Anxiety at the San Siro. Inter, Milan and the Champions League final that you have to win

Sometimes you need to move away from the scene, look at it from afar, one step after another backwards to be able to grasp the whole. Really being able to reach the right Mazzacuratian distance to focus on what happened. It applies to a lot of things, even football. Just for one Champions League semi-final second leg. Inter and Milan, thinking back to last August, could, should they?, not be on the pitch at San Siro to play for the final. Sometimes, however, the ball makes a mockery of how it had to go, rolls in its own way, gets tossed by the imperfections of the ground. One of the two will travel to Istanbul on Saturday 10 June to play for the cup against whoever manages to win between Manchester City and Real Madrid, in a final that seems to be one-sidedbut you never know for the same reason as before, the rolling of the ball.

Yet, despite this, Milan and Inter find themselves waiting for these 90 minutes (perhaps more, who knows), with the anxiety that continuing or exiting is the ridge between failure and success, between a wasted season and a positive season. It’s not like that, but you need to get away from San Siro, get on a hot air balloon, look at everything from above.

Because it’s true that it could have been better for both, but all in all, despite a few too many disappointments, I’m in the semifinal and one of the two will get there in the final. Who? It depends a lot on how much they will be able to control the anxiety of thinking all is lost without getting the plane ticket to Istanbul.

Milan feels on the edge of a precipice. It seems like years have passed since the Scudetto, the team is fifth with four points from the last place useful for accessing the Champions League (of course there are a few ifs and it may not be enough, but in any case the accounts are done with all the cards on the table ), the fans, or at least a noisy part of them, didn’t take the two defeats in a row well, especially the one against Spezia, and Stefano Pioli, who seems a lot less “on fire”, is no longer the spotless master of some time ago. It all seems like a mess. Is it really? Maybe not. Because the Rossoneri got there in the semi-final, fourth place is compromised but not lost, the players are young and with some forethought you can easily restart. You just need to have the humility to say you’ve made mistakes, which is not easy in football.

Inter are far from the precipice, the 2-0 in the first leg is an excellent starting point, the victories have come in abundance in recent months: seven in a row. Nevertheless even among the Nerazzurri it is perceived that not everything is calm, that the anxiety that afflicts Milan has also spread to the other part of Milan. Perhaps less totalitarian, but present. Simone Inzaghi threw it out there: “As regards tomorrow evening’s referee, my friends have pointed out to me that he is French and that Milan have four French players in their squad… For us, no problem and maximum confidence” . He could not mention the nationality, he did, and it’s always in trifles that concern hides. Even when there is only a step away from the crowning of a season that has taken the nerazzurri where they thought they could not go.

Anxiety is never good, not even desperation, the sense of imminent collapse. Each of the two teams perceives it, and it shouldn’t be like this. Yet there is, the path on which you walk is always the same, but it seems narrower, you have to make sure you don’t think about it, widen it or at least notice that nothing has changed. It has come a long way and well too. It’s up to playing, trying to think of Istanbul without worrying about not being able to go.