The Fog, the Fall, and the Number Six

The Fog Takes Up Residence

There are winters in Lombardy when the fog does not so much fall as take up residence, settling over the Navigli like a tenant who has studied the lease and found, to his quiet satisfaction, no clause obliging him ever to leave; and it was into such a winter that Milan carried the wreckage of December 1996. That month had done its demolition work with terrible efficiency. Oscar Washington Tabárez, the courteous Uruguayan schoolmaster whose blackboard had never quite persuaded the dressing room, was dismissed at the start of December after a 3-2 defeat at Piacenza — Piacenza, a town the Lombard gourmand associates with cured pork and honest wine rather than with regicide — and within a day Arrigo Sacchi was summoned back to the pulpit from which he had once preached the most persuasive football in Europe.

The calendar gave the returning prophet almost no grace at all. On 4 December, Rosenborg of Trondheim — Norwegians, from a country where the fog at least has the honesty to freeze — won 2-1 at San Siro, and the reigning champions of Italy were out of the Champions League at the group stage before the panettone had reached the table. So 1997 began as few Milanese years have ever begun: no Europe to dream of, no cushion of habit to fall back upon, only the league — and the league, as we shall see, had turned hostile.

A man should beware of returning to the scene of his miracles. The Sacchi who came back was the same man with the same convictions, but the church had changed and the congregation had heard every sermon; the great pressing machine of a decade earlier could not simply be wheeled out of the depot and oiled. He managed the club through the whole of that spring, honestly and without luck, and it was his particular misfortune that the spring had already decided what it wished to be.

Six Bells Over the Madonnina

On 6 April 1997 the season acquired its blackest page. Eighty-one thousand one hundred and seventy people came to the Giuseppe Meazza and watched Marcello Lippi's Juventus win by six goals to one, the scorers recited like a sentence handed down from a high court: Jugović twice, Zidane from the penalty spot, Amoruso, and Vieri twice, the second of them closing the account. For Milan there was a goal from Marco Simone, which history files under consolation and honesty files under arithmetic.

There are defeats that merely subtract points and defeats that redraw maps, and this one was cartography. The scudetto that Juventus would carry off with sixty-five points was already travelling toward Turin, but the 1-6 was something more intimate than a title changing hands: it was the formal reading of a will, conducted in the fallen family's own drawing room, before the largest possible gathering of the relatives.

Seven days was all the city allowed for mourning. On 13 April came the derby, and Roy Hodgson's Inter won it 3-1, Maurizio Ganz among their scorers — hold that name in your pocket, for football's irony never leaves a debt unpaid. Nine goals conceded in a single April week, beneath the indifferent gilt of the Madonnina; the great cycle that had frightened Europe for a decade was not ending — it had ended, and the city was merely being notified.

The Arithmetic of Famine

The table, when it closed, did not moralise; tables never do, which is what makes them crueller than moralists. Forty-three points from thirty-four rounds — eleven matches won, ten drawn, thirteen lost, forty-three goals scored and forty-five conceded — and eleventh place, the club's worst finish since 1981-82. Champions of Italy in the spring of 1996, eleventh in the spring of 1997: the drop reads like a misprint, and one sympathises with any typesetter who checked it twice before letting it through.

Nor did the cup offer a side-door to dignity. Vicenza put Milan out of the Coppa Italia at the quarter-final stage and then, with the tact of a provincial cousin who wins the family card game and pockets the stakes, went on to lift the trophy themselves. And because eleventh place buys a ticket to nowhere, the season that began in the autumn of 1997 would contain no European football of any description — a sentence so foreign to the modern history of this club that supporters read it twice, and then once more, slowly.

Through the whole famine one man kept bringing bread. George Weah, Ballon d'Or of 1995, led the line and led the scoring — some thirteen league goals, sixteen in all competitions, though the ledgers quibble over a unit or two, and in a year like that even the ledgers had lost their composure. He was the lighthouse the fog could not swallow, and if the beam fell mostly upon wreckage, that is a complaint to address to the sea, not to the light.

Don Fabio Rides Back Over the Alps

In the summer the club reached for the surest remedy in its medicine cabinet. Fabio Capello, who had spent a single season at Real Madrid and returned with the Spanish title in his luggage, came home to the bench from which he had directed four scudetti between 1991 and 1996. Silvio Berlusconi, still president and owner, dividing his energies between the opposition benches in Rome and his seat above the San Siro turf, sanctioned a rebuild of imperial scale, and for a few weeks of July the fog seemed almost to lift.

The buying was done like a nervous man ordering the entire menu for fear of choosing badly. Patrick Kluivert arrived from Ajax, Christian Ziege from Bayern Munich, Leonardo from Paris Saint-Germain, Ibrahim Ba from Bordeaux, the goalkeeper Massimo Taibi from Piacenza — from Piacenza, the very town whose 3-2 had felled Tabárez, as though the club meant to buy back its own bad luck — with Winston Bogarde, Andreas Andersson and Steinar Nilsen besides; in the autumn Roberto Donadoni came home; and in December there arrived Maurizio Ganz, the man who had scored against Milan in April's derby and now pulled the red and black over his head, football's irony settling its account within the calendar year, exactly as promised.

Yet the truest business of that summer was subtraction. Roberto Baggio was sold to Bologna; Marco Simone, scorer of the lone goal on the day of the six, left for Paris Saint-Germain; Mauro Tassotti hung up his boots at last; and Franco Baresi retired, whereupon the captain's armband passed to Paolo Maldini — from one son of the house to another, the inheritance at least kept within the family. Of the rebuild itself the record obliges us to say what the season would soon say for itself: costly, and largely unsuccessful. Expensive orchestras do not play in tune merely because the instruments are new.

Sei per sempre

Every chronicle needs its human heart, and in 1997 Milan's beat beneath the number six. Franco Baresi had come to the club's youth ranks in 1974 and made his debut in 1977-78, and for twenty seasons he wore the only shirt he ever consented to wear, reading the game from libero the way a good notary reads a contract: everything seen, nothing signed in haste. The miserable campaign of 1996-97 was his twentieth and his last, and he left as he had lived at the club — as captain.

On 28 October 1997, San Siro staged his farewell beneath a banner carrying the finest pun the Italian language has ever lent the game: Sei per sempre — 'you are forever,' and also, since sei is six, 'six forever.' The greats of football, past and present, gathered for an all-star evening of tribute. And then the club performed the one act of that whole grim year which history reads without wincing: it retired the No. 6 shirt, so that no Milan player would ever wear it again.

Institutions reveal themselves not by what they buy — heaven knows Milan bought plenty that summer — but by what they refuse ever to sell, and in withdrawing the six from circulation the club declared that some things are not squad numbers but titles of nobility. In a year of famine, the finest gesture was an act of renunciation. The six went up into the rafters of the imagination, where no moth of fashion can reach it, and there it hangs still: the one trophy of 1997, won on an October evening with no competition in sight.

A Lantern in August, Lead by All Saints

August, as is its custom, told a beautiful lie. On the 19th, in the seventh edition of the Trofeo Luigi Berlusconi, more than seventy-six thousand interrupted their holidays to watch Milan beat Juventus 3-1 at San Siro, Patrick Kluivert among the scorers in red and black; and for one warm evening the arithmetic of April looked reversible — the six avenged, the new orchestra tuning sweetly, the summer's spending vindicated before a note of the real season had been played.

The league corrected the impression with bureaucratic promptness. On 31 August Capello's second reign opened at Piacenza — always Piacenza — with a 1-1 draw; on 28 September Vicenza, the season's recurring small torment, won 1-0 at San Siro; and though a 3-0 away win at Sampdoria on 2 November suggested a pulse, the campaign was already settling into the previous year's rhythm, which is to say no rhythm at all. It would end, months beyond this chapter's border, in tenth place — forty-four points, eleven wins, eleven draws, twelve defeats, thirty-seven scored and forty-three conceded — and it would end for Capello too, dismissed when it was over.

So the year closed as it had opened, in fog — with Weah still carrying the scoring burden, one of the few constants amid the upheaval; with the new signings learning that a crisis cannot be transferred out in a single market; and with the presiding fact of Italian football installed elsewhere. This was Juventus's era now, and Moratti's Inter was spending heavily to contest it, while the grandest club of the early nineties queued at the window like everyone else.

The Verdict of the Interregnum

Beyond the touchline, Italy was performing austerities of its own: Romano Prodi's centre-left Ulivo government spent 1997 steering the country toward the single European currency, a fiscal slimming regime endured with operatic complaint, while Berlusconi led the opposition through Forza Italia — so that the president of the fallen champions passed the year contesting two arenas at once and mastering neither. There is a novel in that; but our trade here is the chronicle, so let us simply note the symmetry and move on.

History, which adores symmetry even more than we do, had already drafted the sequel — the interregnum would close with Zaccheroni's scudetto in 1999 — but nobody in 1997 was permitted to read ahead, least of all the faithful on the far side of the world, for whom following Milan has always meant alarm clocks set at unchristian hours and results arriving with the dawn. They, like the Curva, had to take the year as it came: eleventh place and then tenth, a six conceded and a six enshrined. And there, precisely, is the verdict. A great club is not the one that never falls; it is the one that, falling, chooses correctly what to hold above the flood. In its worst year of the modern age, Milan held up a number — and the number, of course, was six.