Coppa D'Europa, arrivederci!
Mario Rossi | 01/09/1933

Ambrosiana Inter, therefore, did not win the European Cup which, in possession of Bologna since last year, has crossed the Alps to occupy the place prepared for them with great care in the showcase containing the prizes won by Austria.

Luck was not a good friend of the nero-azzurri colors. The Viennese terrain was difficult for them five days after the field of the Milanese Arena had shown them a frown. On both fields, the Milanese eleven was a "ten" and a "nine" for most of the double match. Adversity hit the black-blue from the first minutes of the first game to the last of the second, with a persistence and a variety of form that put a strain on the nerves of the players, their spiritual strength, their technical power.

It began with Levrato's muscle tear. The Ligurian, in truth, is not new to injuries of this kind. The bundle of muscles that he possesses gives the athlete power of action and shooting; precisely because of their ample structure, however, his muscles acquire looseness and become accustomed to the shot only through more accurate and longer than normal training. At the beginning of the season a sudden and irregular movement can cause the classic injury of the athlete not yet well trained to the efforts. This is what happened to Levrato in a movement made to avoid an opponent's kick. It is known that then, in Milan, Demaria got lame and that the team had taken the field without the valid help of Serantoni.

In Vienna, Cejnar, the gigantic Czechoslovakian referee, was the despot of the match. Perhaps someone will not have wanted to take seriously the statements tending decisively to exclude the opportunity of the penalty kick awarded by Cejnar to the Ambrosiana and the existence of the offside of Meazza on the basis of which the worthy referee wanted to cancel the point of Frione; too many times, in truth, people have wanted to beg for excuses, take responsibility, invoke bad luck, to justify the defeats of Italian athletes in international competitions. But this is not the case of the Austria-Ambrosiana meeting.

Allemandi and Demaria can be reproached for not being able to control their nerves, but the expulsion of two players guilty of venting their mood with repeated kicks at the ball cannot be approved: much less often the referees limit themselves to admonishing. The double expulsion is all the more deplorable when one thinks that this could also — as probably happened — cause without the possibility of appeal the awarding of a cup for which the best teams of the most advanced football nations of the continent had fiercely fought.

We forgot. Not only eight football teams fought, but also one man whistled. The man, a gigantic man physically, a little man spiritually, won the tournament. This is how Czechoslovakia, eliminated from the competition through Sparta and Slavia, came back through the window, arbiter of the situation.

We must regret the way in which the tournament ended: if Austria had won Ambrosiana as they had eliminated Juventus from the tournament, we would have taken off our hats in front of the team that proved to be the best of the moment. But through the 180 minutes of play, all things considered, there is to be sworn on an effective superiority of the team of the brown Meazza over that of the blond Sindelar.

Observe. Overall, Austria scored four goals and Ambrosiana Inter scored three. Austria scored, of their four goals, one on a crazy penalty kick, one when the Ambrosiana had nine valid players on the pitch in Milan and two unused by accidents, and the other two when the nero-azzurri in Vienna there were actually nine. The three goals of the Milanese unity were all obtained, however, against a solid and numerically strong team of all its elements, while the Ambrosiana was already affected in its strengths. What more? There is the absence of Serantoni in Milan, that of Levrato and his best reserve De Manzano in Vienna, which have resulted in an unprecedented team formation, and there is the disallowed goal for no reason.

Even through adversity, the Ambrosiana has shown its strength. We believe we are right by saying that today it has also healed from that discontinuity which, through flashes and obfuscations of the game, once undermined the regularity of performance necessary to establish itself even in a long tournament. Now the Ambrosiana to a technically very valuable game theme has definitely added a fighting spirit and moral strength of the highest order. Nor is it true who affirms that it has made the wrong tactics in Vienna, imposing itself on a defensive line-up of play, with forbidding and vacuous expressions that are now superseded by reality. The progress of that match shows that an undefeated Ambrosiana would have come out of a regular match and an objective refereeing. And then no one would have said that the tactic was wrong...

Meanwhile, it is planned to expand participation in the Coppa Europa for the next few years to a greater number of teams. We would not want this decision to take away from the tournament that enviable and very special flavor of a meeting of excellence of continental football forces, which derives from the competition of each national champion team and its most direct competitor, only graduates from the championships. A larger intervention, then, would perhaps require too many days of dispute. But it will be good for the Coppa Europa Committee to worry a little bit about the refereeing issue and the advisability of appointing field commissioners with wide-ranging powers in the future.