2003 — The Sixth Cup and the House of Maldini | Le Cronache

Fog on the Navigli, Silver at Old Trafford

There are years a club merely endures and years a club inhabits, and 2003 was for the Rossoneri emphatically the second kind: a year lived at full stretch, from the winter fogs that roll off the Lombard plain and settle on the Navigli like a grandmother's shawl, to a May evening in Manchester when the sixth European Cup was lifted toward a foreign sky by the most Milanese hand imaginable. The reader who wants the ledger first shall have it, because a chronicler owes his reader the bones before the broth: winners of the Champions League, winners of the Coppa Italia, third in a Serie A that belonged to Juventus, losers of two other finals from the penalty spot, winners of a third by a single early goal, and then, as the leaves turned, the first strides of the march that would become the seventeenth scudetto. But a ledger is bones without broth, and 2003 deserves the whole risotto, saffron and all.

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.

Old Trafford, 28 May 2003: captain Paolo Maldini (No. 3) raises the European Cup after Milan beat Juventus 3-2 on penalties in the first all-Italian final — forty years after his father Cesare lifted the same trophy at Wembley.
Photo by Soccer illustrated (Wikimedia Commons), own work, 28 May 2003 — CC BY-SA 3.0

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its base, on the very ground where convention posted a destroyer, he installed a creator: Andrea Pirlo, the metronome, withdrawn to the deepest midfield station and instructed to conduct rather than to chase.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 squad had been reinforced the previous summer with a boldness that only Berlusconi's Milan could then afford. Alessandro Nesta came from Lazio for a shade under thirty-one million euro — sixty billion lire in the old money, and comfortably the largest fee Milan paid that summer; Seedorf crossed the city from Inter for roughly twenty-two and a half million; Rivaldo arrived free from Barcelona and Jon Dahl Tomasson free from Feyenoord, two pedigrees acquired for the price of their signatures; Dario Simic came over from Inter for about five million, while Francesco Coco and Umit Davala made the reverse journey to the neighbours. Behind them all 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 quarrel; 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 accounting; Serginho scored for Milan; Birindelli replied for Juventus; then 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. So it came to Shevchenko, the Ukrainian, walking the long 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; 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 write and football simply produces, the way the plain produces fog.

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.

Dida in the Milan goal at San Siro, 6 May 2007. Four years earlier at Old Trafford he had saved from Trezeguet, Zalayeta and Montero — three stops in the shootout that brought the sixth European Cup home.
Photo by Roberto Vicario, Toscanafotonotizie.it (Milan-Fiorentina, 6 May 2007) — CC BY-SA 3.0

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 dining at other people's tables. 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 moralist records the symmetry without surprise: the gods of the twelve yards keep strict double-entry books, and they always, eventually, balance them.

Autumn's Promise

But 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 Kaka 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 — 82 points at the close, twenty-five wins, seven draws, two defeats, eleven clear of Roma, the first league title since 1999. That arithmetic belongs, strictly, to the next chapter; the momentum belongs entirely to this one, the way the flavour of a broth belongs to the hours before anyone tastes it.

So let 2003 stand in the ledger as the year Ancelotti's Milan declared itself: not merely a team that won, but a school that argued and a family that remembered. Its genius, examined closely, was patience — the patience of Pirlo's deep station, where the game 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. The fog lifts slowly over the Lombard plain, as anyone who has waited on the Navigli in January knows. But when it lifted that year, the Madonnina stood exactly where she had always stood, gilded above the city, looking down — for the sixth time, and not the last — on the champions of Europe.

Andrea Pirlo warming up in rossonero. Ancelotti dropped him to the base of the diamond as a deep-lying regista — the move that turned a discarded trequartista into the metronome of the 2003 side.
Photo by Roberto Vicario, Toscanafotonotizie.it (Milan-Fiorentina, 6 May 2007) — CC BY-SA 3.0

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