

F.C. Internazionale Milano

I wasn’t around for the second half as I had a Mother’s Day commitment, but my reaction as I checked the score before I left the house was telling. I left the game Inter up by one and making chance after chance in the first half. I checked the score and Inter were down 2-1 and I just felt resignation. I checked the score again at the end and I still wasn’t mad. I had seen this movie before. I had seen it against Parma. I had seen it all season really. This Inter wasn’t capable of defending a one goal lead. There were too many holes on this team. Too many players didn’t have a reserve tank in them – mentally or physically. This was an exhausted team and perhaps for the first time in a long while, the drama finally got to them.
With Manchester City winning in the fashion they did, whose to say something amazing like that won’t happen for us. Come on boys! We believe! Calcio Gods, be kind and gentle. Read the rest of this entry »

There are still lots of rumors circling regarding who will stay and who will go from the roster. A lot will depend on whether Inter makes the Champions League or not. Cuts will have to be much more drastic one would think if that 30 million Euros aren’t available to the team. More contracts will have to be renegotiated in order to bring the overall spending down enough to plan for the decrease in revenue and other transfer targets will have to be found to accommodate those players who will demand Champions League football.

Lots of things to discuss this week now that the euphoria of winning the deby is over. Strama was confirmed, sort of. Someone, I can’t remember who, had a great idea for a Player of the Season poll so I will try to get one of those up and going in the next week. And I can’t help, with all the transfer talk, but think about who is coming and going… rather who is going than coming, right? Because with Inter’s transfer policy and potential loss of CL revenue we are going to have to lose players before we can buy any more.

There’s a lot of ground to cover this week so for sanity’s sake – what little I have left – I am only going to talk opinion on The Derby at this time. And while last game against Parma was less nuts and bolts and more personnel, this game was very much nuts and bolts. It’s the kind of game that makes Italian football incredibly great and very frustrating at the same time.
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There’s a lot of subtext that goes with this game, but there’s also not. The game was lost when the team made a mistake in the defensive third and then couldn’t recover to stem the tide. But in a broader sense a game like this was going to be lost because of a basic, fundamental problem that has not been fixed – there has been no reinforcement of the defense since Mourinho was in charge. Samuel, Lucio, Materazzi, Cordoba and Chivu were the defensive core nearly 3 years ago, and it was considered old then.

There was a lot to like about this game in general. Inter used a lot of young guys in the lineup. Stramaccioni managed to make the nay-sayers look foolish again. He even, somehow did the impossible by finding a way to play both Sneijder and Alvarez together on the field at the same time – a herculean task that the geniuses over at what is considered the leader in the wide world of sports thought nigh impossible.
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The number 3 is going to be incredibly important for these last few games. There are 3 points separating Inter from its goal of Champions League football. This build up to the end of the season still has 3 tough games left to it. Inter need to collect 3 points from as many games as it can. And of course, we are hunting for 3rd place. In many belief systems, the number three has a mystical, magical quality to it. But in this world of football, the number 3, since the 90s of course, is a secularly religious number. Especially if you are an Inter supporter and especially if you are living this season we are now.









