Thousands of Internazionale fans are in love with Liverpool. It is an exciting romance, barely 2½ years young, built purely on schadenfreude and one hot date. Liverpool did Inter loyalists such a favour in Istanbul that famous May 2005 night by beating Milan, their rivals, that few will ever rip up the “Grazie Liverpool” banners made to commemorate the most dramatic of Champions League finals.
Liverpool supporters can expect to be vividly reminded in the hours ahead of Tuesday’s meeting with Inter at Anfield of quite how cherished they are among Interisti of a certain age simply for that result. Hearing all this, they may in turn wonder how easily the city of Milan can sound like a caricature of their own football territory, the blue half defining itself obsessively against the red. Inter are the Italian champions, and on course to comfortably defend that title, but there sticks to some of them a sense that while they lord it in Serie A in the period Milan remain the reigning champions of Europe, it hurts.
“You can exaggerate the sense of Inter feeling in the shadows of Milan but, yes, there’s bound to be that jealousy,” acknowledges Roy Hodgson, twice head coach at Inter and, were it not for his December detour to Fulham, the man who would be sitting in an office at Inter’s headquarters designing the club’s strategy for the next few years.
Hodgson, the most international of English managers, had been offered a technical director’s role at the Italian champions before he chose Craven Cottage. He has been close to Inter for well over a decade and doubts he has known an Inter in such good health as the present version, no longer Europe’s most notoriously brittle, flaky and impatient overspenders, but champions who consolidate. “The second time I coached them, I was the fourth managerial appointment within a year,” he points out of Inter’s scatty reputation from the mid1990s and beyond.
“But what they have now is stability in the leadership, with no changes to the management in three years, Roberto Mancini as the coach, and now two scudetti in that time, albeit that the first was by default [Juventus having being stripped of the 2006 title, awarded after the event to Inter]. They should win the next one, too, which will make it a great centenary for the club.”
For an institution 100 years old, most of that time among the mightiest three in Italy, Inter’s European Cup record is no more than average. They have won it twice, back in the mid1960s. A more urgent longing developed over the past decade: the need for an Italian league title, which between 1989 and 2006 was mainly shared between the other two of Italy’s so-called Big Three – Juventus and Milan – but also found itself ending up anywhere else – Lazio, Roma, Sampdoria – but Inter. They seemed cursed.
“For a long time, the league was the big target because it had been so long in coming,” explains Hodgson, “and even when we reached a couple of Uefa Cup finals, they weren’t doing cartwheels about it. Now, I’m not sure, now that the title has been won, whether they would still think of that as the priority.
They’ve got the squad for both competitions. They’ve bought well and the players have gelled over the last couple of years. “It helps that they’ve got groups of players from the same countries, like a lot of Argentinians: Javier Zanetti, who came in around my time, and players like Esteban Cambiasso, Hernan Crespo, Julio Cruz.”
Hodgson would have liked to add the defender Walter Samuel to that list of Argentinians: he had hoped to call in a favour from Inter president Massimo Moratti and take Samuel on loan at Fulham until he fell injured.
Liverpool should watch out for Cruz, says Hodgson. “He’s vastly underrated. He’d been doing well at Bologna when Inter picked him up, and though they’ve got strikers like Crespo and David Suazo, Cruz has great value to them.’’ Rafa Benitez, the Liverpool manager, would not count among Cruz’s underraters. “People talk about Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Cambiasso playing well,” says Benitez, “or Luis Figo or Marco Materazzi, but Julio Cruz is always there, always scoring.” The Argentinian striker has 15 goals this season, and that’s from less than 19 matches in terms of playing time going into last night’s league meeting with Livorno: he often starts as substitute.
But as Benitez says, people do talk about Ibrahimovic. So they should. The Swede has played probably the best football of a still young but eventful career at Inter, whom he joined from Juventus after Juve’s punitive relegation – some of their directors had been implicated in manipulating match officials – in 2006. He was then 24, had been among the elite for three years already, a prodigy who had got into the odd scrape while growing up in Sweden, making the big-time with Ajax in Holland and being captivating to watch without, often, finishing with the directness some of his managers wanted of a centre-for-ward.
Ibrahimovic is now the spearhead striker of the most potent attack in Italy. “I remember him when he was very young, still playing at Malmo in Sweden,” says Hodgson, “and I tried to sign him for FC Copenhagen, but even as a teenager he was beyond our means. He’s a strong character, and has developed a lot as a footballer. In the early part of his career he was maybe more interested in humiliating opponents than accumulating goals. He’s now much more ruthless going forward. I’ve been very impressed with him. He’s got every quality you want in a striker. There’s not many you say that about at the moment.”
Liverpool hope to have Fernando Torres back for the tie, and Hodgson anticipates that it will be tight. “It’s a classic European Cup game. Liverpool are well organised in these situations and a top team at snuffing out opportunities. There’s not much to choose between them. It depends on what those top players do. Will Ibrahimovic be inspired on the night?
“It’s also about different styles. I enjoy watching this Inter team, and like the way they play, but Serie A is nowhere near as intense as the Premier League. In Italy, it is slower-paced and can be more technical, which is maybe why older players such as Figo can still perform at a high level there. It gets intense only around the penalty area, defences drop much deeper, and in midfield there’s not so much flying back and forth. In the Premier League you get very little time on the ball anywhere.”
A possible setback for Inter is that those players who best know Anfield, best know the habits of English football, are short of match fitness. Midfielder Olivier Dacourt, once of Everton and Leeds, has missed a large part of the season; ditto Patrick Vieira, late of Arsenal, whose comeback from injury was interrupted last weekend by a red card and subsequent suspension. Dejan Stankovic and Figo also nurse wounds, making the likely Inter midfield more mundane than it might have been. “Inter have actually had bad luck this season with injuries,” says Hodgson, “but people forget that because it’s such a big bench there.”
