How Inter embraced their ‘Nazionale’ stars to put Milan in their place

Federico Dimarco could have been a greengrocer. His father Gianni still gets up at the crack of dawn to sell fruit and veg in Milan’s Porta Romana neighbourhood. Lifting the shutters must have been a sweet experience this morning. He probably reminisced on the times he took his boy to watch Inter at San Siro. Dimarco was six when a Derby della Madonnina was also a Champions League semi-final. He was at San Siro for it, too.

“As an Inter fan, I don’t have the fondest of memories,” Dimarco said. His team went out on away goals that night in 2003 and, to compound his misery, Milan finished the job and went on to win the trophy. Dimarco never thought he’d get a chance to set things right. But on Wednesday night, he climbed the stairs leading up to the pitch at San Siro and must have had goosebumps as the Champions League music blared out of the sound system.

“It’s an unbelievable feeling to think I was here 20 years ago to watch a semi-final and now I’m playing in one.”

The 7,000 Inter ultras looked down and saw one of their own. Dimarco stood with them as a teenager. When Inter won the Coppa Italia last season and then the Super Cup, on both occasions he grabbed a megaphone and led the travelling fans in song.

“This isn’t a derby. It’s the derby,” Inter coach Simone Inzaghi said on the eve of the game. No one knew that better than Dimarco. Milano born and raised, he’s steeped in it. The 26-year-old’s cut-back for Henrikh Mkhitaryan clinched Inter a 2-0 win that should have been more. It was Dimarco’s fifth assist in the Champions League this season. Only Vinicius Junior can match him.

On the face of it, Inter’s triumph felt quintessentially Internazionale. They opened the scoring via a corner kick. A Turk, Hakan Calhanoglu, whipped a ball in for a Bosnian, Edin Dzeko. “It was a scheme we practised this morning,” the veteran striker revealed. Not long afterwards, Mkhitaryan, an Armenian, doubled Inter’s advantage as the self-proclaimed ‘Brothers of the World’ raced into the earliest 2-0 lead a Champions League semi-final has experienced in 14 years.

But under Inzaghi, this club — a club that, in 2006, became the first Serie A team ever to send out a starting XI made up entirely of foreign players — has felt more Nazionale than Internazionale.