You’ve got to take your hat off to Milan; the only city to have produced two European Cup winners, both of whom are now in the semifinals of the champions’ league, who played each other in the mother of all derbies on Wednesday at the San Siro, the same stadium where they will play the return leg this week. Manchester and Liverpool might fancy themselves two great football cities but, in terms of raw credentials, they cannot compete with Milan.
The Milan team have won the European Cup four times and been losing finalists twice. Internazionale have won it twice and been losing finalists once. They have Francesco Toldo, the world’s best goalkeeper with the possible exception of Juventus’s Gianluigi Buffon.
They have probably the world’s best right-back in their captain, Argentinian Javier Zanetti. Fabio Cannavaro is a rock of a centre-half. Ronaldo, who played at Inter last season, reckons that Colombian Ivan Cordoba is as accomplished a defender as any he knows. The left foot of Alvaro Recoba, the Uruguayan midfielder, is as good as David
Beckham’s right. Hernan Crespo is the complete striker and the cup-tied Gabriel Batistuta and Christian Vieri (who is injured but may just make it back for the second leg) are the two most brutally successful centre- forwards alive.
As for Milan, they are the only team that for sheer individual talent come close to matching the collection assembled at Real Madrid.
And yet, of the two champions’ league semifinals played this week, the one at the San Siro was the ugly sister. Unsurprisingly, it ended 0-0 on Wednesday. Any European game involving Real Madrid these days has an unmatchable allure to it. But Juventus, cruising towards the Serie A title well clear of the second and third-placed Milan pair, have emerged as the most rounded team in Italy this season, playing — thanks chiefly to their driving Czech midfielder Pavel Nedved — the most purposeful football. They lost 1-2 to Real in Madrid on Tuesday.
Milan and Inter, by contrast, are a sorry sight. Inhabiting as they do what might with some justice be called the football capital of the world right now, they play the game in a petty, provincial style thrilling only to their own most partisan supporters.
It is football as tribal contest, pure and simple, drained of daring and fun. Inter, whose midfield functions exclusively as a first line of defence, do not play 4-4-2, or even 5-4-1. They play 9-1, breaking into an 8-2 formation at moments only of great urgency and despair.
All season they have been the most criticised of the top Serie A teams, with many commentators as well as fans calling for coach Hector Cuper to go at the end of the season. Milan started off the season playing as if they had given their stellar cast instructions to play football the swashbuckling Spanish way.
The Real Madrids, Deportivos and Valencias had been dominating European football for the previous four seasons while the Italian teams had faded from view, something
Italian sports writers have been keen to point out. As respected Gazzetta dello Sport columnist Candido Cannavo wrote a couple of months into the season: ‘Italy is witnessing a disconcerting dichotomy: a Milan of beauty, freedom, symphony in attack — and an Inter that play ugly but equally effective football.†In other words, while Milan’s virtue was being rewarded, so was Inter’s vice.
They were neck and neck, as they remain today, in the league table. Somewhere along the line someone at Milan, presumably coach Carlo Ancelotti, must have thought: ‘Well, what’s the point of playing this fancy stuff when the old way works just as well, and involves less risk?â€
No point whatsoever, came back the reply.
After a roaring start in the champ-ions’ league, in which they won a ‘Group of Death†that included Bayern and Deportivo scoring 12 goals, they have scored just eight times in their past nine European games. In Serie A they have scored 48 goals in 30 games before this week, a tally that would have been even more abysmal had they not put six past hapless, bottom-of-the-table Torino in the riotous early days of the season. Inter’s figures seem almost noble by comparison.
With only one recognised striker in the formidable Vieri, they have scored 10 more goals than Milan in Italy and five more in Europe.
Besides, Inter’s greatest concentration of individual talent is in defence while, man for man, Milan’s attacking potential is sensational. All that said, statistics are a funny business. Often dangerously misleading. Every impartial observer of the champions’ league quarterfinals would have agreed that Manchester United were the second most adventurous and exciting of the eight competing teams. Even less in doubt would have been the verdict that Inter were the most depressing and dullest.
And yet Inter have scored more goals per game on average (1,93) in what is considered to be the league with the most tightly marshalled defences in the world than Manchester United have (1,88) — even though United play in a league where the defences are generally reckoned to be comparatively shambolic.
Maybe Inter will defy all predictions and beat Milan 6-5 on aggregate. Maybe the second San Siro game will turn out to be more thrilling than the ones at the Bernabau and the Delle Alpi. Could well be, in a way. The big Italian teams will rarely be accused of scoring high on artistic impressions. But for good old-fashioned nail-biters at club or international level, they tend not to disappoint. Football is about drama as much as about art.
Suspense will hang heavy at the splendid stage of the San Siro next week. —