https://theathletic.com/4507684/2023/05/11/inter-ac-milan-champions-league-analysis/



How Inter embraced their ‘Nazionale’ stars to put Milan in their place

MILAN, ITALY - MAY 10: FC Internazionale players celebrate at the end of the UEFA Champions League football semi final first leg match AC Milan vs FC Internazionale in Milan, Italy on May 10, 2023 (Photo by Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
By James Horncastle
May 11, 2023
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Federico Dimarco could have been a greengrocer. His father Gianni still gets up at the crack of dawn to sell fruit and veg in Milan’s Porta Romana neighbourhood. Lifting the shutters must have been a sweet experience this morning. He probably reminisced on the times he took his boy to watch Inter at San Siro. Dimarco was six when a Derby della Madonnina was also a Champions League semi-final. He was at San Siro for it, too.

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“As an Inter fan, I don’t have the fondest of memories,” Dimarco said. His team went out on away goals that night in 2003 and, to compound his misery, Milan finished the job and went on to win the trophy. Dimarco never thought he’d get a chance to set things right. But on Wednesday night, he climbed the stairs leading up to the pitch at San Siro and must have had goosebumps as the Champions League music blared out of the sound system.

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“It’s an unbelievable feeling to think I was here 20 years ago to watch a semi-final and now I’m playing in one.”

The 7,000 Inter ultras looked down and saw one of their own. Dimarco stood with them as a teenager. When Inter won the Coppa Italia last season and then the Super Cup, on both occasions he grabbed a megaphone and led the travelling fans in song.

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Inter were made from AC Milan. Never forget that - The story of the Milan derby

“This isn’t a derby. It’s the derby,” Inter coach Simone Inzaghi said on the eve of the game. No one knew that better than Dimarco. Milano born and raised, he’s steeped in it. The 26-year-old’s cut-back for Henrikh Mkhitaryan clinched Inter a 2-0 win that should have been more. It was Dimarco’s fifth assist in the Champions League this season. Only Vinicius Junior can match him.

On the face of it, Inter’s triumph felt quintessentially Internazionale. They opened the scoring via a corner kick. A Turk, Hakan Calhanoglu, whipped a ball in for a Bosnian, Edin Dzeko. “It was a scheme we practised this morning,” the veteran striker revealed. Not long afterwards, Mkhitaryan, an Armenian, doubled Inter’s advantage as the self-proclaimed ‘Brothers of the World’ raced into the earliest 2-0 lead a Champions League semi-final has experienced in 14 years.


But under Inzaghi, this club — a club that, in 2006, became the first Serie A team ever to send out a starting XI made up entirely of foreign players — has felt more Nazionale than Internazionale.

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Five Italians started against Milan. Alessandro Bastoni, the left-sided centre-back with a tattoo of San Siro on his right calf, sent Dzeko through one-on-one with Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan in the second half; a gilt-edged chance to bury the tie regretfully spurned. Next to him, Francesco Acerbi did not get the run around from Olivier Giroud in the way Fikayo Tomori and Simon Kjaer did from Dzeko at the other end.

Acerbi is one of Inzaghi’s trusted lieutenants. He joined on loan from Lazio on the final day of the transfer window to little enthusiasm as he was neither Gleison Bremer, the Serie A Defender of the Year who left Torino for Juventus and not Inter, and because the dithering over bringing in the 35-year-old underlined how reluctant a financially distressed club was to add to its wage bill. Completing Inter’s all-Italian back three was the versatile Matteo Darmian, who delivered a heroic performance away in Porto in the round of 16.


Inter’s Matteo Darmian challenges Divock Origi (Photo: Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)
As with Dimarco, both Acerbi, Darmian (and Calhanoglu) know what this rivalry is about, but for different reasons. Darmian was an Inter fan who came through Milan’s academy. “When I was doing my first trials for Milan in 2000, the youth coaches asked us all to name our favourite players and I said (Clarence) Seedorf who, back then, was playing for Inter.”

Acerbi, on the other hand, was signed by Milan from Chievo when he was 24 and was hyped as the new Alessandro Nesta. The club even gave him Nesta’s old No 13 shirt. But it was too much, too soon. “I didn’t think like a professional,” Acerbi confessed. “I’d often go to training tipsy without sobering up from the night before. Physically I was fine because I’ve always been strong. All I needed was a few hours’ sleep and I could still perform on the pitch.”

Testicular cancer changed him. Twice Acerbi came back from it and the experience gave him a greater appreciation for how short life and careers can be. The potential Milan identified in Acerbi went on to be fulfilled at Lazio and Inter. The centre-back has had to fight to make it to this level. The same goes for Dimarco.


Inter’s Federico Dimarco (Photo: MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images)
Inter have tended to take a short-termist approach with academy graduates like him. If sold, homegrown players represent all profit and there was a time when Inter regularly cashed in on their kids in order to balance the books for FFP purposes. Dimarco was one of them. Inter sold him to Sion in Switzerland for €3.5million and included a buy-back clause for double, which they exercised before sending Dimarco out on loan. The wonder goal he scored against them for Parma was enough to persuade Inter to bring him back and he hasn’t disappointed.

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Dimarco was the one who set up Calhanoglu’s winner against Barcelona in the group stages and he made sure to lay on another couple of assists in the quarter-final just as things were getting nervy against Benfica. The man of the match that night was Nicolo Barella, the midfielder Romelu Lukaku nicknames ‘Radiolina’, as having him around is like having the radio on 24/7.

These are the players Inzaghi has turned to when the going got tough this season. Inter have lost 11 league games, the most in 12 years, and regardless of reaching another Coppa Italia final and a Champions League semi-final, their coach has often appeared on the brink of the sack. Inzaghi’s solution has been to put his faith in a quintet of players who know what it takes to get the job done in Serie A, not to mention what it means to play for Inter.



His substitutions on Wednesday night spoke volumes (and highlighted Inter’s re-emerging depth). Two-nil up, Inzaghi brought on Stefan de Vrij, Marcelo Brozovic and Lukaku — the spine of Antonio Conte’s Scudetto-winning team. Inzaghi deserves credit for transitioning this team. He dropped his captain Samir Handanovic for Andre Onana. Darmian replaced the injured Milan Skriniar, who has been marginalised ever since he decided he will join PSG on a free in the summer. Dimarco, meanwhile, stepped into Ivan Perisic’s boots and held off competition from the brittle Robin Gosens.

Wednesday’s win was Inter’s sixth in a row in all competitions. Inzaghi’s reputation as a cup specialist and knack for delivering in the big games has been enhanced further. When it’s a derby and a semi-final, he tends to come out on top. That was the case when Lazio knocked Roma out of the Coppa Italia semis in 2017 and Milan last year, too. In elimination games, he is to coaching what his brother Pippo was to goalscoring. Inter severely bruised Milan as they did in the Super Cup in Riyadh, bashing the likes of Brahim Diaz off the ball, intent on showing their cousins who is boss. “We weren’t aggressive enough,” Milan coach Stefano Pioli said.

As Inter’s fans left San Siro towards midnight, they lit a few more flares and sang one of their favourite songs. The lyrics are about Milan acting tough but never fighting, talking the talk without walking the walk, “idiot Bandito from the (Curva) Sud,” what an imagination you have. It’s a song Dimarco sings. A song one of the most Italian Inter sides in recent memory knows off by heart.

(Top photo: Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)