Approaching the Business End
The Supercoppa defeat to Fiorentina was frustrating, although only in the same way that stubbing your toe is frustrating. Painful at the time, but not something anybody intends to discuss at length during their retirement speech. Publicly I maintained that the competition was little more than an elaborate exhibition match. Privately, I was rather less philosophical.
Fortunately, football has an excellent way of distracting you from disappointment by refusing to slow down. Within a matter of weeks we found ourselves playing every three or four days, bouncing between Serie A, the Coppa Italia and the Champions League with barely enough time to remember which competition we were currently trying to win.
The response from the players was encouraging. We dispatched Sampdoria 4-0 in the cup before navigating what can best be described as an unnecessarily eventful trip to Cagliari, where we somehow managed to transform a comfortable afternoon into a 2-2 draw. Chelsea then reminded us that the Champions League has a habit of exposing even the smallest tactical weakness, comfortably beating us 3-0 at Stamford Bridge. Fortunately, football also has an extremely short memory. Four days later Lecce were beaten 4-1, and a draw against Milan secured our passage through the league phase of the Champions League.
By February, the fixture list had become genuinely unreasonable. Roma were beaten 3-2 to send us into the Coppa Italia semi-finals. Aston Villa were edged out over two entertaining legs in Europe. Monza, Como, Palermo and Udinese were all dealt with in the league, while an awkward trip to Bergamo produced a respectable draw against my former employers. Even a scoreless first leg away to Inter in the Coppa semi-final felt like quiet progress. Not spectacular, but the sort of result that gives you permission to dream for another few weeks.
The league table, however, offered a useful reminder that dreams and reality are not always close acquaintances.
Inter had quietly disappeared over the horizon.
The title race that had consumed us twelve months earlier had become something rather different. While Inter marched relentlessly towards another Scudetto, the rest of us found ourselves locked in a weekly argument over who was actually the second-best team in Italy. Napoli, Fiorentina, Bologna and ourselves were separated by little more than a handful of points, each convinced that Champions League qualification was simultaneously inevitable and slipping away.
Oddly enough, I found I wasn’t checking the Serie A table quite as often as I had the previous season.
Not because it mattered less.
Because something else had started to occupy my thoughts.
Europe.
The Champions League had begun as an enjoyable distraction.
It was about to become something considerably more serious.