1995 — The Swan and the King | Le Cronache

Fog on the Navigli, Smoke Over Rome

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like creditors, and 1995 came to Milan with a ledger under its arm. The city wore its winter fog as it always has, drawn up off the Navigli at dusk and laid over the streets like a tablecloth, and beneath that fog the most powerful football club on earth prepared to learn what every dynasty learns eventually: that the bill for greatness is presented not when you fail but while you are still succeeding. Serie A in 1995 stood at its global zenith, the richest and strongest league in the world, the theatre in which every great actor of the game wished to perform, and Milan entered the year as holders of the European crown, with Fabio Capello on the bench, Franco Baresi wearing the armband as if he had been born already wearing it, and Silvio Berlusconi in the president's chair.

Berlusconi himself had lately discovered how much faster politics moves than football. His first government had collapsed in December 1994, and 1995 belonged, in Rome, to the technocratic cabinet of Lamberto Dini — a year of caretakers in the capital while the owner of Milan remained, whatever his parliamentary arithmetic, a dominant figure in the national imagination. It is a very Italian arrangement, that a man may misplace the country and keep the club, and I record without judgement that nobody in the Curva Sud lost a minute of sleep over the distinction. The fog does not read the newspapers. The fixture list does not resign.

San Siro, 19 April 1995: PSG line up before the Champions League semi-final against Milan — George Weah among them, four months before he swapped Paris for the rossonero shirt. Milan won 2-0.
Unknown author, via histoiredupsg.fr / Wikimedia Commons — PD-Italy (simple photograph, 20 years after creation)

The Spring of Strange Arithmetic

The domestic spring made no sense, and I say this as a man who has spent a lifetime insisting that football always makes sense if you stare at it long enough. Milan surrendered their crown as champions of Italy to Marcello Lippi's resurgent Juventus and finished fourth — fourth! — with sixty points from thirty-four games: seventeen won, nine drawn, eight lost, fifty-three scored, thirty-two conceded. The numbers are respectable on paper and mortifying in the flesh, the accounts of a great house that has begun, discreetly, to sell the silver. And still the public came, because the Milanese are faithful in the way of people who have known both famine and banquet: an average of 56,659 filed into San Siro all the same, through the fog and past the trams, to watch the strangest league season the club had produced in years.

Consider the evidence, because the evidence refuses to be considered quietly. On 15 January at Bari, Milan won by five goals to three, and four of the five belonged to Dejan Savicevic — the conjuror, a man who handles the ball the way a jeweller handles a stone he suspects of being priceless, and who chose that provincial afternoon to empty his entire workshop onto the pitch. On 19 February, Lazio put four past Milan without reply. A fortnight later, on 5 March, Milan put five past Brescia without conceding. And on 15 April the derby went to Inter, three goals to one, which in Milan is not a result but a season of penance compressed into ninety minutes. Marco Simone, il piccolo diavolo of the front line, finished as top scorer with seventeen league goals, twenty-one in all competitions, and deserved a more coherent spring to score them in. A team that can win 5-3 and 5-0 and lose 4-0 and 3-1 in the same few months is not a bad team; it is a great team whose clock has begun to run on two different times at once.

The Old Road Still Led to Vienna

Europe was another matter, because in Europe the old machine still remembered itself. In the quarter-final of the Champions League, Milan dispatched Benfica with the cold courtesy of the Capello school: 2-0 at San Siro on the first of March, then a goalless evening in Lisbon on the fifteenth, the away leg played like a man walking home with his winnings buttoned into an inside pocket. No flourish, no risk, no mercy. This was the deep grammar of Capello's Milan — Sacchi had written the poetry, Capello edited it into prose that won — and in the spring of 1995 the prose still parsed perfectly.

The semi-final brought Paris Saint-Germain, and Milan won it in the manner least likely to inspire poets and most likely to inspire engravers of trophies: 1-0 at the Parc des Princes on 5 April, 2-0 at San Siro on the nineteenth, three goals to none across the tie. There is an irony folded into that scoreline which only the summer would unfold, for the Parisian club Milan eliminated in April was the club from which, before the next season began, Milan would take George Weah. Football devours its opponents and then hires their best cook. And so to a third consecutive European final — the last of the sequence, though no one leaning on the April railings of San Siro could have known that the run of finals, like the fog, was about to lift.

The Eighty-Fifth Minute

Vienna, 24 May 1995, the Ernst-Happel-Stadion, 49,730 inside — the round-number men wrote fifty thousand, and for once I forgive them. History, which has a taste for symmetry that borders on cruelty, had arranged a rematch: Milan and Ajax, the same two names that had contested the final of 1969, met again with a quarter of a century between the handshakes. Capello sent out a team that read like a page of the club's own gospel: Rossi in goal; Panucci, Costacurta, Baresi and Maldini across the back; Albertini and Desailly in the engine room; Donadoni and Boban to supply; Simone and Massaro to finish. The holders of the cup, captained by Baresi, the last Roman of the penalty area, against Louis van Gaal's young orchestra from Amsterdam.

For eighty-four minutes the final was a chess match played with the pieces glued to the board, the kind of evening in which every pass is an argument and no argument is won. Then, in the eighty-fifth, the orchestra found its note. Patrick Kluivert — eighteen years and 327 days old, a boy in the strict actuarial sense, a finisher in every sense that matters — scored the only goal of the night. One to nil. The holders were holders no longer, and the run of three straight finals closed not with a collapse but with a single late sentence, delivered by a teenager to a team of monuments. The football gods do not send letters; they send eighteen-year-olds. Defeat by a boy is how the game serves its memo about time, and Milan, who had taught Europe more about time and space than any side of the era, read the memo in silence on the flight home over the Alps.

The Swan Folds His Wings

Whatever Vienna took, August took more. On the seventeenth of that month, at a press conference in Milan, Marco van Basten announced the end of his career, and with it ended the long, whispered argument about whether we would ever see him whole again. His last competitive match had been the European Cup final of 1993, lost to Marseille; everything after that was medicine — more than two years of treatment that failed, four operations on an ankle that would not forgive him for the way he had been kicked and the way he had insisted, regardless, on dancing. Shortly before the announcement he had flown to Belgium for one final consultation, and the specialist delivered the plainest sentence of the whole affair: the ankle would not recover, and the advice was to stop. The door that had stood ajar for two years, wide enough for hope to squeeze through sideways, was closed.

The next evening at San Siro, before the Trofeo Berlusconi friendly against Juventus, he walked a lap of honour while a crowd reported at over sixty-three thousand rose and stayed risen, an ovation of the kind a stadium grants perhaps twice in a generation, and Fabio Capello — Capello, the great pragmatist, the man who had turned beauty into a budget — sat in the dugout and wept. Van Basten was thirty; the birth certificate says the last day of October 1964. Reflect on the crueller number: he never played a competitive match after the age of twenty-eight. Three times the Ballon d'Or had gone to him, the most complete striker of his generation, a swan among the geese of the area di rigore, and the swan folded his wings at an age when most centre-forwards are still learning which way the goal is. There are defeats a club avenges and defeats a club can only mourn. Vienna was the first kind. This was the second.

Buying Goals by the Kilogram

A club that loses its greatest scorer cannot weep indefinitely; it must go to market, and that summer Milan shopped like a widow determined not to be pitied. From Paris Saint-Germain came George Weah, for a fee reported at around seven million — I give the figure with the shrug it deserves, since the tellers of transfer fees are the least reliable witnesses in football, and other honest ledgers swear to something nearer nine. From Juventus, of all houses, came Roberto Baggio, at a price similarly disputed, nine million and some or ten depending on the newspaper and its mood at breakfast. From Cannes came a long-limbed young midfielder named Patrick Vieira, a purchase whose wisdom the future would audit; from Reggiana came Paulo Futre. The intent was legible from the Madonnina: the goals that had walked out with the swan would be carried back in by new shoulders, and the broadest of those shoulders belonged to a Liberian.

The departures had their own quiet poetry. Daniele Massaro, who had led the line in Vienna, went east to Japan, to Shimizu S-Pulse, along the era's new silk road for the distinguished veteran. And Van Basten's retirement was entered formally into the books at last — an administrative full stop beneath a sentence that injury had finished writing two years before. Thus does a great club conduct its grief: with a press conference, a signature, a ledger entry, and then, because the calendar is merciless and merciful in the same gesture, a fixture list.

The Autumn of the Fifteenth

Whoever expected the remade Milan to require a season of introductions was disappointed inside a month. The autumn of 1995 was an exercise in steady accumulation, the football equivalent of a good risotto — no single stir decisive, every stir necessary: 2-1 against Padova, 2-1 against Udinese, 2-1 against Roma, 3-0 against Atalanta, points gathered the way the Lombard plain gathers its harvest, without commotion. Then, on 15 October, matchday six, the champions of Italy came to San Siro and left beaten: Milan 2, Juventus 1, the goals from Weah and Simone — the new king and the faithful retainer sharing the scoresheet, and the table tilting towards Milan as the days shortened. By the time the fog settled in for the winter, Milan led the league, and the foundation was poured for what April 1996 would confirm: the fifteenth scudetto, sealed at seventy-three points from a season of twenty-one wins, ten draws and three defeats, eight clear of Juventus, after which Capello would depart for Real Madrid. But that is the next chapter's harvest. 1995 did the ploughing and the sowing, which is the part of farming nobody photographs.

There was midweek work too, in the UEFA Cup, to which the fourth place of the previous spring had consigned them — a demotion the squad treated as a professional obligation rather than an insult. Zaglebie Lubin were dispatched 4-0 at San Siro on 12 September and 4-1 away a fortnight later; Strasbourg fell 1-0 in France on 17 October and 2-1 in Milan on 2 November; Sparta Prague were beaten 2-0 on 23 November, and a goalless evening in Prague on 7 December carried Milan through the round of sixteen and into the new year. That the road would end at Bordeaux in the spring belongs to 1996's page, not this one; in December 1995 the ledger showed only wins, and a club that had spent May learning about endings spent the autumn remembering how to begin.

A Crown on Christmas Eve

And then, on 24 December 1995, the year performed its final reversal. George Weah was awarded the Ballon d'Or — the first African ever to win it, in the first edition that deigned to consider players born outside Europe — and in the first days of the new year the FIFA World Player of the Year would join it, presented at a gala staged, fittingly, in Milan itself, completing in a single season of awards a European, African and world treble that no man had assembled before. He would finish that season as Milan's leading league scorer with eleven goals, but the goals were the smaller half of the story. A forward who had crossed from Monrovia to Monaco to Paris to Milan carried the rossonero shirt to a summit the game's oldest prize had never before permitted, and he did it in the December of the very year the club had buried its greatest striker's career. Football's bookkeeping is brutal, but its poetry, when it condescends to rhyme, rhymes like this.

So tally the year as the year tallied us. In May, Milan lost the crown of Europe to a boy of eighteen by a single goal in the eighty-fifth minute. In August, they lost the most complete striker of his generation to an ankle, and the hardest man in the dugout wept in front of sixty-odd thousand witnesses. And by Christmas Eve, the best footballer on the planet, by official decree, wore red and black, while the fifteenth scudetto germinated quietly under the winter fog. Wherever the rossoneri kept their vigils that December — along the Navigli, in the bars of the peninsula, or on the far side of the world where the faithful of the southern hemisphere take their Milan before dawn and their coffee immediately after — the toast wrote itself. 1995 took a swan and returned a king and invited us to call it an exchange. I decline the word: there is no exchange for Van Basten. But the game, like the city, does not stop for grief. The fog lifts, the risotto is served, the fixture list resumes, and the verdict on 1995 is the verdict Milan's whole history keeps handing down — the club buries its dead with full honours and then, without indecent haste but without delay, goes back to winning.

George Weah celebrates a goal for PSG at Napoli's San Paolo, October 1992 — the striker Milan signed in the summer of 1995, and the Ballon d'Or of that December.
Unknown author, via Italian Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons — PD-Italy (simple photograph, 20 years after creation)

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