Forty Years, Two English Nights

The Clerk's Version

Winners of the Champions League. Winners of the Coppa Italia. Third in a Serie A that belonged to Juventus. Beaten in two further finals from the penalty spot, victorious in a third by a single early goal — and then, as the leaves turned, the opening strides of the march that would become the seventeenth scudetto. That is 2003 as a clerk would set it down, and the clerk is not wrong, only early. What his column cannot hold is that Milan lived the year at full stretch, from an April evening in Amsterdam to a December night in Yokohama, with a floodlit hour in Manchester at its centre and the most Milanese hand imaginable lifting the sixth European Cup into a foreign sky.

It helps to remember what Italy was that year, because the country and its football have always been cooked in the same pot. Serie A still carried itself as the grandest league on earth, its Sundays the world's theatre; Silvio Berlusconi sat in the president's chair as he had since the age of the Dutchmen; and the continent's crown was contested that spring by Italians alone, for the final at Old Trafford — Juventus against Milan — was the first European Cup final ever played between two Italian sides. The scandals that would later reshape the peninsula's game lay three years in the future, unimagined. For one season Italy looked at Europe the way a chef looks at his own dining room: everything being served out there had been prepared in our kitchen.

The Quiet Architect and His Diamond

Carlo Ancelotti's contribution to the tactical literature was, like the man himself, modest in manner and radical in substance. He took the old 4-4-2 and folded it into a diamond — the 4-1-2-1-2, as the notebooks solemnly recorded it — and at its base, on the very ground where convention posted a destroyer, he installed a creator: Andrea Pirlo, the metronome, withdrawn to the deepest midfield station and instructed to conduct rather than to chase. Ahead of him Rui Costa embroidered as trequartista; on the diamond's flanks ran Clarence Seedorf, the brains, and Gennaro Gattuso, the growl, one appointed to think and one to bite; and from the trio of Shevchenko, Inzaghi and Tomasson two forwards were chosen each week to eat whatever the midfield had cooked. It was a formation that trusted intelligence over sweat while never quite dispensing with the sweat, which is as good a definition of Milanese industry as any.

The pieces had been gathered the previous summer — Nesta, Seedorf, Rivaldo, Tomasson — and the fees, the swaps and the deadline-day heartbreak that brought them belong to the chapter just closed, which paid for them properly. What that chapter could not yet show was the finished arrangement standing on grass. Behind the diamond stood Dida in goal, Paolo Maldini wearing the captain's band and Alessandro Costacurta serving as his vicar — a defence with the combined institutional memory of an archive, and rather better legs.

A Spring of Neighbours

The road to Manchester passed first through Amsterdam, where on 8 April the quarter-final's first leg against Ajax produced a goalless evening that satisfied the accountants and nobody else. The return at San Siro on 23 April was another animal entirely. Inzaghi struck on the half-hour; Litmanen levelled on sixty-three and Shevchenko answered inside a minute; Pienaar levelled again on seventy-eight, and at 2-2 the away goals belonged to Amsterdam, which is to say the semi-final did too. Then, in the ninetieth minute, Inzaghi lifted the ball over the advancing goalkeeper and Tomasson steered it across the line for 3-2, in that hour when a great stadium stops being a building and becomes a lung. Milan advanced, breathless, and the city began to suspect what kind of spring it was going to be.

It was, of course, a spring of neighbours. The semi-final paired Milan with Inter, and so for two May evenings — the 7th and the 13th — the same stadium hosted both legs of a tie in which home and away were legal fictions, San Siro changing its shirt between appointments. The first leg, nominally Milan's, finished 0-0; the second, nominally Inter's, finished 1-1, Shevchenko striking for the Rossoneri and the young Obafemi Martins answering late for the other parish. One goal apiece across the fortnight, and Milan passed to the final on the away-goals rule, having scored their decisive away goal in a ground that was also their own house — a paradox worthy of a scholastic philosopher, and the sweetest technicality in the long Milanese history of technicalities. The derby is always a family row; this one was settled, fittingly, over the deeds to the family home.

One Hundred and Twenty Minutes of Nothing, Then Everything

Old Trafford, 28 May 2003: 62,315 inside, Markus Merk of Germany carrying the whistle, and the first all-Italian final in the history of the European Cup. Ancelotti sent out Dida; Costacurta, Nesta, Maldini and Kaladze across the back; Gattuso, Pirlo, Seedorf and Rui Costa in the diamond; Inzaghi and Shevchenko ahead — with Roque Junior, Ambrosini and Serginho rising from the bench as the night lengthened. What followed was one hundred and twenty minutes without a goal, and the neutral press would grumble about those minutes for years, as neutrals do whenever two Italian schools meet and each knows the other's catechism by heart. To anyone raised in the tactical faith it was not sterility but siege warfare, two fortified cities declining to open their gates to one another; to everyone, believer and heathen alike, it ended as penalties.

From twelve yards the final became a duel of goalkeepers. Dida saved from Trezeguet to open the evening's tally; then Serginho took the long walk out of the centre circle to face Buffon — a walk he would describe years afterwards to ESPN Brasil as being just long enough for a man's whole life to pass in front of him — and scored. Birindelli replied for Juventus; Buffon saved from Seedorf and later from Kaladze, and for a while the cup leaned perceptibly toward Turin; but Dida denied Zalayeta and then Montero — three saves in a single shootout, a goalkeeper's harvest — while Nesta and Del Piero, in their turns, kept their nerve. The harvest was less a miracle than an inheritance. The man in the Milan goal had been born Nelson de Jesus da Silva at Irará, in the Bahian interior, and called Dida from childhood by a household that never discovered where the name came from; he says so himself, and the origin is still missing. Brazil had watched him do this before. At Cruzeiro, between 1994 and 1998, he took the Copa do Brasil of 1996 and the Libertadores of 1997 with decisive saves from the spot; at the Copa América of 1999 he stopped penalties against Chile and against Argentina. His countrymen keep the figures the way other countries keep feast days: something near three-quarters of the kicks he faced for the seleção turned away, thirty and more saved across a career. At Old Trafford he did only what he had always done at home.

So it came to Shevchenko, the Ukrainian, walking that same walk with the sixth cup balanced invisibly on his instep. He put his kick past Buffon for 3-2 and became the first Ukrainian ever to win the competition. A second first stood on the pitch beside him, and it belonged to a man who had failed: Clarence Seedorf, denied by Buffon from the spot, finished the night as the first footballer to win the competition with three different clubs — Ajax in 1995, Real Madrid in 1998, Milan now — and he had done it against the Juventus of his friend Edgar Davids. The Netherlands has savoured the irony ever since: the one who missed is the one in the photographs with his hands on the trophy. And the man of the match, the arbiters decided, was none of the marksmen but Paolo Maldini — which tells you precisely how the nothing of those hundred and twenty minutes had been manufactured, and by whom.

The House of Maldini

And now the micro-history, which at this club is always family history. On 22 May 1963, at Wembley, Cesare Maldini had captained Milan to the club's first European Cup, a 2-1 over Benfica, and in doing so became the first Italian captain ever to raise that trophy. Forty years later, almost to the week, his son Paolo lifted the sixth at Old Trafford — again on English soil, again with the band on his arm. Two Maldinis, two English evenings, one club: a symmetry no novelist would dare to invent, and football produced it without comment.

For Paolo the night was also an exorcism. He had stood on the losing side in the finals of 1993 and 1995, near enough each time to read the engraving, and a lesser man might have concluded that the cup held something against the family's second generation. Instead he waited, defended, captained; and on 28 May the circle closed, father and son joining the mere handful of pairs in the whole history of the competition to have both captained a European champion. In the house of Maldini the trophy cabinet is not furniture; it is genealogy.

A Roman Feast, a Lombard Hunger

The Coppa Italia final that year was a two-legged affair that bracketed the Manchester expedition like bookends. On 20 May, eight days before Old Trafford, Milan went to the Stadio Olimpico and won 4-1 before 60,647 Romans: Totti struck first on twenty-eight minutes, and then the evening turned rossonero — Serginho from the spot on the hour's edge at 62, Ambrosini on 70, Serginho again on 73, Shevchenko on 89. The return at San Siro on 31 May, played before 76,061 spectators still hoarse from Manchester, finished 2-2 — Totti twice, on 56 and 64, answered by Rivaldo on 65 and by Inzaghi in the third minute of stoppage time — and the aggregate read 6-3. A fifth Coppa Italia was set on the table three days after the sixth European Cup, and even the most demanding Milanese palate conceded the pairing.

And yet the league, the bread-and-butter Sunday league, told a humbler story, as leagues insist on doing. Milan finished the 2002-03 Serie A third, with 61 points from 34 matches — eighteen won, seven drawn, nine lost, fifty-five scored against thirty conceded — behind Inter on 65 and champions Juventus on 72. Nine defeats is a confession, however it is dressed, and it measured the price of a season spent glancing toward Europe. The house stayed full regardless: an average of 61,534 for home league afternoons, with 78,843 — the season's high water — for the November derby. Filippo Inzaghi, the poacher of half-metres, finished as the club's leading scorer with 17 in the championship and 30 across all competitions, numbers gathered in that penalty-box parish where he resided like a verger who never once left the church.

Three Cups on Foreign Tables

Success breeds fixtures, and the champion of Europe spends its August and its December at other people's tables, living out of departure gates. The first was set, improbably, in New Jersey: the Supercoppa Italiana of 3 August was staged at Giants Stadium while both clubs toured America on the ChampionsWorld Series, and there Juventus took a small revenge for Manchester — goalless after ninety, Pirlo converting a penalty in extra time, Trezeguet levelling within about a minute, and the shootout, this once, declining to obey Dida. Monaco was kinder. On 29 August, at the Stade Louis II before a boutique gathering of 16,885, Milan met Porto, holders of the UEFA Cup, for the European Super Cup, and Shevchenko settled the matter in the tenth minute: 1-0, a trophy banked before the evening had properly begun to perspire.

Yokohama was crueller. On 14 December, before 66,757 in the International Stadium, Milan faced Boca Juniors, champions of the Libertadores, for the Intercontinental Cup and the world title that travels with it. Tomasson put Milan ahead on twenty-three minutes and Matias Donnet levelled five minutes later; it finished 1-1 after extra time; penalties again; and this time the coin fell the other way, Boca winning 3-1 from the spot while Donnet, the man who had scored their goal, collected the man-of-the-match honours. A year won on penalties in May was lost on penalties in December, and the two nights are set side by side here and left there. The spot at Yokohama had no memory of the spot at Old Trafford.

Outvoted by the Table

December's disappointment was already being outvoted by the league table. The 2003-04 championship had begun in the autumn, and Milan had begun it like a side that had studied its own nine confessions of the previous spring and resolved to sin no more; the young Brazilian Kaká had arrived that year to enrich the midfield's stations of grace, and the run assembled through the second half of 2003 would roll on through winter and spring to the seventeenth scudetto. What that title finally counted, and the May afternoon on which it was sealed, is business for the year that follows; the momentum is entirely the property of this one.

Ancelotti's Milan had by then become two things at once — a school that argued about the game and a family that remembered it — and what held the two together, examined closely, was patience: the patience of Pirlo's deep station, where play was slowed until it confessed; the patience of a forty-year family errand completed by a son on the same island where his father began it; the patience of one hundred and twenty scoreless minutes endured at Old Trafford for the right to be perfect from twelve yards. Six European Cups, then, and the sixth carried out of England by a captain whose father had carried the first out of England before him. And the autumn was already several strides into the next thing, the floodlights coming on earlier each week, the table beginning to lean.