The Achilles Year

A City in Blue and Black

There are years when the Lombard fog lifts from the Navigli only to reveal that the city — your city — has been repainted in the colours of the neighbours, and 2010 dawned on a Milan dressed in blue and black. Internazionale, who share our stadium, our tramlines and our espresso counters, completed their fifth scudetto in succession that May, and they were not finished: under José Mourinho they added the Coppa Italia and then, on a spring night in Madrid, the Champions League itself, beating Bayern Munich to seal a historic treble. For the milanista trudging home beneath the Madonnina, it was a season of averted eyes and shortened conversations.

Our own spring was honourable, which is not the same thing as good. Leonardo, the Brazilian aesthete entrusted with the bench for what would prove his only season as Milan's coach, steered the team to third place in Serie A with seventy points — twenty victories, ten draws, eight defeats, sixty goals scored and thirty-nine conceded — behind champions Inter and second-placed Roma. Third place bought a ticket back into the Champions League and satisfied absolutely no one, least of all the men who paid for it. Leonardo's football had moments of genuine beauty, as his football always did, but beauty in Italy is a garnish, not a meal; the league table is the risotto, and ours was underdone.

The institution itself remained the late-Berlusconi principality it had been since 1986: Silvio Berlusconi, simultaneously Italy's serving Prime Minister and Milan's owner and president, presiding from a distance; Adriano Galliani, vice-president and chief executive, working the telephones as ever; Massimo Ambrosini, honest carpenter of the midfield, wearing the captain's armband. Around them stood the last colonnade of an old empire — Pirlo, Nesta, Gattuso, Seedorf, Inzaghi — great men in the afternoon of their greatness, and it was precisely this afternoon light that 2010 would first expose without pity and then, remarkably, redeem.

Manchester, Twice

The exposure came in February, and it wore red. Manchester United arrived at San Siro on the 16th for the first leg of the Champions League round of sixteen, and for a little while the old order held: Ronaldinho scored in the third minute, San Siro roared, and the evening promised one of those European nights on which Milan have always fattened their legend. Then Paul Scholes equalised before the interval, and in the second half Wayne Rooney — a young bull of a centre-forward at the full gallop of his powers — struck twice, in the 66th minute and the 74th, so that Clarence Seedorf's goal five minutes from time was consolation dressed up as hope. Two-three, at home, with the return to come in England.

At Old Trafford on 10 March, hope was undressed in public. Rooney again, twice more, in the 13th minute and the 46th; Park Ji-sung in the 59th; Darren Fletcher in the 88th. Four-nil on the night, seven-two on the aggregate, and no appeal possible from any honest witness. A two-legged tie is a medical examination conducted over three weeks, and this one read like an X-ray: the legs of the old champions could no longer cover the ground the modern game demanded of them. Milan did not merely lose to Manchester United; Milan were informed, courteously and completely, that an age had closed.

The Tendon of Achilles

Four days after Old Trafford, fate — who reads Homer more attentively than any of us — added a footnote of her own. David Beckham had come back to Milanello that January for a second winter's loan from the Los Angeles Galaxy, a thirty-four-year-old Englishman of famous right foot and unfashionable seriousness, training in the Lombard cold not for money but for a dream: a fourth World Cup with England, that summer, in South Africa. The old professionals liked him because he ran; the crowd liked him because he meant it.

On the evening of 14 March, against Chievo at San Siro, the match was goalless and dying quietly when Beckham, near the centre circle and with no opponent anywhere near him, pulled up as if he had trodden on something that was not there. He had not been fouled; he had been chosen. The left Achilles tendon had ruptured completely — the one wound antiquity insists upon for its heroes — and he understood the sentence at once, the way athletes always understand it before any doctor pronounces it. He snapped his wrists towards the bench, the gesture of a man breaking a twig, to tell them what had gone; then he limped off in tears. It was only after he had gone that the match found a winner, Clarence Seedorf striking in the ninetieth minute for a one-nil that nobody at San Siro much felt like celebrating.

Leonardo, a man of feeling, said afterwards that the pain of it made the victory less enjoyable to savour, and praised what the Englishman had given the shirt. The next day, in Turku, Finland, the surgeon Sakari Orava sewed the tendon back together; the recovery would take six months, which is to say it would take the World Cup with it. Beckham never played in South Africa, and in effect the injury closed the door on his international career altogether. Football is generous with metaphors and stingy with mercy: it gave the most photographed player of his age the injury of Achilles, at the precise moment his last great ambition required both heels intact.

The Last Days of August

Leonardo departed when the season ended, one year and out, and in his place the club installed Massimiliano Allegri, a coach with little poetry in his reputation and a great deal of prose in his methods — which was, as events would demonstrate, exactly what the patient required. The summer itself was a wandering: the Emirates Cup in London at the turn of July into August, where Milan drew one-one with Arsenal and one-one with Lyon; a crossing to Detroit to meet Panathinaikos on 6 August; friendlies against Juventus, Internazionale and Barcelona. Pleasant enough, and proof of nothing. The proof arrived by aeroplane in the last days of the transfer market.

On 28 August, Zlatan Ibrahimović — a Swede built on the scale of the Alps one glimpses from the Madonnina on a clear day — arrived from Barcelona on a season's loan carrying an obligation to buy at around twenty-four million euros the following year. The next afternoon, 29 August, Milan opened the league by dismantling Lecce four-nil at San Siro, Pato scoring twice, Thiago Silva and Inzaghi completing the account; and on 31 August Robinho was signed permanently from Manchester City, on a four-year contract, for a fee reported at around eighteen million. Kevin-Prince Boateng had come in too, by way of Genoa. In a handful of late-summer days Adriano Galliani had performed his favourite conjuring trick, the August market, and the squad that had been X-rayed in Manchester suddenly had new bone.

It is worth pausing on what Ibrahimović signified, because it was more than goals, although the goals came — he would finish the season as the team's leading scorer with twenty-one in all competitions. He signified appetite. A dressing room of decorated veterans, men with nothing left to prove, was joined by a man constitutionally incapable of believing anything had yet been proved, and the chemistry of the whole club changed as when one throws saffron into the rice: the same ingredients, suddenly a different dish.

The Autumn of the Swede

The autumn did not begin as a coronation. On 11 September, at Cesena, on the day Ibrahimović and Robinho made their first appearances in the shirt, Milan lost two-nil, and the old Milanese pessimism — a civic art form, practised in the bars along the Navigli with the same devotion as the aperitivo — enjoyed a brief and vigorous revival. But Allegri's team absorbed the lesson rather than the panic, and on 10 November, matchday eleven, a three-one victory over Palermo at San Siro carried Milan to the top of Serie A for the first time in the campaign. They would not surrender that position again all season, though in November nobody yet dared say so aloud.

Four days later came the derby, and the derby belonged to one man and one minute. In the fifth, Marco Materazzi brought down Ibrahimović; the Swede rose, placed the ball on the spot with the ceremony of a man laying a table, and converted. What followed was less banquet than siege: Ignazio Abate was sent off on the hour for a second yellow card, Milan played the final half-hour a man short, and the one-nil lead was defended with the old catenaccio virtues our grandfathers would have recognised — the door held, the key turned. The fixture is remembered too for an off-the-ball blow from Ibrahimović that left Materazzi needing hospital attention, which one records without applause: our Swede was a warrior of the old northern kind, magnificent and not entirely housebroken. Milan stayed at the top of the table, and the city's colours began, at last, to change.

Midweek Nights in Europe

Europe, meanwhile, offered its midweek nights as a running commentary on the convalescence. Milan were drawn into Group G of the Champions League with Real Madrid, Ajax and Auxerre, and opened on 15 September by beating the Burgundians two-nil at San Siro, Ibrahimović scoring in the 66th minute and again in the 69th. In Amsterdam on 28 September they drew one-one with Ajax, Mounir El Hamdaoui putting the Dutch ahead before the Swede levelled in the 37th minute. At the Bernabéu on 19 October they lost two-nil, honestly and by the book, to the Real Madrid now coached by José Mourinho — Cristiano Ronaldo from a free-kick in the 13th minute, Mesut Özil sixty seconds later — a side that would finish the group unbeaten. Then on 3 November, at San Siro, they held Real Madrid two-two, Filippo Inzaghi scoring twice in ten second-half minutes and Pedro León rescuing the Spaniards deep in stoppage time, in a match that felt, for the first time in several seasons, like a conversation between equals rather than an audience granted by the great.

Qualification was sealed with a game to spare, on 23 November at Auxerre, two-nil again: Ibrahimović in the 64th minute, and then Ronaldinho, in the first minute of stoppage time, adding the flourish. The group closed on 8 December with an anticlimax entirely in the Milanese manner: with qualification already banked, Ajax came to San Siro and won two-nil, Demy de Zeeuw and Toby Alderweireld scoring, and took third place and the Europa League with them. Two wins, two draws, two defeats, eight points, second behind the unbeaten Spaniards, and passage to the round of sixteen. It was not conquest; it was recovery of the pulse, and after the bleak radiography of Manchester in March, a steady pulse was precisely the news the doctors had been waiting for.

Thirteen Points of Daylight

One should not leave the year without recording Italy's summer, because Milan does not float free of the peninsula. In South Africa the reigning world champions, still under Marcello Lippi, went out of the World Cup at the group stage — a national humiliation, absorbed in the piazzas with the grim relish Italians reserve for confirmed catastrophe. A footballing cycle was visibly closing, from the national team downward, and against that backdrop what was stirring at Milanello mattered well beyond the city ring road: it suggested that an Italian giant could still be rebuilt rather than merely mourned.

Milan's own year ended, with fine Milanese irony, in defeat: on 18 December, at San Siro, Roma won one-nil, and the goal was scored by Marco Borriello, who only the season before had been Milan's leading marksman in the league. The crowd filed out into the December fog grumbling, as is both their right and their recreation. But the table told the truer story. At the winter break Milan sat clear at the top of Serie A, and the gap to Inter had grown to thirteen points — the figure quoted in every report on 23 December, when the treble-winners of seven months earlier, seventh in the table, dismissed Rafael Benítez. On Christmas Eve they replaced him with Leonardo, the very man who had sat on Milan's bench the season before. The empire across the city was already devouring its own coaches; the empire on our side of it was quietly rebuilding its walls.

That is the shape of 2010, and it is a parabola inverted: a year that opened with a seven-two autopsy in Manchester and a great Englishman weeping at the centre circle, and closed with a Swede's goals, thirteen points of daylight, and the 18th scudetto already forming in the winter air, though it would not be sealed until May 2011. Decline and rebirth are usually assigned separate chapters; 2010 insisted on containing both, the way a Lombard winter day contains fog at dawn and then, by late afternoon, the sudden astonishing sight of the Alps. One walked out of the Roma defeat into the cold and knew, with the certainty only the league table can give, that the city was changing colour again — and that this time the paint was red and black.