The Fog, the Fall and the Tower from Udine

The Winter of the Long Fog

There are calendar years a club would like to fold in half and post to two different addresses, and for Milan 1998 was exactly that: the first five months belonged to the dying of one team, Fabio Capello's second and far unhappier creation, and the last five to the slow, sceptical birth of another, drawn up by a mild man from the provinces whom almost nobody expected to matter. Between the two Milans sat a World Cup in France, a sacking, and the strangest silence of all — a season arriving with no European football in it, an absence this club had almost forgotten how to imagine.

The ledger of 1997-98 reads like a penance: tenth place, forty-four points from thirty-four matches — eleven wins, eleven draws, twelve defeats. There is a terrible evenness in that arithmetic, the evenness of a risotto stirred without love, neither burnt nor golden but simply grey, and grey is the one colour the red and black shirt cannot wear. This was still Silvio Berlusconi's Milan, still the Milan of San Siro's high concrete tiers with the Madonnina glinting somewhere beyond the fog, and yet the fallen giant spent its winter looking up at a table it had been built to look down upon.

Capello, in his second spell, could not make the river run uphill twice. When the dismissal came at season's end it surprised no one, for football is a court in which the sentence is generally passed long before the verdict is read aloud; the crowd had read it in the grey Sundays of late winter, in the shrug of tired shoulders, in the way the fog off the Navigli seemed to follow the team indoors.

Spring of the Maulings

The spring taught its lessons with a cruelty that bordered on pedagogy. On 22 March, in the derby at San Siro, Internazionale won 3-0 and Milan did not so much lose as decline to appear. Six days later, away to Juventus, came a 4-1 in which Del Piero and Inzaghi helped themselves to two goals apiece and Milan's whole reply was a Boban penalty — consolation of the kind that consoles nobody, in a season that had passed beyond failure into farce. On 3 May arrived the coup de grâce, Roma 5-0, a scoreline that reads less like a result than a diagnosis.

And yet April had opened with a thread of silver through the grey. In the Coppa Italia final, first leg at San Siro on 8 April, George Weah struck in the 90th minute and Milan carried a 1-0 lead south; at the Stadio Olimpico on 29 April, Lazio turned the tie over 3-1 — Albertini's goal a minute after the interval serving only to sharpen the regret — and lifted the cup 3-2 on aggregate, the second Coppa Italia of their history. Milan's cabinet for 1997-98 was left all but empty, and emptiness, in a house built for silver, echoes.

Through the maulings one man kept lighting candles. On 11 April, against Atalanta at San Siro, Weah scored all three goals of a 3-0 — the 10th minute, the 53rd, the 87th — a hat-trick delivered like a soliloquy to a house that had bought tickets for a tragedy. The Ballon d'Or of 1995 finished as Milan's top scorer, thirteen goals in all competitions, ten of them in the league, a king carrying his own sedan chair because the bearers had wandered off.

A July Interlude in France

The summer belonged to France, and France, for the Milanist, belonged to one family. Italy travelled to the World Cup coached by Cesare Maldini, and Italy's captain was his son Paolo, Milan's captain too; beside him went Alessandro Costacurta and Demetrio Albertini, three rossoneri lent to the nation while their club sat at home contemplating its sins. On 3 July, in the quarter-final, Italy held the hosts to 0-0 through every minute the laws allowed and then lost, as Italy in those decades so often lost, on penalties; France proceeded, in time, to win the whole tournament, which is consolation of the coldest sort — to be eliminated by the eventual champion is to be told that the man who robbed you was, at least, a professional. For the Maldinis, father and son, the walk away from that penalty spot must stand among the longest in the family's long service to the game; and for Milan there was a quieter lesson in it, that its captain remained a monument even in a year when the house around him had become a ruin.

The Heretic from Udine

Into the ruin walked Alberto Zaccheroni, hired from Udinese with a heresy in his briefcase: three at the back. His 3-4-3 — which would in time soften into a 3-4-1-2, the way a young wine softens in oak — scandalised the sacristans of Italian defending, and he arrived flanked by two believers from his small-club miracle, the centre-forward Oliver Bierhoff and the right wing-back Thomas Helveg. Few believed with them. The consensus of the summer held that a provincial professor and his provincial pupils had been handed the keys to a palazzo they could not afford to heat.

The market, meanwhile, rearranged the furniture with a certain melancholy. Patrick Kluivert left for Barcelona and Marcel Desailly for Chelsea, departures that felt like the settling of accounts from a richer decade; in came Jens Lehmann from Schalke 04 for the goal, Roberto Ayala from Napoli for the rearguard, the young Christian Abbiati as third keeper — his hour belongs to a later chapter — and Massimo Ambrosini, promoted from within. And because tenth place purchases no passport, there was no European football at all in 1998-99: the press noted the light schedule and the lowered expectations, and in that lightness, though nobody dared say so at the time, lay a hidden mercy — a whole winter of free midweeks in which to train, to think, to become.

The spine Zaccheroni assembled was older than revolutions are supposed to like. Paolo Maldini captained a back three of Sala, Costacurta and Maldini himself, with N'Gotty and Ayala rotating through it; Helveg and Ziege patrolled the touchlines like men paid by the kilometre; Demetrio Albertini sat at the base of midfield and distributed with a notary's exactness; and ahead of them moved a trident of Weah, Bierhoff and Leonardo — three forwards of three entirely different grammars asked to compose a single sentence. Berlusconi, as ever, presided from above, waiting to see whether his fallen house would stand.

The Tower from Udine

Every Milan year conceals a parable, and the parable of 1998 was a tall German centre-forward aged thirty, which in the currency of strikers is practically pensionable. Oliver Bierhoff had wandered — Germany, Austria, the lower reaches of the Italian game — a journeyman rising slowly, like good bread, while flashier doughs collapsed around him. Then came Euro 96 and the final against the Czech Republic: sent on as a substitute, he scored the equaliser and then the first golden goal in the history of a major international tournament, and Germany had won by the sudden death of his forehead. Careers are supposed to climb towards such a moment; Bierhoff's appeared instead to begin at one.

At Udinese he made himself capocannoniere of Serie A in 1997-98 with twenty-seven goals, and still his purchase was received in Milan with pursed lips, for the Milan of Berlusconi had been raised on glamour and now found itself handed a thirty-year-old target-man from the provinces. The scepticism had its logic; it simply had no future. On 12 September, opening day of the new season, Bologna came to San Siro and left three goals the poorer: Bierhoff scored on the stroke of half-time, added a penalty six minutes after the restart, Leonardo signed the third late on, and 3-0 read like a manifesto.

By the following May the Tower from Udine would have nineteen league goals, or twenty — the ledgers, as ledgers will, disagree by one — and Milan would have its sixteenth scudetto; but that harvest belongs to the next chapter. What belongs to 1998 is the sowing: the sight of a doubted man, in a doubted team, under a doubted coach, converting scepticism into points with the patience of a mason. Lombardy has always trusted men who arrive late and stay useful, and Bierhoff was of that school — no arabesques, no theatre, only the high mathematics of the penalty area conducted from above everyone else's line of sight.

An Autumn of Quiet Arithmetic

The autumn that followed was not a coronation; it was bookkeeping. Milan won away at Salernitana 2-1 and at Venezia 2-0, lost 1-3 at home to Fiorentina, fell 1-0 in Cagliari, and beat Roma 3-2 at San Siro in the sort of match that leaves fingernails on the parapets — Leonardo, Ziege and Weah the scorers. At Piacenza, Ganz scavenged a point in the 92nd minute; at Bari nothing whatever happened, 0-0, and with great conviction. On 22 November Lazio came to San Siro and Leonardo beat them with the last course the menu allowed, 1-0 in the 90th minute — a small revenge, served properly cold. Then on 29 November Parma administered a 4-0 that smelled unpleasantly of March; and this time Milan's answer was not collapse but a shrug and three unbeaten results to close the year — Udinese dismissed 3-0 through Weah, Leonardo and Bierhoff, Vicenza beaten by Weah's goal in the 84th, and a 2-2 at Sampdoria on 20 December signed by Leonardo and Bierhoff.

In the middle of that ledger sat the derby of 8 November, the second of the calendar year, and this time Milan appeared. Weah struck in the 13th minute, Albertini converted a penalty in the 59th, and against an Inter led by Ronaldo the match ended 2-2 — not vengeance for March's 0-3, but the repayment of its dignity, which in derby accounting is the older currency. A derby drawn honestly outweighs a derby lost absently, and San Siro, which keeps precise moral books, recorded the difference.

The Coppa Italia, for its part, insisted on rhyme. Milan lost the away leg of its opening tie 2-0 to Torino, mended matters 3-0 at San Siro — Helveg, Weah, Bierhoff — and advanced 3-2 on aggregate, only to find Lazio waiting in the round of 16 like a patient creditor: 3-1 away despite Bierhoff's seventh-minute goal, 1-1 at home on 11 November, out 4-2 on aggregate to precisely the side that had taken the cup from them in April. Some seasons have opponents; this Milan had a motif.

The Hundredth Winter

The club had been founded on 16 December 1899, which means the season that opened in the autumn of 1998 was the campaign of the hundredth anniversary, and that as December closed over the Navigli the red and black entered their centenary winter mid-table, unglamorous and quietly gathering. Nobody sang about it. The choirs of a centenary prefer trophies to anniversaries, and the autumn's arithmetic promised none; and yet 23 May 1999, when it came, would hang the sixteenth scudetto on the hundredth year like a medal struck to order. History, which is usually a poor dramatist, occasionally writes a perfect act break — and it placed this one precisely at the end of 1998, with the plot laid and the audience unaware.

Judge 1998 by silverware and it handed Milan precisely nothing: a final lost in April, a cup exit in November, no Europe, and between them a tenth place that flattered nobody. Judge it as one judges a vineyard in winter rather than at harvest, and it handed over nearly everything: a coach with an idea, a centre-forward with a forehead, wing-backs with lungs, a captain who had carried Italy through a French summer and came home to carry Milan, and beneath it all the first stirring of the title that the following May would confirm. The fog of the Po valley is famous for what it hides; it is rarely praised for what it allows to grow underneath. In 1998 Milan lived in that fog, and grew.