Fan reporter Guido Tassinari reflects on his side’s glorious march to the title in 2010, as he hopes for a repeat
I am privileged. My father Giorgio played as a mezzala for AC Milan just after the Second World War. My older brother became an AC Milan fan and so – typical when you are a child and a serial contrarian – I chose Inter instead.
As little boys, my brother and I grew up going to all the matches together. Afterwards we used to go to the horse races, sometimes giving adults a few coins to bet for us. In 1979, AC Milan won the Scudetto. The following season Inter won it and late that summer we finally went to our first European Cup game at the San Siro (two years before we’d had an ignominious European debut when Inter lost 1-0 to Dinamo Tbilisi in the UEFA Cup).
That first European Cup game was a 2-0 win against Universitatea Craiova. It gave us high hopes but the run ended in the spring with a 2-1 semi-final aggregate loss to Real Madrid. The return leg was heart breaking: Graziano Bini scored but despite waves of attacks, it was not enough after a 2-0 defeat in Madrid. Let’s say my love story with the EuropeanCup ignited slowly.
From the late ’80s until 2007, Milan won the European Cup five times. Then, finally, Inter managed to get their hands on the trophy in 2010.
It’s been a privilege for me to live in the only city with two Champions League-winning teams. Now I’m older, I’m still a faithful season-ticket holder and belong to the Balaustra (balustrade), a group of anti-racist Inter fans. I joined the group through my university friend Paolo; his older brother died in the late ’90s and we’re like family. At the beginning of 2010 one of us, just so happy at Inter having survived the group stage, bought tickets to go to Barcelona at the end of April. Call it a sixth sense. Incredibly, Inter then made it through to the semi-finals to take on the brilliant Barcelona side of Lionel Messi and company.
Through Catalan friends we got tickets for the Camp Nou. But the week before, my friend Paolo called, offering me a job in Uruguay that I could not refuse. So I left. When I arrived in Montevideo I told the taxi driver: “Don’t take me to the hotel. Are there any football matches on” And so I ended up watching Peñarol v Nacional, a Uruguayan title decider. After a couple of minutes I realised that Álvaro Recoba, one of our beloved former Inter idols, was playing and immediately he scored a fantastic goal. (In the end his team lost, but who cares?)
Three days later, I locked myself in my room to watch Barcelona v Inter on TV. The night our goalkeeper, Júlio César, stopped the ‘unstoppables’ – at least until the last minute, when Bojan scored. I felt like collapsing until I saw the referee rule the goal out for offside. After the final whistle I went to the conference where I had to give a speech. I was so happy that I invited all of the Uruguayan participants to dinner afterwards.
Many of our group then went to Madrid for the final but ironically, not the friend who had bought the tickets for Barcelona as he was visiting his girlfriend in Burkina Faso. I was back in Milan from Uruguay. But though we were not all together, I like to think that when El Príncipe, Militó, scored the decisive second goal against Bayern, we all lost it at the same time. An unforgettable memory of the kind you can spend your entire life just hoping to repeat.
