Italian rivals weigh in behind Mourinho’s vital Inter mission
We’ve all suffered that experience – personally I find it hard enough to watch on TV even when my team is winning – but to hear it from Silvio Berlusconi was a surprise.
The Milan owner has his critics but he’s always seemed able to take defeat on the chin, whether in football or in politics, although in the latter he has a tendency to change the rules to ensure he doesn’t lose too often.
So will Italy’s Prime Minister will be tuning in for the big game at Stamford Bridge tonight, having seen his own team being destroyed by Wayne Rooney?
Like many other Italian football fans, Berlusconi has mixed feelings about this game.
One reason is that Inter are the least Italian side in the country.
It may be that Davide Santon will come in at left back, but Jose Mourinho has decided to leave Mario Balotelli out of the squad altogether. No explanation, but it sounds as if there has been yet another tiff with the 19-year-old striker, and this time it could be terminal.
Debate raged this way and that yesterday on the internet, with fans split down the middle between manager and player, but the upshot is that Inter’s squad contains just two Italians who are likely to play any part in the game.
One of those is Marco Materazzi, an Italian hero in the last World Cup, but now a peripheral figure at the age of 36.
On Friday night he came back into the centre of the defence for the league match against Catania and looked increasingly uncertain as the home side came back from a goal down to achieve one of the shocks of the season. Catania’s previous win against Inter was back in February 1966.
Inter’s 3-1 defeat was compounded on Sunday night when their neighbours Milan scored late on to beat Chievo and close the gap at the top of Serie A to a single point.
That of course delighted Berlusconi, still bruised from the drubbing at Old Trafford, and facing a more difficult time than expected in the campaign for the local elections which take place at end of the month.
But even so, he’s likely to grit his teeth and support Inter tonight – just as former Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri did on Sunday. It’s not that Jose Mourinho has been winning hearts and minds – more that tonight’s game could have a big impact on Italian football for several years to come.
Italy are almost neck and neck with Germany in UEFA’s football rankings, and those are the rankings which decide whether a country is entitled to three or four clubs in the Champions League.
Next season Italy will still be entitled to four, but if Inter go out at this stage and Bayern progress further in the competition, Germany are likely to overtake them from 2011 onwards. A lot could hang on whether Juventus can win the Europa League, but as of now Germany would be three points ahead in the rankings for 2012.
For Ranieri’s Roma, just like Milan, Inter and Juventus, that fourth Champions League spot is a vital lifeline.
Serie A is relaunching itself next season, just as the Premier League did 18 years ago. The hope is to boost TV and marketing revenues so that Italy’s big clubs can compete on more equal terms with England and Spain.
It’s a tough call anyway, given that they don’t own their grounds and major investment is needed to improve conditions and attract bigger crowds.
Losing that extra Champions League place would be a big blow financially, not just to Italian status.
So Mourinho the outsider, the troublemaker, the rebel finds himself in the unlikely role of standard bearer for the prestige of calcio, at least over the next few years.
A curiously ambiguous situation for a man who does still seem to have genuine emotional attachment to Stamford Bridge.
Ever since the Champions League draw brought these two sides together this tie has promised to be an intriguing drama. Like all good drama it has its plots, and its subplots. One side must emerge victorious, in a match that could finish in sudden death.
Almost like a Shakespeare play in fact... and so quite fitting that it should take place on the Ides of March, with a man named Julio Cesar defending the Italian goal.
