Six Minutes in Istanbul

The Fog Lifts on a Masterpiece

There are Januaries when the fog comes down over the Navigli like a curtain drawn by a discreet servant, and the city of Milan conducts its business — the silk, the Borsa, the slow golden ceremony of the risotto — without any need to see past its own doorstep; and in the first weeks of 2005 the rossonero half of that city lived contentedly inside the fog, because it knew, without having to look, that it possessed the most complete football team in Europe. Carlo Ancelotti, a man of the Emilian plains who carries his tactical intelligence the way a good innkeeper carries his cellar key — invisibly, until the precise moment it is needed — had spent three years polishing his diamond: Dida behind a rampart of Cafu, Stam, Nesta and the eternal Maldini; Pirlo at the base of midfield, the watchmaker, taking the old idea of the regista and winding it backwards until it told a new time; Gattuso snarling at his shoulder to guard the watch; Seedorf carrying the piano up and down the staircase without complaint; Kaka, the boy with the face of a seminarian and the stride of a thoroughbred, at the tip of it all; and ahead of them Shevchenko, the archer of Kyiv, reigning holder of the Ballon d'Or, partnered by Hernan Crespo, borrowed from London and playing like a man determined never to be given back.

Above the team sat the same twin powers that had governed it for a decade: Silvio Berlusconi, owner of the club and at that moment Prime Minister of Italy, a coincidence of thrones that only this country could have arranged; and beneath him the quiet hierarchy of the dressing room, Paolo Maldini the captain, Alessandro Costacurta his vice, men who had defended the same goal since before some of their team-mates could read. This was the mature summit of the era that followed Capello and Zaccheroni: champions of Europe in 2003, champions of Italy in 2004, and now, in 2005, a side entering the spring with two crowns in view and no reason — none that logic could supply — to doubt it would take at least one of them.

Capello Returns as the Enemy

History, which has a taste for irony as sharp as any Milanese aperitivo, arranged that the man barring the road to the scudetto should be Fabio Capello, once the architect of Milanello's invincible years and now dressed in the black and white of Turin. All winter and spring the two great households traded the head of the table like duellists trading ground, until with four rounds still to play they arrived at the head of the classifica dead level on seventy-six points apiece, neither able to shake the other off; and all the while every man in Italy understood that the argument would be settled not by arithmetic but by a single evening, face to face, as these things were settled in the duelling age.

That evening came on 8 May at San Siro, and it lasted, in truth, one thrust: David Trezeguet, a striker whose economy of movement would have pleased a Lombard accountant, scored the only goal, and Juventus left with the points and, in effect, with the title. The final ledger read 79 points for Milan — twenty-three victories, ten draws, five defeats, sixty-three goals scored and a mere twenty-eight conceded — against 86 for Juventus; a record that would have won many a championship and in this one bought only silver. The Coppa Italia had already been surrendered at the quarter-final stage, so the season now narrowed to a single prize. And here the chronicler must add the footnote that history itself would add: the following year the tribunals of Calciopoli would strike that Juventus scudetto from the books, and the wiretaps would drag half of Italian football into the dock. But that thunder belonged to 2006. In 2005 the table said what it said, and Milan read it with the particular bitterness of a family beaten at its own recipe by a cook it had trained.

The Old Roads of Europe

In Europe, meanwhile, the team moved with the calm of a great liner leaving harbour. Manchester United were met in the round of sixteen and dispatched with a symmetry so perfect it might have been drawn with compasses: one-nil at Old Trafford on 23 February, Crespo striking in the 78th minute after Roy Carroll had spilled a Seedorf drive — the first time in their history that Milan had won on that ground — and one-nil at San Siro on 8 March, Crespo again, just past the hour, heading a Cafu cross softly over the goalkeeper and into the far corner. The borrowed Argentine had scored in both legs, as if to remind his paymasters in London precisely what they had lent away.

The quarter-final gave the continent a spectacle of another kind, for the draw had produced the derby, Milan against Inter, two households sharing one cathedral of a stadium and one increasingly thin supply of patience. The first leg, on 6 April, Milan won 2-0 — Stam heading in on the stroke of half-time, Shevchenko concluding in the 75th — and the second, six nights later with Inter the nominal hosts of the same ground, descended into the grotesque. Milan led on the night, three-nil on aggregate; Cambiasso had a would-be equaliser disallowed; and the nerazzurro end began to rain flares onto the pitch, one of which struck Dida, Milan's goalkeeper, as he stood in his area. The referee, after some seventy-three minutes, abandoned the match. UEFA awarded Milan the game 3-0 — five-nil across the tie — fined Inter and ordered them to play their next European home fixtures behind closed doors, in front of the only audience that could be trusted: nobody. A European semi-final had been reached through smoke, quite literally; and the city, which shares one cathedral of a stadium between two quarrelling households, spent the spring debating whose shame the burning debris truly was.

The semi-final against PSV Eindhoven ought to be re-read today with a shiver, for it was a rehearsal whose meaning nobody grasped at the time. Two-nil at San Siro on 26 April, Shevchenko in the 43rd minute and Tomasson at the death in the 90th, seemed ample; in Eindhoven on 4 May the Dutch scored three — Park Ji-sung inside ten minutes, Phillip Cocu twice, the second of them at the very end — and only Ambrosini's goal in the closing minute — an away goal worth a kingdom — carried Milan through a 3-3 aggregate on the away-goals rule. A two-goal cushion had all but vanished in a single second half, and Milan had survived by the width of a fingernail. The gods, who are pedants, had shown Ancelotti the examination paper a fortnight before the exam; like all of us, he could not read their handwriting until afterwards.

Forty-Five Minutes of Paradise

The final was set for 25 May at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium, a concrete amphitheatre planted on the windswept edge of Istanbul, where 69,000 souls gathered under the whistle of the Spaniard Mejuto Gonzalez to watch Milan meet Liverpool, the aristocrat of Merseyside managed by Rafael Benitez. Ancelotti named the diamond at full strength: Dida; Cafu, Stam, Nesta, Maldini; Pirlo, Gattuso, Seedorf, Kaka; Shevchenko and Crespo. It was, on paper and for forty-five minutes on grass, one of the great sides of the modern age arranged in its ideal form.

What followed in the first half deserves to be kept under glass. Within the first minute — the clocks made it roughly fifty seconds — Pirlo curled in a free-kick and Maldini, the captain, arriving on the volley with the timing of a man who had rehearsed the moment across an entire career, scored the fastest goal ever recorded in the final of the European Cup in any of its incarnations, and at thirty-six years and three hundred and thirty-three days became the oldest man ever to score in one. It was his seventh such final, a tally no footballer has bettered; no man had brought more of himself to this competition. Before the interval Crespo struck twice more, in the 39th minute and the 44th, and Milan walked to the dressing room three goals to the good, playing football of such serene superiority that the neutral half of the stadium had already begun composing its obituaries for the English. The risotto, as the saying goes in the old trattorie behind the Duomo, was cooked, plated and steaming on the table.

The Six Minutes

Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained the six minutes, and perhaps nobody should try too hard, for some catastrophes are diminished by explanation. Benitez sent on Hamann at the interval and re-drew his midfield; and between the 54th minute and the 60th, football's oldest law — that no lead is a possession, only a loan — was enforced with a severity not seen in a final before or since. Gerrard struck the first. Smicer added the second two minutes later. In the 60th minute Dida saved Xabi Alonso's penalty and Alonso, following in, buried the rebound. Three-nil had become three-three inside six minutes, and the great liner, which an hour earlier had been steaming for harbour with the band playing, was suddenly taking water in every compartment.

Extra time belonged, in its decisive image, to Andriy Shevchenko — though not in the way the archer of Kyiv had ever dreamed. In the 117th minute Serginho delivered the cross and Shevchenko rose and headed it true; Jerzy Dudek, the Polish goalkeeper, clawed the ball out, and when Shevchenko lashed the rebound from barely three yards, Dudek — off balance, half-fallen, operating it seemed by some private arrangement with providence — flung it over the bar. Years later, when UEFA's own website put the question to the public in 2011, that double save was voted the greatest moment in the history of the Champions League: which is to say that the finest single moment this competition has produced was manufactured, unwillingly, from Milanese despair.

So it came to penalties, and the account must be given plainly, as bad news is given in Lombard houses. Serginho missed. Dudek saved from Pirlo. And when the shootout stood at 3-2 to Liverpool and everything Milanese depended on one kick, the man walking forward was Shevchenko — the same Shevchenko who, two years earlier at Old Trafford, had calmly beaten Buffon from the spot to win Milan the European Cup. Now the inversion completed itself: Dudek guessed rightly, saved, and the hero of 2003 stood in the Istanbul night as the face of 2005, while Liverpool lifted their fifth European title. Shevchenko would reflect, long afterwards, that football is beautiful for precisely this reason — that nothing in it can ever be taken for granted — and there is more wisdom in that sentence than in all the tactical post-mortems ever written about Istanbul. He was a great man on the worst night of his working life, and the chronicler who cannot love him for both halves of that sentence has no business writing about this game.

A Summer of Repairs

A house that has survived an earthquake does not rebuild its foundations; it repairs its roof, and this was the summer's philosophy at Milanello. Crespo, his loan concluded, went back to Chelsea carrying the strange distinction of two goals in a lost final; Tomasson departed for Stuttgart, where a four-year contract and a World Cup summer awaited him; Dhorasoo went back to Paris Saint-Germain and Pancaro, out of the reckoning, to Fiorentina. In their places came youth and ballast in careful proportions: Alberto Gilardino, the marquee purchase, arrived from Parma to learn the striker's trade at the highest table; Marek Jankulovski came from Udinese to give the left flank fresh lungs; Christian Vieri crossed the city from Inter on a two-year arrangement, a bull seeking pasture and playing time with a World Cup on the horizon; Johann Vogel arrived free from PSV; and the towering Zeljko Kalac came, also without fee, from Perugia to stand guard behind Dida.

The shop window for this refitted side was American: in July Milan crossed the Atlantic for the World Series of Football, losing 1-0 to Chelsea at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough on the 24th, beating Chicago Fire 3-1 at Soldier Field on the 27th, and drawing 1-1 with Chelsea again on the 31st, Drogba having put the Londoners ahead and Rui Costa curling the equaliser past Cech with ten minutes to run — the old Portuguese aesthete reminding everyone, in a mid-summer exhibition, that elegance does not take holidays. These were friendlies and weighed accordingly; but for a squad that had left a piece of itself on the Bosphorus, the mere act of playing again, of putting the shirt back on and finding it still fitted, had a therapeutic value no ledger records.

The Verdict of Autumn

The question that hung over the autumn was medical rather than technical: does a team recover from Istanbul, or does it limp forever? The answer came in instalments. A modest 1-1 at Ascoli opened the league on 28 August; Lazio were beaten 2-0 at San Siro on 21 September; and then, on 29 October, came the evening the fog-bound city had circled in red — Juventus, Capello, the takers of May, beaten 3-1 at San Siro in a performance of controlled fury. A week and a day later Udinese were dismantled 5-1. Whatever had been broken in Turkey, the machinery still turned; the watchmaker still kept time; the archer still drew his bow. Only December brought the counterweight that this chronicle, in honesty, must record: on the 11th, Inter took the derby 3-2 at San Siro, a defeat that stung the more for arriving in the season of goodwill.

Europe, too, resumed as if by muscle memory. Drawn into Group E with PSV Eindhoven, Schalke 04 and Fenerbahce — the last name carrying its own Turkish echo, which nobody at Milanello can have relished — Milan beat the Istanbul club 3-1 at San Siro on 13 September, drew 2-2 away to Schalke a fortnight later, played out a goalless evening with PSV on 19 October, and finished the business by winning the group. The team that had suffered the most public collapse in the history of finals had returned to the same competition and topped its section without visible trembling, which tells you something about the constitution of the men Ancelotti had assembled, and something more about Ancelotti himself, who absorbed the catastrophe as the Po plain absorbs the spring floods: silently, completely, and with next year's harvest already in mind.

How, then, shall the year be judged? By trophies, 2005 was a famine: second in the league by seven points, out of the Coppa at the quarter-final, and beaten in Europe's final by a method so improbable that mathematicians, not merely journalists, ought to have studied it. And yet the chronicler declines to write it down as a year of failure, because failure does not play the forty-five minutes Milan played in Istanbul, and failure does not stand up in August and beat the takers of its scudetto 3-1 by October. What happened at the Ataturk was not the exposure of a weak side but the punishment of a great one — the old gods collecting, with interest and in a single evening, for all the seasons of abundance. Milan ended 2005 with empty hands and an unbroken spine, and the two years that followed would show which of those facts was the truth of the matter. The fog came back down over the Navigli in December, as it always does; and under it, quietly, a wounded giant was counting the days to its revenge.