Eighty-Two Points, and a Wind Off Galicia

Epiphany, and the Holders Go to Rome

On the sixth of January, the day of the Epiphany, the champions of Europe went to Rome and beat Roma 2-1 in their own house. On the afternoon it looked like nothing more than a well-fed team resuming work after Christmas; the full meaning of it would not be legible until May, since it was Roma, of all the pursuers, who would chase the rossoneri longest and finish nearest. Five days later Reggina were dispatched 3-1 at San Siro and the machine went back to its unhurried humming. This was the age in which a great club lived out of airport lounges from September to May and the news of the sport arrived in the pocket rather than on the doorstep; Milan, in the first weeks of 2004, had every reason to like the news.

What they carried into the new year was the great cup itself, taken the previous May at Old Trafford with Juventus beaten on penalties — the coldest method the game has yet invented for deciding anything. Carlo Ancelotti, an Emilian with a temperament built for patience, presided over a side that played like chamber music. Pirlo was the metronome, set deep in front of the defence where playmakers had never before been allowed to live; Kaká glided between the lines with the untroubled face of a seminarian; Seedorf and Gattuso divided between them the labour of silk and the labour of steel; Nesta and the captain Maldini kept aristocratic order behind. At the point of it all stood Andriy Shevchenko, the archer of Kyiv, who in this one calendar year would gather up very nearly everything an individual footballer can gather. Above them all sat Silvio Berlusconi, president of the club and, at that moment, Prime Minister of the Republic — so that Milanello answered, in a manner of speaking, to the same man as the state itself.

Six-One, and the Leap Day Reply

The Coppa Italia was, for the great clubs of that era, a competition attended the way one attends a distant cousin's wedding: presence obligatory, enthusiasm optional. Lazio punished the condescension without mercy — 2-1 for the Romans at San Siro on the fifth of February, then a 4-0 flogging in the return six days later, 6-1 on the aggregate, a tie not so much lost as abandoned at the roadside. Lazio went on to win the cup itself, which at least lent the humiliation a retrospective dignity. The old rule holds: a team declares its hierarchy of desires by choosing where it is willing to bleed, and Milan had declared. The league and Europe were the year's real business, and everything else was to be got through.

Consolation came in the purest Milanese form. On the twenty-first of February San Siro divided itself in two, as it does twice a year, red and black against blue and black under the same Lombard sky, and Milan won the derby 3-2 against Internazionale — one of those derbies that alters nothing in the table and everything in the temper of the city, five goals traded in the great concrete bowl and argued over afterwards in every bar between the Duomo and the ring roads. Then, because 2004 was a leap year, the twenty-ninth of February existed at all; and it existed, so far as this chronicle is concerned, for a single purpose. Milan travelled to Rome and beat Lazio 1-0 in the league, a quiet correction of the February insult, administered without a word of commentary.

The Road to the Second of May

Titles of substance are won in the houses of rivals, and on the fourteenth of March Milan went to Turin, to the Stadio delle Alpi, and beat Juventus 3-1 — the kind of result that does not merely collect three points but removes an idea from a rival's head. From that afternoon the road ran straight and very slightly downhill, and Milan travelled it the way Ancelotti's teams travelled everything, without haste and without alarm, Pirlo turning the pages, Shevchenko supplying the punctuation.

It ended, fittingly, against the nearest pursuer. On the second of May, at San Siro, Milan beat Roma 1-0 and the seventeenth scudetto was mathematically sealed — the first since 1999, five years in which the tricolore had felt both near and maddeningly elsewhere. The final table read like the work of a careful house: eighty-two points from twenty-five wins, seven draws and two defeats; sixty-five goals scored against twenty-four conceded; Roma second on seventy-one, a full eleven points adrift; Juventus third on sixty-nine; Internazionale fourth on fifty-nine. On the sixteenth of May the last home crowd of the season was given a 4-2 festival against Brescia, the sort of match in which champions loosen their belts. And Shevchenko finished as the league's capocannoniere with twenty-four goals — twenty-nine across all competitions — which is to say that more than a third of the champions' entire league harvest came off a single Ukrainian bow.

The Debt Called In at the Riazor

Europe, meanwhile, had been proceeding with deceptive smoothness. As holders, Milan entered the knockout rounds defending the trophy of Old Trafford, and in the round of sixteen Sparta Prague were handled like a formality wearing the costume of a fixture: a goalless first leg under the floodlights of the Letná on the twenty-fourth of February, then 4-1 at San Siro a fortnight later — Inzaghi on the stroke of the interval, Shevchenko twice in the second half, and Gattuso, of all the unlikely poets, adding the fourth late on, with Tomáš Jun's reply for the Czechs a footnote in a foreign alphabet. Four-one on the aggregate, and the quarter-final produced Deportivo La Coruña of Galicia, a fine side from the Atlantic's edge. The first leg then produced what looked like the settlement of the entire affair.

On the twenty-third of March San Siro witnessed a 4-1 that had the manner of a coronation held in advance: Kaká just before the interval and again just after it, Shevchenko between his two, Pirlo completing the picture. Walter Pandiani had scored early for the Galicians, and an away goal, like an unpaid debt, has a way of quietly maturing. Two weeks later, on the seventh of April, at the Riazor, with the cold ocean at the stadium's back, the debt was called in with interest. Deportivo scored four times without reply — Pandiani again, then Valerón, then Luque before the break, and Fran to close the account — and Milan, champions of Europe, three goals to the good from the first leg, were out, 5-4 on the aggregate, victims of one of the great comebacks the competition has ever recorded.

No tactical explanation of that night fully survives contact with it, and I distrust the ones offered with too much confidence. The Greeks kept a word for what happens when the gods notice a man enjoying his own excellence a little too visibly, and a windswept ground beside the Atlantic is precisely the sort of place where the gods are said to keep watch. Milan had arrived as holders, as champions-elect of Italy, as the most complete team in Europe. They left in silence, the title defence dead on a Galician shore, three weeks before the scudetto that would gild the year. An honest chronicle holds both in the same hand and does not pretend the hand is steady.

The Man Who Tried to Give Back the House

Because 2004 was a year of trophies and of one enormous wound, it is fitting that its most instructive story belongs to a man who appeared in almost none of its matches. Fernando Redondo had come from Real Madrid in 2000 for a large fee, an Argentine midfielder of such bearing that even his walking looked composed, and in one of his very first training sessions the knee gave way — ligaments torn, and with them roughly two and a half years of his football life. Here begins the part that belongs to the moral history of the game rather than to its statistics. Considering it dishonest to be paid for work he could not perform, Redondo went to Adriano Galliani and asked that his wage — a multi-million wage, by every report — be suspended until he could play again; and he tried, further, to give back the house and the car the club had placed at his disposal. Football has produced a great many stories about money. It has produced very few in which the money runs in that direction.

He fought his way back, because men of that sort always do, and made a combined sixteen league appearances across two seasons — a genuine, if modest, hand in the seventeenth scudetto. Then, in late 2004, at thirty-five, the knee betrayed him a final time, and he retired. Measured by an accountant, Milan's investment in Redondo returned almost nothing. Measured any other way, it returned one of the most respected men ever to pass through Milanello, and a lesson the club has kept: that in the richest age football had yet known, the rarest signing available was a conscience.

Three Arrows in August

Summer redrew the margins of the squad while leaving its heart untouched. Out went Roque Júnior to Bayer Leverkusen and Martin Laursen to Aston Villa for some three million euros; Rivaldo, a golden name of another vintage, moved on; and Redondo laid down his boots in the manner just described. In came Jaap Stam from Lazio, a Dutch defender built along the lines of the Alps you can see from the city on the clear days; Hernán Crespo, a centre-forward of pedigree, on a season's loan from Chelsea; and Vikash Dhorasoo, free from Lyon, for the midfield's quieter hours. The spine — Kaká, Cafu, Pirlo, Nesta, Seedorf, Gattuso, Maldini — stayed exactly where it was, which is to say at the centre of the European game.

The new season introduced itself on the twenty-first of August at San Siro, where 33,274 gathered for the Supercoppa Italiana: Lazio, holders of the cup they had taken through Milan's ribs in February, against the champions of Italy. Shevchenko scored all three in a 3-0 win — one before the interval, one immediately after it, one late — a hat-trick that settled the year's last outstanding account with the Romans and put the first trophy of 2004-05 on the shelf before the leaves were down. There is a particular pleasure in serving a guest the dish he once sent back; Shevchenko served it three times.

Group F and the Long Autumn

In Europe the draw produced Group F, and Milan moved through it as aristocrats move through the early rooms of a reception: with courtesy, and without mercy. They won in Donetsk on the fourteenth of September, 1-0 over Shakhtar; they beat Celtic 3-1 at San Siro a fortnight later — Shevchenko early, Varga replying for the Scots, before Inzaghi and Pirlo struck in the final two minutes, the second arriving as the clock turned ninety. Then came Barcelona, twice, and the two evenings belong together like panels of a diptych: on the twentieth of October, 76,502 filled San Siro and Shevchenko's strike just past the half-hour won it 1-0; on the second of November, 94,682 filled the Camp Nou and the Catalans took the return 2-1, Shevchenko's early strike answered by Eto'o and then, in the eighty-ninth minute, by Ronaldinho. No great harm done. Shakhtar were dismantled 4-0 at San Siro in late November — two for Kaká, two for Crespo — and a goalless evening at Celtic Park in early December closed the group with Milan on top of it, thirteen points gathered, the knockout rounds waiting on their pleasure in the new year.

The domestic autumn held the same temperature. Lazio were beaten again in Rome in late September, 2-1, Shevchenko striking twice inside four minutes; the October derby finished 0-0 before 79,775, an afternoon of held breath rather than spilled blood; and on the twelfth of December Fiorentina were taken apart 6-0 at San Siro — Seedorf opening the account and closing it, an own goal from the young Chiellini, Shevchenko twice, Crespo once. The calendar year ended in Turin on the eighteenth of December: Juventus 0-0 Milan, top of the table against top of the table, Capello's newly rebuilt Juventus against Ancelotti's champions, two heavyweight chess players studying the board and agreeing, for the moment, to adjourn. The match that would define the following spring was already set out between them.

The Golden Ball

On the thirteenth of December, between the Fiorentina evening and the Turin adjournment, France Football announced what the season had been announcing for a year: Andriy Shevchenko was the European Footballer of the Year. He collected 175 votes to the 139 of Barcelona's Deco, and became the third Ukrainian to lift the Ballon d'Or, after Blokhin in 1975 and Belanov in 1986 — a lineage out of the east that he now carried into the red and black. For a man who had worn the capocannoniere's crown in spring, struck a hat-trick for the August silverware and led the autumn charge on both fronts, the golden ball completed a personal year with few equals in the club's long history.

2004 left two memories in the same house, and neither has ever evicted the other. There is the seventeenth scudetto, eighty-two points, eleven of daylight over the nearest rival, a Supercoppa taken with three arrows, a European group topped at a canter, a golden ball carried home in December. And there are ninety minutes on the Galician coast in which a three-goal cushion dissolved and the champions of Europe handed back their crown without so much as reaching a semi-final. Standing between the triumph and the wound is a limping Argentine who had tried to return a house and a car because he would not be paid for football he could not play. Trophies tell you how good a team is; that gesture tells you what a club is worth. In 2004, uncommonly, Milan could point to both: a tricolore sewn onto the shirt for the summer, and a set of keys a man had tried to hand back. The Atlantic keeps what it takes. Neither of those two things went with it.