Читать книгу Calcio: A History of Italian Football - John Foot - Страница 13

Slowly, but inexorably, calcio grew in influence and importance. The second championship lasted three days, the third in 1900 twenty days. Other cities became football centres – above all Milan, traditional rival to Turin as Italy’s football capital. The infrastructures associated with the modern game began to take shape. Clubs formed all over the country, including in the south, and the business possibilities of the game also became evident.

In November 1897 a group of school students from the prestigious Massimo D’Azeglio school in the centre of Turin – a school attended over the years by such Turin luminaries as FIAT magnate Gianni Agnelli and Primo Levi – met to organize the foundation of a new Turin sports club. They settled on a Latin name – Juventus – ‘youth’. What was to be the biggest club in the history of Italian football became a calcio team in 1899 – Juventus Football Club. The famous black-and-white shirts came to Turin – allegedly – via an English referee called Harry Goodley.⁶ Given the task of buying some football kit in England, he sent back Notts County’s, which thus became the black-and-white of the Turin team.⁷ Juventus won their first championship in 1905, by one point from Genoa. It was about this time that shirts and other items of kit began to be produced in Italy, and not simply imported from England. In 1907 Juventus pulled out of the playoff final in protest against a change of venue. They were not to win the title again until 1926.

The early history of Turinese football was extremely complicated but began to take shape in 1906 with the formation of a second, unified, Turin club to rival Juventus. Torino Football Club was set up in a beer hall by ‘twenty or so Swiss men with bowler hats and a lot of good will’ (Marco Cassardo).⁸ Torino’s first ever official game was a derby victory in 1907, although the club’s fans would have to wait until 1928 for their first championship success. Since then, Torino’s history has been intimately linked to that of its hated, rich and envied cousins. Torino’s colours were claret red – leading to one of the club’s nicknames (along with Toro, the bull, their symbol) – the granata. Many of calcio’s greatest, most controversial and most tragic moments were to be associated with the extraordinary history of Torino.

In 1899 a group of Milanese industrialists and English and Swiss footballers in alliance with the local Mediolanum gymnastic society created the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Milan had rapid success, winning their first championship in May 1901. The team’s most influential early player was Herbert Kilpin. Like Bosio in Turin and Spensley in Genoa, Kilpin played a pioneering role in the development of Milanese calcio. In his native Nottingham he had played in a team named after the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, complete with red shirts. A minor player in England, he became a legend in Italy – perhaps the first real football star – underlining the huge gap in the level of play in that early period.

As a utility player, Kilpin popped up in defence, midfield and in attack, and was captain of Milan for ten years. His nickname was ‘Il Lord’. Legend also relates that he chose the team’s red-and-black shirts. There is some controversy over the team’s ‘Devils’ nickname, however. Relatives of Kilpin argue that it was his Protestantism, in a Catholic country, which led to the epithet.⁹ Kilpin is supposed to have said that ‘our shirts must be red because we are devils. Let’s put in some black to give everyone a fright.’ Kilpin’s Milan team won three championships, and might well have claimed a fourth if it were not for a split in the football federation (over the question of foreign players) in 1908.¹⁰ Another oft-repeated story (first spread by Kilpin himself, and then rewritten with poetic licence by Gianni Brera) is that he abandoned his own marriage party to play a game in Genoa, whereupon he broke his nose. The most famous of all early footballers, he played up to the age of 43, and then became a referee. According to legendary Italian national manager Vittorio Pozzo, Kilpin liked a drink, and used to keep a bottle of ‘Black and White’ whisky in a hole behind the goal. Kilpin, again according to Pozzo, claimed that the only way to forget a conceded goal was to drink a sip of the hard stuff. When he died in 1916 the sports press was moved to hyperbole: ‘[Kilpin]…a magic name, which moved the first passionate crowds to sporting delirium…a name which encapsulates the history of our football’.¹¹

Just how very different the early game was from today can also be seen by looking at Kilpin’s official record for Milan. He played a mere seventeen championship games (with seven goals) between 1899 and 1906, for which he was awarded three titles. Early photographs show Kilpin running for the ball in a wide field with scattered fans looking on and some half-built houses in the background. In another famous photo Kilpin is decked out in full Milan kit, including long white trousers, long black socks, long-sleeved Milan shirt with buttons and Milan cap.

Kilpin left a very rare series of anecdotes about the early game, written just before his death in 1916. He relates that 500 fans turned up in 1900 in the pouring rain for Milan’s first ever match, and tells the tale of a remarkable game in something called the Negrotto Cup. In Kilpin’s version (the only one we have) Milan’s goalkeeper had brought a chair onto the pitch with him as he had nothing to do all game. There he sat, cross-legged, smoking a series of cigarettes and sporting a straw hat, as the goals went in at the other end. ‘In the closing stages’, relates Kilpin, ‘he was bored to death. He asked me, “Can’t I play a bit as well?” I let him leave the goal, he went up front and scored…the twentieth goal.’ Milan duly won the match, 20–0.

Too old for the regular army, Kilpin remained in Italy after the outbreak of World War One and died in mysterious circumstances in 1916. It was only in 1928 that he was given a proper burial, thanks to an anonymous donor. His tomb was unmarked, and its location unknown, until the 1990s when a dedicated Milan fan decided to find his club’s founder. After scouring the Protestant and non-Catholic sectors of sixteen sites across Italy he finally discovered Kilpin in the city’s vast, flat, municipal cemetery. AC Milan paid for a proper tombstone, and Kilpin was re-buried in the city’s beautiful monumental graveyard.

In 1908, a split from Milan led to the formation of a new Milanese team, Internazionale Football Club. An artist, Giorgio Muggiani, along with 42 other rebels, organized the historic meeting in a city-centre restaurant called The Clock.¹² Fanatical Inter fan Giuseppe Prisco – who was the team’s lawyer in the 1960s – later joked that ‘everyone knows that we were born from a split with Milan: well, we really came from nowhere’. It appears that the motives behind the split were many, but were dominated by a discussion over the role of foreigners (after the end of the Kilpin era) and personal tensions. Inter’s vaguely communist name hinted at the squad’s non-nationalist intentions, confirmed by their first team, which contained eight Swiss players.

On the field, Internazionale enjoyed almost immediate success. In 1910, in their first title-winning year, Inter crushed their ‘cousins’ twice in the derby; 5–0 and 5–1. Inter had won their first championship just two years after their formation, amid great controversy over the preponderance of foreign players in their side. According to the history books, Internazionale introduced a new playing style, based upon short passing and stylish touches. Their play was certainly attacking, as their goals tally shows (they scored 55 goals against the 46 of second-placed Pro Vercelli). Inter took the field in the Arena, an impressive amphitheatre built by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

A photo of the Inter team of 1909 shows ten men in striped shirts, one with a large badge on his left chest (with a cross) – the captain. All the players sport moustaches and there appear to be two goalkeepers dressed in white. Another team member boasts an impressive potbelly. The championship portrait of 1910 is far more professional. Only the team are in the photo, Virgilio Fossati, the captain, is in the middle with a ball under his arm (and he has the physical shape of a modern player), whilst the others stand in formation around him. The eccentric goalkeeper – Piero Campelli, only sixteen at the time – the first player in his position to ‘catch’ the ball, instead of simply hoofing or punching it away – stands behind with his hands up holding a ball. The other star of that team is absent from this particular photo. Ermanno Aebi was a Swiss-Italian (born in Milan, his mother was Italian, his father Swiss), who learnt the game at school in Switzerland. He became a skilful attacking midfielder, scoring 100 goals in ten seasons with Inter, and winning two championships. Aebi was perhaps the first of a long line of stylish midfielders in the Italian game, who were to be at the centre of criticism, time and again, for their lack of application and grinta – ‘grit’. Aebi was known, in fact, by the nickname of signorina – ‘miss’ or ‘little lady’. Inter’s second championship was not to come until 1920, after a series of mediocre seasons. The birth of Inter began the tradition of one of the world’s great derbies – Milan-Inter.

In 1928, Internazionale merged with another Milanese club to form Ambrosiana. Usually interpreted as acquiescence to fascist diktat (against all foreign names and words) this fusion was probably more of a financial move. After the war, Inter returned to their original name and colours and they continued to play at the Arena, right in the centre of Milan, until 1947. AC Milan, after 1926, had their home in the newly constructed San Siro stadium, on the northern edge of the metropolis. Since 1947–1948, the two clubs have shared the magnificent San Siro, which is sometimes compared to the city’s most famous cultural arena of all – as La Scala of football.