The Greatest Cup Tie of All Time
INTER MILAN vs BARCELONA had everything. It was a privilege to watch from my hotel room in Italy with a man screaming and stomping upstairs.
Mehdi Taremi won the ball just inside his own half and carried it down the sideline to burn off a few seconds of extra time, and the man upstairs went ballistic. He was banging walls, stomping his feet, shouting his approval over and over: “Dai! Dai! Dai!”
We were both watching Sky Sports Italia from a hotel in Bologna, about 140 miles from the San Siro in Milan, and he was making enough noise that it felt like we were sharing a room. To be fair, he was watching Inter and Barcelona fight out a punch-drunk, end-to-end, back-and-forth Champions League semifinal that might just go down as the greatest cup tie there ever was.
They came into this decisive second leg with three goals apiece, the product of a sensational opening round where Marcus Thuram started the scoring with an audacious backheel 30 seconds in. Denzel Dumfries made it 2-0 with a leaping scissor kick before Lamine Yamal went intergalactic to flip the match on its head. Still, Inter came again, then Barcelona matched them once more through an outrageous strike from Raphinha, and all that turned out to be a mere preview of coming attractions.
The anticipation for Tuesday’s Part Two was stratospheric. The myth-makers were sharpening their tools, preparing to carve this one into stone before it began. But when Inter went into halftime 2-0 up, you’d have been forgiven for thinking they were already on their way to the final. The Italian outfit were at home, in front of a raucous and gloriously partisan Nerazzuri crowd, and they’ve been a top team for three seasons now.
But you could tell it wasn’t over in the early minutes of the second half by the only slightly less partisan commentary on Sky Sports Italia. The play-by-play man was absolutely relentless — he scarcely took a breath even when the ball went out of bounds — but as Barcelona seized a grip on things, fear and trepidation began to creep into his voice.
When Lamine Yamal corralled the ball into his orbit to begin terrorizing the Inter backline, it was, “Sinistro! Sinistro!”
When Eric Garcia struck on 54 minutes to get Barcelona back into the game, it was, “Gol, Bar-che-llona.” Quiet, dejected, wholly concerned. You’d hardly have known that a centerback by trade had crept into the box and adjusted his body so cleverly to bonk a volley into the back of the net.
And then we were off. The shooting starlets from Catalunya took over the game in the second half, and their onslaught on the Inter goal was unrelenting. The hosts were struggling to get out and get up the field as Barça coach Hansi Flick’s halftime tweaks came good. Inter were on the rack, and Garcia nearly had another himself after a lightning counterattack from the visitors. It was a maze of passes forward, left, and right that twisted Inter inside-out, but the defender put his shot far too close to Yann Sommer, who still had to react with incredible speed to claw it away.
The Swiss goalkeeper could not keep the door padlocked for long, though, and soon Gerard Martín sent a swooping cross in from deep on the left for Dani Olmo to head home. For the second time in the same semifinal, Barça had come back from two goals behind, and they didn’t stop there.
They laid siege to their hosts’ 18-yard box, Yamal testing Sommer again on 76 minutes before Pedri set up the killer move. Inter, truly reeling now, turned it over far too close to their own goal with three minutes left in the 90. Raphinha stole in down the left, took on the pass, and struck once with his left — saved by Sommer. It came back to him, though, and there was no mistake about the Brazilian’s second effort. He buried it in the far bottom corner with his right foot for 3-2. From 2-0 down in enemy lands, Barcelona suddenly had one foot in the Champions League final.
To his credit, the man upstairs took all this in stride, perhaps the George Michael Bluth kind. Nary a hoot nor holler came down through the ceiling of the old Bolognese hotel. The minutes ticked on — 89, 90, 91 — and only an Inter player losing possession or putting one in the stands got a cry or crash from upstairs, as if only his team was playing and Barcelona were some kind of alien force over which he had no control, no grasp.