San Siro doesn’t do skyboxes. There, the VIPs instead sit at ground level.
While Inter Milan’s former striker Christian Vieri, one of the many ex-footballers to take up the sport of padel, talked to tennis player Fabio Fognini, presumably about how to improve his short game, Kanye West took his place pitchside. Vieri could be forgiven if he didn’t recognise him. Kanye had his hood up and tied close and one of his all-over face masks on.
It could have been Inter chairman Steven Zhang under there for all anyone knew — except that Zhang, present for each of Inter’s Champions League knockout games last season, has still yet to attend a match in this campaign and was conspicuous by his absence amid the need to refinance or repay the loan Inter’s owner Suning took out to prop up the club during the Covid pandemic.
To Kanye’s left were the ultras of the Curva Nord, whose chants feature on a couple of tracks of his new album; a badge of honour, one might say, for notorious groups that thrive on outsider culture and occasionally say the unconscionable.
Kanye West, we believe, at San Siro last night (Mattia Ozbot – Inter/Inter via Getty Images)
All of the lights came on before kick-off. The famous song Luci A San Siro reimagined as smartphone torches activated to make the stands twinkle like the night sky. Inter also shone in this first leg of a Champions League last-16 tie with Atletico Madrid. But it did feel for a while like they, too, were wearing one of Kanye’s all-over masks.
On the one hand, it did not matter too much. This Inter side can play with their eyes closed. On the other, it would have excused their struggles in front of goal. Inter approached Atletico’s penalty area with the blindfolded tentativeness of Sandra Bullock in Bird Box.
As the players joined hands and ran under the Nord to take the applause of the ultras at full time, they should have been celebrating more than a 1-0 win. This tie should be over already. “We could have scored more goals,” midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan said. “We weren’t mentally composed enough in the first half. We wanted to play as quickly as possible.”
Inter applied the stethoscope to the Atleti safe. They tried combination after combination and eventually blew it open. The door swung on its hinges for what felt like an age, the win and so much more — qualification for the quarter-finals — lay in a manilla envelope there for the taking.
But Inter showed what Fognini, as a tennis player, knows all too well: the dreaded ‘braccino corto’ — that feeling when you can’t close out a match point and the arm that got you into that position suddenly shrinks.
Inter hit 19 shots. Their xG was nudging 2.0 and yet there were times when it felt like they wouldn’t have scored even if the game had continued into Wednesday.
Still goalless until the final 10 minutes, the oddity of it all was that Atletico’s Jan Oblak had not needed to put in one of the best performances of his career. The former Benfica goalkeeper did not do what the current Benfica goalkeeper, Anatoliy Trubin, did on his visits here with Shakhtar Donetsk in 2020 and 2021, when a bag of rice could have been thrown at him and he would have caught every grain.
Inter were instead their own worst enemy.
They regularly misplaced the final ball and, when they found it, they either struck a covering defender or the perspex barriers behind Oblak’s goal. Lautaro Martinez’s glancing headers were too clean and when Marcus Thuram interrupted a Rodrigo De Paul free kick, then chased it down and squared it to his strike partner, Martinez took an extra touch allowing Jose Gimenez to recover and block his shot.
Thuram makes his frustration clear (Tiziano Ballabio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
A sign that it might not be Inter’s night arrived when Thuram strained his right groin taking a shot. He did not come out for the second half. Marko Arnautovic replaced him and set about eclipsing Martinez’s misses with some of his own.
The first came at the end of a wonderful move started by goalkeeper Yann Sommer. It was followed by quarterback Hakan Calhanoglu finding him in a pocket of space, a neat one-two with Martinez and another inexplicable error. The only thing missing from Inter’s performance was the finish. Frivolous and frustrating, the final touch did not match the standard of football they were playing.
Luckily, Atletico did not catch them with a sucker punch. Having been 5-0 winners against Las Palmas at the weekend, Diego Simeone’s reinvention of Marcos Llorente as a striker did not work last night. Antoine Griezmann hobbled off late on and Alvaro Morata, an early second-half substitute, wasn’t 100 per cent.
The only visiting player to carry a threat was wing-back Samuel Lino. Other than his intermittent forays into the left half-space, Inter did not give Atletico a sniff.
Stefan de Vrij, a backup for Francesco Acerbi last season, expertly muzzled Simeone’s attackers. His midfield acted like a diligent screen and Inter did not concede a single shot on target in a Champions League game for the first time since 2006. They ended up keeping their 21st clean sheet of the season, a trait that does not get talked about enough.
It gave Inter the confidence to keep playing and, in the end, the goal summed up the performance: Martinez’s shot hit Oblak in a one-v-one, then Arnautovic’s follow-up hit a defender. The pair did their best to miss but, this time, the ricochet careened in and all the pent-up frustration inside San Siro frothed into euphoria.
Arnautovic eventually conjured the game’s decisive moment (Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The 34-year-old Austrian, who has a Champions League winners’ medal from Inter’s 2009-10 treble (although he never played, he was on the bench for two knockout-phase games), found the net in November’s 3-3 group-stage draw with Benfica in Lisbon. It was his first goal in the competition for nearly 13 years, the longest time lapse between a player scoring in Champions League history. “This is one of the most important goals of my career,” he said.
Arnautovic and Alexis Sanchez have been criticised for not backing up the first-choice strikers as effectively as Romelu Lukaku did this time last season. But, as coach Simone Inzaghi underlined, Sanchez scored in the 2-1 group-stage win over Red Bull Salzburg here in October and Arnautovic decided this game. He also scored in the weekend’s blow-out against Salernitana.
Thuram’s injury makes his ability to contribute even more vital if last season’s runners-up Inter are to return to the final and win Serie A.
“There’s huge satisfaction,” Inzaghi said. “The lads did very well against a physical and skilful side. It wasn’t easy and it’ll be tough in Madrid. Considering how much we created, we deserved more. There’s some regret.”
If Inter do not make the quarter-finals, those misses by Martinez and Arnautovic will haunt them.
But they have won every game in 2024 across three competitions, are yet to lose on the road all season and Sommer has picked up where Andre Onana left off last season in terms of keeping clean sheets.
Inter’s players celebrate their first-leg victory (Mattia Pistoia – Inter/Inter via Getty Images)
Inzaghi was keen to draw parallels with last year’s tie against Porto at this stage, another side coached by a former Lazio team-mate and protege of Sven-Goran Eriksson, Sergio Conceicao. “They were probably the team that caused us the most problems before the final,” he reflected.
Inter won the first leg 1-0 at San Siro before defending heroically and qualifying with a goalless draw in Portugal.
Could history repeat itself in the Spanish capital on March 13?
(Top photos: Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu & Mattia Ozbot/Inter via Getty Images)
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