Six Bells and a Quiet Monday

The Fog Over the Navigli

Every great city keeps a private weather, and Milan's is fog: the grey breath that climbs off the Navigli before dawn, wraps itself around the tram wires, and softens even the golden Madonnina on her spire until she seems to float above a city that has briefly misplaced itself. In 2001 the fog got into the football. Two seasons after the scudetto of the centenary year, the Rossoneri of president Silvio Berlusconi closed the 2000-01 championship in sixth place, and the ledger read like a penance recited without conviction: thirty-four matches, twelve victories, nine defeats and thirteen draws — thirteen! — for forty-nine points, with fifty-six goals scored and forty-six allowed with the absent-mindedness of a man who leaves his umbrella on the tram every single morning.

A team that draws thirteen times in a season is not unlucky; it is undecided, and indecision in football, as in the kitchen, ruins the dish — the risotto stirred too timidly goes to glue. One man alone refused the fog. Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian with the stride of a courier who knows the shortcut, scored twenty-four goals in Serie A that season and thirty-four in all competitions, carrying the attack the way a porter carries a piano upstairs: without complaint and largely without help.

The Night the Music Stopped

The reckoning came in March, in Europe. Milan had reached the second group stage of the Champions League, drawn into Group B with Deportivo La Coruña, Galatasaray and Paris Saint-Germain, and on the night of 13 March they stood at San Siro needing victory over the Galicians to stay alive. Djalminha struck from the penalty spot for Deportivo with a quarter of an hour left; Shevchenko answered from the spot four minutes from time, because Shevchenko always scored; and the evening closed 1-1, which for Milan was arithmetic dressed as tragedy. Third in the group, and out.

The next day, 14 March, Alberto Zaccheroni was dismissed — the same Zaccheroni who two years earlier had steered the club to the championship of its hundredth birthday, which tells you all you need to know about the gratitude of football, an industry that keeps its medals in one drawer and its guillotine in the next. Into the breach stepped Cesare Maldini as caretaker, with Mauro Tassotti at his elbow, while out on the grass his son Paolo wore the captain's armband as he had all along: the government of the club handed, for a season's dying months, to a single bloodline, father in the dugout and son marshalling the defence, which in Milan passes not for nepotism but for constitutional order.

Six Strokes of the Bell

And it was the old man, of all people, who gave the year its immortal night. On 11 May 2001, at San Siro, came the derby: Marco Tardelli's Inter against a Milan with nothing left to play for except the oldest cause of all, the humiliation of the neighbour. Pierluigi Collina presided, implacable as a Roman censor, and what he witnessed was not so much a match as a sentence carried out in six strokes.

Gianni Comandini after two minutes; Comandini again on nineteen; Giunti on fifty-three; Shevchenko on sixty-six and again on seventy-seven; Serginho, who had already laid on three of the goals from that greyhound left flank of his, adding the sixth himself on eighty-one. Inter 0, Milan 6 — the heaviest humiliation in the long history of the Milanese derby, administered by a caretaker's team in a season otherwise fit for the archive of forgettable things.

A year of fog redeemed by one night of pitiless clarity: it is not nothing. The city's two tribes measure their lives not in points but in evenings such as this, and for the red-and-black half of Milan the sixth of those goals rang like the sixth stroke of a bell that would go on sounding for decades, across kitchen tables and barbers' chairs, wherever the neighbour needed reminding.

The Meteor

Pause now on the boy who struck the first two, because his story is the year's secret heart. Milan had bought Gianni Comandini from Vicenza in the summer of 2000 for a reported twenty billion lire — their second-heaviest outlay of that market, behind only Fernando Redondo — on the strength of twenty goals in Serie B and a European Under-21 title won alongside two other young men named Andrea Pirlo and Gennaro Gattuso. He arrived at twenty-three with a centre-forward's licence and a debtor's burden, and at Milan he drowned quietly: no league goals through his first months, a marginal man, doubted in the manner that great clubs doubt — politely, totally.

Then came 11 May. Handed a start in the derby, he needed nineteen minutes to score twice: a left-footed finish past Frey, then a header past him too, both served up by Serginho from that same left flank, both taken with the calm of a man who has stopped being afraid because he has nothing left to protect. Around the hour he was substituted, his work complete. Those two goals were the only Serie A goals Gianni Comandini ever scored for Milan.

That summer he was sold to Atalanta for a reported thirty billion lire — their record purchase — where the goals again declined to come; there were loans at Genoa and Ternana, and at twenty-eight, in 2005, he retired. What follows is the part the moralist loves. He became a traveller, a surfer, a disc jockey, the owner of a venue; he said he wished to be known as a person and not as an athlete. Football is full of men who scored two hundred goals and were never once happy; here was a man who scored two that mattered and then went looking, deliberately, for a life. One afternoon of glory, then silence — but a silence, one suspects, of his own choosing.

Lire and the Art of Beginning Again

Around the club, Italy itself was rearranging the furniture. The scudetto of 2000-01 went to Roma — Fabio Capello's Roma of Totti, Batistuta and Montella — a coronation that stung Milanese pride from both ends of the city. And in May the club's owner completed a double of his own peculiar kind: Silvio Berlusconi, media magnate and president of the Rossoneri, returned as Prime Minister of Italy after his coalition won the general election, so that football, television and politics now simmered in a single pot, a national risotto in which it grew ever harder to say which grain was which.

On the pitch, the response to sixth place was the chequebook, opened with the old imperial confidence. From Fiorentina came Manuel Rui Costa for a reported eighty-five billion lire; from Juventus came Filippo Inzaghi for a reported seventy; and from the neighbours themselves — a detail to savour like the last spoonful — came the young Andrea Pirlo for a reported thirty-five, Inter selling across the city the quiet boy who would one day sit at the base of Milan's midfield and conduct a decade. Martin Laursen arrived from Parma, Javi Moreno from Alavés. The figures, reported in lire and converted variously ever since, should be read as a merchant's tale rather than a notary's deed; the ambition behind them, however, was exact.

And out through the same door went the nineties. Zvonimir Boban to Celta Vigo on loan, Oliver Bierhoff to Monaco, Leonardo home to São Paulo: three men of the old guard walking into the fog with their collars up. Clubs, like cities, renew themselves by demolition, and it is always the finest façades one mourns first.

The Emperor's Autumn

To govern the new estate the club chose an emperor — literally, by nickname: Fatih Terim, the Turk they called the Imperatore, took the bench for 2001-02 and began brightly enough to make the title talk seem sane. Fiorentina were dismantled 5-2 at San Siro on 9 September, Shevchenko striking twice with Laursen, Inzaghi and Serginho sharing the rest; Lazio were put away 2-0 a fortnight later.

On 21 October came the derby again, and with it confirmation that 2001 was the year Milan owned the city. Ventola put Inter ahead on thirteen minutes, and then the reply arrived like weather: Shevchenko twice, Cosmin Contra, Filippo Inzaghi — 4-2, a second derby rout inside a single calendar year, ten goals to two across the two meetings, a statistic to be produced at family tables for a generation.

Europe, meanwhile, was being crossed at a steady march. In the UEFA Cup Milan put out BATE Borisov, 2-0 away on 20 September and 4-0 at home a week later, then CSKA Sofia, 2-0 at San Siro on 18 October and 1-0 in Bulgaria on 1 November — the beginning of a continental autumn that would reach the winter unbeaten.

And then, as empires do, this one tripped over something small. On 4 November, at Torino, Milan lost 1-0, Inzaghi missing a late penalty as if to underline the afternoon's thesis; the team sat fifth, five points behind the improbable leaders Chievo — Chievo! — and the club terminated the Imperatore's contract. His reign had lasted from summer to the first frost. Emperors, Milan was reminded, are a seasonal crop in Lombardy.

The Quiet Man of November

What happened next was announced quietly and would echo for a decade. On 5 November 2001 — the football says the empire fell on the fourth, the paperwork says the successor arrived on the fifth; the two dates are a single handover — Carlo Ancelotti was appointed coach of Milan. No trumpet sounded. Yet from that modest Monday would flow the Champions League of 2003, won on penalties over Juventus at Old Trafford; the scudetto of 2004; the grief of Istanbul in 2005; the redemption of Athens in 2007. And among his first and most consequential acts of imagination, Ancelotti would take the young Pirlo, lately arrived from across the road, and set him deep in front of the defence as a playmaker in withdrawal — inventing the register in which Milan's next great symphonies would be written.

The steadying was immediate and unspectacular, which is to say Ancelottian. Sporting Lisbon were beaten 2-0 at San Siro on 22 November and held 1-1 in Lisbon on 6 December, 3-1 on aggregate, carrying the UEFA Cup run towards spring; Perugia were removed from the Coppa Italia, 3-0 at home and 0-0 away. In the league, Chievo themselves were beaten 3-2 on 2 December, Juventus were held 1-1 on the ninth with Shevchenko scoring, and Verona were seen off 2-1 two days before Christmas — a run pointing towards the fourth place, and the return to the Champions League, with which the season would eventually close.

So ended a year that had opened in fog: sixth place and a sacking; a caretaker's immortal derby; a meteor named Comandini who flared for nineteen minutes and then chose a life instead of a career; an emperor deposed by a missed penalty; and at last a quiet man handed the keys in November. History rarely announces its hinges — it prefers a wet Monday and a modest signature. The rossonero year of 2001 put nothing in the trophy cabinet, and yet it gave the club Rui Costa's velvet, Inzaghi's hunger, Pirlo's compass and Ancelotti's patience, which is to say it gave the club the following decade. The fog, as it always does over the Navigli, lifted just enough to show the road.