The Tribunal, the Crown and the Going of Sheva

The Last Innocent Winter

There are years that enter like guests and years that enter like bailiffs, and 2006 arrived at Milanello wearing the first costume with the second folded in its briefcase. In January the fog lay on the Lombard plain as it always has, thick as a good stock before the rice goes in, and through it Ancelotti's Milan went about its winter trade: in pursuit of a Juventus that would not stumble, playing the sort of football that made the connoisseur purr and the accountant sleep soundly. Nobody yet knew that the season's true drama was being transcribed, syllable by syllable, in the offices of Turin prosecutors; nobody suspected that the league table studied over Monday espresso was a draft awaiting a most severe editor.

The house itself seemed eternal. Berlusconi presided, Galliani administered, Ancelotti — Carletto to a city that measures affection in diminutives — kept his kitchen calm, and on the pitch the armband belonged to Paolo Maldini, with Costacurta as his deputy: two defenders who between them had seen everything football can do to a man and forgiven most of it. In front of them Pirlo conducted from the depths, Gattuso supplied the fury that Pirlo declined to feel, Kaká drifted between the lines like a rumour, and at the point of it all Andriy Shevchenko, the Archer of the East, went on scoring — nineteen goals in the league that season, twenty-eight in all competitions, numbers a great striker files away with the composure of a notary.

The Coppa Italia supplied its customary comedy. Milan and Brescia traded eleven goals across two legs — 3-1, then 4-3, seven to four on the aggregate, a tie with more goals than sense — before Palermo administered the lesson in the quarter-finals: a narrow 1-0 for Milan at San Siro, then a 3-0 undressing in Sicily. Milan shrugged, as the aristocracy shrugs at a lost hand of cards, and turned back to the two tables that mattered, one domestic and one European, not knowing that by summer a tribunal would be redrawing the first.

Inzaghi's Spring

In Europe, Ancelotti's men moved with the ease of the practised. Milan went to Munich on 21 February and came away from the Allianz Arena with a 1-1 draw — the first visiting side to leave Bayern's new house without a defeat — Ballack striking on twenty-three minutes and Shevchenko replying from the penalty spot before the hour, after Ismaël had handled. And if the Germans read the away goal as a mere formality, the return at San Siro on 8 March disabused them in the most Milanese way possible. Inzaghi opened in the eighth minute, Shevchenko doubled the lead on twenty-five, and after Ismaël had lit a candle against the headwind on thirty-five, Inzaghi restored the distance two minutes into the second half and Kaká closed the account on fifty-nine: 4-1 on the night, 5-2 on the aggregate, and Bayern sent home to think about it.

The quarter-final against Lyon was a sterner sermon. In France on 29 March nothing happened, professionally and by mutual consent, 0-0; at San Siro on 4 April Inzaghi struck on twenty-five minutes, Diarra replied on thirty-one, and for the better part of an hour Milan lived with the away-goal guillotine glinting above the tie. Then came the ending that only Inzaghi writes: a goal in the eighty-eighth minute from a man who has spent his whole career on the blind side of the last defender, like a pickpocket at a procession, and Shevchenko's third deep in added time to make it 3-1 — the scoreline serene, the evening anything but.

The Ghost of the Camp Nou

Then Barcelona, and the frontier. On 18 April at San Siro the semi-final's only goal arrived through Ludovic Giuly on fifty-seven minutes, a small wound that refused to close. Milan went to Catalonia on 26 April needing one goal and believing, with the sincerity of the just, that they had scored it: Shevchenko put the ball in the net and the whistle took it out again, the apparent equaliser disallowed, the night finishing 0-0 and the tie 1-0 to Barcelona across the fortnight.

Barcelona went on to beat Arsenal in the final; Milan went home to chew on the oldest lesson in the competition — that the line between the immortals and the merely excellent is drawn in chalk, and chalk yields to a referee's thumb. It felt, that April, like the injustice of the year. The year, as it turned out, was only clearing its throat.

The Wiretaps of May

In May the storm broke, and it came not from the sky but from the transcript. Out of a Turin prosecutors' investigation into Juventus spilled the wiretaps — hour upon hour of recorded conversation revealing a network of clubs working to influence the men who appointed referees — and Italian football discovered that its championship had been played on a tilted table. The affair took the name Calciopoli, and Milan did not escape its pages: the club official Leonardo Meani stood accused of attempting to influence referees, and Adriano Galliani, the vice-president and chief executive, of improper contact with the designators themselves. Through the summer the sporting trials ground on, and the game held its breath.

What the pitch had said was plain enough. Milan finished the 2005-06 championship second with 88 points — twenty-eight wins, four draws, six defeats, a goal difference of plus fifty-four — three points behind Juventus's 91 and twelve clear of Inter's 76. That was the table written in sweat. The other table, the one written in ink, arrived in July.

The verdicts fell like scythed wheat. Juventus were placed last, stripped of the 2004-05 and 2005-06 titles and relegated to Serie B; the 2005-06 scudetto was assigned by the federation on 26 July to Inter — their first in seventeen years, conferred in a committee room upon a team the pitch had left twelve points behind Milan. Milan themselves had first faced a proposed deduction of forty-four points and exclusion from Europe altogether; appeal shaved the sentence to thirty points off the finished season — 88 became 58, second became third — and eight points off the next, with the Champions League place retained, the final recalibration arriving as late as 26 October. Honest chroniclers still disagree about which figures to print, because the figures kept changing with each hearing; what did not change was the smell.

Berlin, the Ninth of July

And then, in the middle of the shame, the crown. It is one of the ironies in which Italy specialises that the summer the game stood in the dock was the summer the nation won the World Cup, and Milan's contribution to the enterprise was not small: Nesta, Pirlo, Gattuso, Inzaghi and Gilardino, five rossoneri in the squad that went to Germany while the tribunals sat at home.

The final, at Berlin's Olympiastadion on 9 July against France, contained more theatre than a season at La Scala. Zidane converted an early penalty; Materazzi rose to equalise with a header from a corner delivered by Pirlo's cultured right foot; the match wound through extra time at 1-1, losing Zidane along the way to the red card that followed his headbutt — a great artist's final brushstroke, applied to entirely the wrong canvas. In the shootout Pirlo stepped up first for Italy and converted with the serenity of a man paying a small bill, and Italy won it 5-3. A country whose football had just been exposed as corrupt at the level of the committee was, at the level of the pitch, champion of the world; the reader may extract whichever moral he prefers.

Nor was football the only house rearranged that year. In April the general election had gone, narrowly, to Romano Prodi's centre-left, and Silvio Berlusconi — chairman and owner of Milan — lost his government in the spring, watched his club stand judgment in the summer, and remained, through all of it, immovably at the head of the table at San Siro. Whatever else 2006 took from him, it did not take the club.

The Going of Sheva

The summer's deepest cut, though, was not administered by any tribunal. On 28 May the club announced that Andriy Shevchenko — bought from Dynamo Kyiv in 1999, Ballon d'Or of 2004, the man who had buried the winning penalty in the Champions League final of 2003 and then, with the cruel symmetry football reserves for its favourites, missed the decisive one in the Istanbul collapse of 2005 — was leaving for Chelsea. The fee was reported at £30.8 million, some €43.875 million, at the time a record for a player signed by an English club, though rounder tongues have always preferred to say forty.

The move was as human as it was financial, which is why the city forgave it more than it ever admitted. Sheva's American wife, the model Kristen Pazik, wished to live in London; Berlusconi, godfather to Shevchenko's first son, let his favourite go with the reluctance of a father signing a daughter's marriage papers. In London the Ukrainian took the number seven shirt and scored on his debut, in the Community Shield on 13 August, a 2-1 defeat to Liverpool — a footnote with a bitter aftertaste, given where Liverpool stood in the recent architecture of Milanese grief. He left as one of the greatest strikers ever to wear the red and black; and the club he left, as if to prove that no man is a cathedral, would win the Champions League the very next season without him.

He did not leave alone. Rui Costa, the melancholy prince of the trequarti, was released on 25 May to fulfil his dream of returning to Benfica; Jaap Stam departed for Ajax on the first of July. In their places came Ricardo Oliveira from Real Betis for some seventeen million euros, the young Yoann Gourcuff from Rennes for around three, Daniele Bonera from Parma and Giuseppe Favalli on a free — honest reinforcements, though nobody pretended the scales balanced. Milan had sold a mythology and bought a squad.

Eight Points Below Zero

The new season began below sea level. Calciopoli had cost Milan its direct passage to the Champions League, so August found Ancelotti's men labouring through a third qualifying round against Red Star Belgrade — 1-0 at San Siro, 2-1 in Belgrade — the group stage secured by the end of the month with the relief of a man catching the last tram home along the Navigli.

The group itself, Group H, was won with 10 points and a peculiar shape. Milan beat AEK Athens 3-0 on 13 September, drew 0-0 in Lille, won 1-0 at Anderlecht in October and 4-1 against the same opponents at San Siro on the first of November — and then, the work already done, lost the last two, 1-0 in Athens on 21 November and 0-2 at home to Lille in December. The final ledger read Milan 10, Lille 9, AEK Athens 8, Anderlecht 4: first place secured with the economy of a household that spends only what dinner costs.

In the league the arithmetic was crueller, because Milan started on minus eight, and every Monday the table reminded them that they were running the race with a sack on their back. They beat Lazio 2-1 on 10 September and won 2-0 in Parma a week later, added a 1-0 over Ascoli through Jankulovski, and then the engine coughed: goalless at Livorno, goalless at home to Siena, a 1-1 at Sampdoria, and on 22 October a 0-2 at San Siro against Palermo that was the first defeat of the handicapped campaign. A 1-0 at Chievo steadied the ship; six days after Palermo came the derby of 28 October, which Inter won 4-3 in one of those matches that age cannot wither — Seedorf on fifty, then Gilardino, then Kaká a minute into added time, and still one goal short against four from the neighbours. Atalanta won 2-0 in Bergamo on 5 November and Roma took a 2-1 win at San Siro on the eleventh; and then, on 25 November against Messina, the season offered its most tender image: Paolo Maldini, captain since men now bald were boys, scoring in the thirteenth minute of a 1-0 win, as if to remind a tribunal-weary public that some institutions remain incorruptible.

December closed with the engine warming. Catania were dispatched 3-0 at San Siro on the twentieth, Kaká scoring in the fourth minute and the eighty-eighth around a goal from Gilardino; then Udinese were beaten 3-0 away on 23 December — Kaká from the spot, Gilardino, and Oliveira with his contribution to the new order. And so the year ended as it had lived, in contradiction: a club punished and a country crowned; a talisman sold and a captain still scoring; a league table that told the truth about a handicap, and a European campaign quietly assembling itself in the fog — for the group won in that poisoned autumn was the first stretch of the road that would end in Athens in May 2007. The verdict on 2006, then: a wretched year in the committee rooms, and in the only places that cannot be wiretapped — the pitch, the feet, the fog-wrapped evenings beneath the Madonnina — a year in which Milan remained, obstinately, Milan.