2008 — The Year the Fog Came Down | Le Cronache

The Fog Comes Down

In Milan the fog never announces itself. It slides up from the plain in the small hours, swallows the Navigli one bridge at a time, erases the Madonnina from her perch above the city, and by morning a town that could once see the Alps must take their existence on faith. That, more or less, is what the year 2008 did to the Rossoneri. They entered it as champions of Europe and of the world, the silverware of 2007 still warm in the cabinet, and they left it as a fifth-placed side exiled from the Champions League for the first time since 2001-02, playing their continental football on Thursday nights against Heerenveen and Braga, and consoling themselves with the most expensive smile in the game. Between those two poles lies one of the strangest, saddest, most human years in the club's modern history.

The bare arithmetic of the 2007-08 championship reads like a doctor's chart: fifth place, 64 points, eighteen wins, ten draws, ten defeats, sixty-six goals scored and thirty-eight allowed. A team that scores sixty-six times is not sick in the attack; a team that loses ten matches is sick somewhere subtler — in the legs, in the calendar, in the soul. Carlo Ancelotti, who coached the whole of 2008 the way a patient cook stirs risotto, no panic, no flame turned suddenly high, presided over both halves of the year, the mourning and the rebuilding, and it is a measure of the house of Berlusconi and Galliani that nobody reached for the axe. The scudetto, meanwhile, crossed the city: Internazionale were champions of Italy in the spring under Roberto Mancini, and by winter, under new management, they were marching toward another.

Kaká in the rossoneri stripes at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza during the Serie A match between Milan and Torino, 19 April 2009 — the talisman of Ancelotti's last Milan side.
Tsutomu Takasu (Flickr: gowestphoto) — CC BY 2.0

The Night the English Came Into the House

The wound that defined the winter was European, and it was administered with terrible courtesy. Milan, the defending champions, drew Arsenal in the round of sixteen and played a first leg of high chess at the Emirates on 20 February — goalless, 60,082 looking on, the tie balanced like a coin on its edge. Milanese logic said the San Siro would settle matters, because history said so: no English club had ever come to Milan's own ground in Europe and won. On 4 March, before 81,879, history was corrected. For eighty-three minutes the old fortress held; then Cesc Fàbregas struck in the 84th, Emmanuel Adebayor added a second in the dying breath of added time, and Arsenal walked out of the San Siro as the first Englishmen ever to beat Milan there in European competition. The champions of Europe were out of Europe, at home, in silence.

Nor was there a domestic cup to hide in, and that door had swung shut even earlier. Catania — provincial, unfashionable, admirably indifferent to reputations — had won 2-1 at the San Siro on 20 December and finished the job in Sicily on 16 January, a 1-1 draw at the Cibali in which Juan Manuel Vargas struck from distance, young Alberto Paloschi equalised as he had equalised in the first leg, and both teams ended the night with ten men, Andrea Sottil and Gennaro Gattuso sent off, as if the fixture itself had grown exasperated with everyone concerned. Three-two on aggregate, out at the round of sixteen, and out before the winter was properly cold. By March the season had been reduced to the league, and the league would be reduced, by May, to an autopsy.

The Falling of the Phenomenon

But the true heartbreak of 2008 was not a result at all. On the night of 13 February, in an ordinary league match against Livorno that would end 1-1 on a Pirlo penalty just after the hour, Ronaldo — Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, Il Fenomeno, twice a world champion with Brazil, twice a Ballon d'Or winner and three times FIFA's World Player of the Year — rose for a ball as he had risen ten thousand times, landed as he had landed ten thousand times, and felt the patellar tendon in his left knee let go. Those who were present will tell you the sound a crowd makes at such a moment: not a roar, not a groan, but a great intake of breath, a whole stadium refusing at once to believe its eyes. He was carried off on a stretcher, in tears, and taken to hospital, and everyone watching understood, the way one understands that a curtain has come down, that they had very probably seen the last of him.

It was the third time a knee had betrayed him — the right one twice, in 1999 and 2000, now the left — and the doctors spoke of nine months, perhaps a year. Football's doctors are optimists by profession; the game's actuaries knew better. Milan let his contract run out that summer while he convalesced in Brazil, and the man who had scored twice in the 5-2 demolition of Napoli only a month earlier never played elite European football again. He would resurface at Corinthians — signed that December, back on a pitch the following March — and lay the boots down for good in February 2011, but the European chapter of perhaps the most gifted striker the game has produced closed that February night, in a Milan shirt, in front of the San Siro. The moralist notes, without cruelty, that the gods give such men everything except durable knees; the romantic notes that at least the last stage he graced was the right one.

The Golden Ball and the Boy Who Arrived in January

That 5-2 against Napoli, on 13 January, deserves its own paragraph, because it contained the whole year in miniature. Ronaldo scored in the 15th minute and again straight after the interval — his last great evening, though nobody in the ground could have known it. Napoli had twice pulled level through Sosa and a Domizzi penalty; Clarence Seedorf had struck in between, Kaká made it four in the 68th, and then, in the 74th minute, a young Brazilian named Alexandre Pato — signed the previous August from Internacional for something in the region of twenty-two million euro and kept from the field by the eligibility rules until January — scored on his Serie A debut. One Brazilian's twilight and another's dawn on the same green rectangle, in the same ninety minutes: football rarely writes its symbolism so legibly, and rarely with such tenderness.

Kaká carried what could be carried. The reigning Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player finished the campaign as Milan's leading scorer with fifteen league goals, nineteen in all competitions — the elegant accountancy of a season that gave him little else to sign his name to. And there was one spring evening when the old order bared its teeth: on 4 May, in the Derby della Madonnina, Inzaghi struck in the 51st minute, Kaká in the 56th, and Milan beat Internazionale 2-1. A derby won, a title lost — for the neighbours took the scudetto anyway, and the Rossoneri finished fifth, outside the Champions League for the first time since 2001-02. A derby victory in a fifth-place season is a beautiful, useless thing, like a perfect risotto served after the guests have gone home.

Paolo Maldini in Milan training colours at a press conference, 1 August 2008 — the captain, turned forty that June, beginning his penultimate season.
Рыбакова Елена (Elena Rybakova) / soccer.ru — CC BY-SA 3.0

The Summer of the Smile

The response of the house was characteristically operatic. In the summer of 2008 Milan went to Barcelona and came back with Ronaldinho, for a fee reported at around twenty-one million euro — the most famous smile in football, the man whose feet had always seemed to hold opinions of their own, now recast as the headline of the reconstruction. Gianluca Zambrotta followed from the same shop for about nine million; Mathieu Flamini arrived on a free transfer from Arsenal, of all houses, as if by way of apology for March; Marco Borriello came in on co-ownership from Genoa; and, most sentimentally of all, Andriy Shevchenko came home on loan from Chelsea, a returning son whose place at the San Siro no ledger could ever quite describe. Going the other way were Alberto Gilardino, sold to Fiorentina for some fourteen million, Ricardo Oliveira to Real Zaragoza, and Cafu — that endless right flank made flesh — into retirement, with the gratitude of anyone who ever watched him run.

Off the field the club's owner had, in his spare time, retaken a country. Silvio Berlusconi won Italy's general election in April 2008 and took office as Prime Minister in May, resuming the double life of palazzo and pitch that has always made Milan something more theatrical than a mere football club; Adriano Galliani, his vice-president and managing director, ran the daily business as he had for decades, though the world's registries have never entirely agreed on what to call the two men. The summer's other Italian story was crueller: the Azzurri, world champions two years before, went out of Euro 2008 in the quarter-finals to Spain, on penalties — which is how the football gods dispose of empires when they are feeling tidy.

Thursday Nights and the Ninety-Third Minute

The new season began like a bad joke told twice. Bologna won 2-1 at the San Siro on the last day of August; Genoa won 2-0 a fortnight later; and the sceptics dipped their pens. Then the team remembered itself. On 28 September Ronaldinho — who else — decided the autumn derby, 1-0 over Inter with a goal in the 37th minute, and Milan climbed back into the argument. Then came a wild 4-2 defeat at Juventus on 14 December — Del Piero from the spot, Chiellini, Amauri twice, against a Pato strike and an Ambrosini reply — and then, a week later, a 5-1 answer against Udinese with Pato and Kaká scoring twice apiece and Seedorf making five. So the year closed: chasing an Inter now conducted by José Mourinho, near enough to hope, far enough to worry.

Europe, meanwhile, meant the UEFA Cup, and the UEFA Cup meant Thursday, and Thursday, for this Milan, meant lateness in every sense of the word. In Heerenveen on 23 October they won 3-1 at the Abe Lenstra Stadion, Calvin Jong-a-Pin turning a Kaká cross into his own net under pressure from Inzaghi, Gattuso adding a second and Inzaghi himself a third — his sixty-fourth goal in European competition, one more than Raúl, which made him the continent's leading marksman outright — with Danijel Pranjić replying from the penalty spot. Braga were beaten 1-0 on 6 November by a Ronaldinho goal in the third minute of added time. At Fratton Park on 27 November, Portsmouth led 2-0 through Kaboul and Kanu, whereupon Ronaldinho pulled one back in the 84th and Inzaghi — a man who has spent his whole professional life materialising at exactly such moments — equalised at the death. And on 17 December Wolfsburg drew 2-2 at the San Siro, Ambrosini heading in a Seedorf corner, Cristian Zaccardo levelling for the Germans and Pato restoring the lead barely fifty seconds later, before Mahir Sağlık struck nine minutes from time. The group was navigated, and Milan advanced to the last 32 as runners-up behind that same Wolfsburg: progress, of a kind, at the wrong altitude.

The Captain at Forty

Through it all walked Paolo Maldini, forty years old and captain still, the armband as natural on him as skin. This was his last season; the farewell of May 2009 was already visible on the horizon the way the Alps are visible from the roof of the Duomo on the clearest days — distant, certain, immovable. There is a kind of nobility in a great house that declines slowly while keeping its manners, and in 2008 Milan declined with more style than most clubs manage in their pomp: it lost a Phenomenon in February, a European crown in March and a Champions League place in May, and it answered with a smile bought from Barcelona and a son brought home from London.

The verdict on 2008, then, is the verdict the fog passes on the city every November: nothing is destroyed, but everything must be taken on faith for a while. The team that had ruled Europe in 2007 spent 2008 learning what every dynasty learns — that decline arrives not as catastrophe but as a procession of small late goals conceded and small late goals scored; that a club is its Maldinis and its wounded Ronaldos as much as its trophies; and that somewhere between the stretcher of February and the added-time salvations of November, an era had quietly begun the long business of saying goodbye. The Alps were still there, beyond the Madonnina. Milan simply had to wait for the sky to clear.

Carlo Ancelotti facing the press in the Milan tracksuit, 1 August 2008 — head coach across the whole of the year, from the Arsenal elimination to the Ronaldinho rebuild.
Рыбакова Елена (Elena Rybakova) / soccer.ru — CC BY-SA 3.0

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