memory and pray that it still works; Farina, whose books were bleeding, bought the most glorious memory on the market.

And for a while the prayer seemed answered. Milan opened 1985-86 briskly and spent the autumn hovering second and third behind Juventus, playing with an assurance the grey years had rarely permitted; and in December, in the derby, Rossi scored twice against Inter in a 2-2 draw — two flashes of the old Pablito, the poacher's instinct flickering once more against the cousins in blue and black. But the chronicle must be honest where the heart would rather look away: the season would end in disappointment for Rossi, and the team's fine autumn would dissolve in the season's final stretch into a run remembered as one point from the last five games, so that when the accounts of that campaign were finally closed — in a spring that belongs to the next chapter — Milan stood seventh on thirty-one points, a single point behind Inter and outside Europe, with Virdis's sixteen goals and Hateley's eleven left as the consolations of the ledger.

Europe by Candlelight

Europe, meanwhile, was conducted by candlelight — flickering, briefly romantic, and finally blown out. The UEFA Cup campaign opened in France on the eighteenth of September, at the Stade Abbé-Deschamps, where Auxerre won 3-1 and the tie seemed half-buried; then on the second of October San Siro produced one of those nights it keeps in reserve for emergencies, Milan winning 3-0 to pass 4-3 on aggregate — proof that the old ground could still, when the mood took it, raise a cause given up for drowned.

The second act was East German and gothic: Lokomotive Leipzig, beaten 2-0 at San Siro on the twenty-third of October, then winners 3-1 in the vast Zentralstadion on the sixth of November, so that the aggregate stood level at 3-3 and Milan passed on the arithmetic of the away goal — the single goal scored in Leipzig worth more than all the others, the kind of accountancy that makes purists grumble and survivors shrug. The almanacs, incidentally, cannot even agree what to call these rounds — second and third by one reckoning, sedicesimi and ottavi by another — and the chronicler, having checked the dates twice, is content to let them quarrel.

Then came Waregem, of Belgium, and the bitter end. A 1-1 draw away on the twenty-seventh of November left everything to San Siro on the eleventh of December, and San Siro, which had saved the Auxerre tie, could not save this one: Waregem won 2-1 on the night and 3-2 on aggregate, a disputed penalty lit the fuse, the crowd's fury spilled beyond the terraces, and the consequences arrived in official envelopes — a two-match European home-ground ban for the club — while out in the December fog the protests against President Farina no longer troubled to distinguish one grievance from another. The year's last European act was whistled off to the sound of a city losing patience.

The Verdict

For the truth, which the terraces had smelled long before the auditors confirmed it, was that Farina's Milan was falling not on the pitch but in the ledgers. Through all of 1985 the president owned and ran the club while its finances quietly collapsed beneath him, and the crisis the Waregem night dragged into the open would, within weeks of the new year, end his tenure altogether — he would resign amid the debts in January, and in February 1986 a media magnate named Silvio Berlusconi would buy the club and change everything, everything, down to the meaning of the word Milan. But that belongs to the next chapter. 1985 itself closed with the old regime still nominally on its throne and the fog thickening politely around it, the way Lombard fog does when it intends to swallow something whole.

And so the verdict. 1985 gave Milan no silver: a fifth place dressed as prudence, a cup final surrendered to another club's first feast, a European run extinguished by a Belgian side and a disputed whistle, a president running out of money and a public running out of patience. And yet the moralist, totting up the year by the low lamplight of the Long Decade, finds the balance secretly, almost scandalously positive — because on an icy afternoon in Udine, in a 1-1 draw remembered for nothing else, the grey years produced a sixteen-year-old right-back who would carry the number 3 and the name Maldini across twenty-five seasons, to every corner of the earth where Milanese hearts keep foreign time. The poorest year of the old regime handed the new one its richest gift. History, which loves a joke at the expense of accountants, has rarely made the point more neatly.