Lazio in Europe
If Manchester City had taught us that we belonged in the Champions League, Inter were about to remind us that belonging and progressing were not quite the same thing.
When the quarter-final draw was made, I remember feeling quietly relieved. That sounds ridiculous given we had just been handed the reigning Italian champions, but the alternative had been Real Madrid, Bayern Munich or Paris Saint-Germain. In Europe, optimism is often little more than choosing the least frightening option.
The first leg at San Siro began exactly as most of our meetings with Inter tended to. They controlled possession, dictated the tempo and spent much of the evening reminding me why they had pipped us to the Scudetto twelve months earlier. For over an hour we struggled to get any real foothold in the game, and I could feel the tie gradually slipping towards them.
Eventually I accepted that matching them wasn’t enough.
One of the strikers came off, Hakan Çalhanoğlu was introduced into midfield and I pushed Akhomach into the space behind our remaining forward. It wasn’t a revolutionary tactical idea. It simply gave us another player capable of receiving the ball in areas Inter had previously controlled.
The change transformed the game.
Almost immediately we began finding spaces that hadn’t existed before. Akhomach equalised with twenty minutes remaining, and suddenly it was Inter who looked uncomfortable. We even had what would have been a winning goal ruled out, a decision that felt particularly cruel given how the momentum had shifted.
Walking away from the San Siro with a 1-1 draw felt like a small victory.
Looking back, it may also have been the moment I realised this group had developed an unusual habit of refusing to accept games were over simply because logic suggested they should be.
The return leg began exactly as we’d hoped. Saelemaekers gave us an early lead and the Olimpico responded in kind. For a brief spell everything felt under control. We looked composed, organised and, perhaps for the first time against Inter, genuinely confident.
Football, however, has a habit of punishing any manager foolish enough to become comfortable.
Having put us ahead, Saelemaekers then gifted Inter an equaliser with an error he’d no doubt spent the following week trying to forget. Before we had fully recovered, Lautaro Martínez struck again. Two chances. Two goals. In the space of a few minutes we’d gone from controlling the tie to staring at another painful European exit.
It would have been easy for heads to drop. Inter had broken our hearts often enough over the previous eighteen months, whether by beating us to the Scudetto or simply reminding us they remained Italy’s benchmark. Instead, this Lazio side responded in the only way it seemed to know how.
On the stroke of half-time, Saelemaekers completed his own redemption by scoring his second of the evening. The same player who had almost thrown the tie away had dragged us straight back into it.
When Taty Castellanos put us back in front shortly after the restart, the mood changed completely.
From that moment onwards there was no panic, no desperate defending and no feeling that we were hanging on for dear life. We simply closed the game down with a maturity that I hadn’t associated with my Lazio teams before. Inter, who had looked so dangerous an hour earlier, were reduced to hopeful crosses and speculative efforts. Every clearance, every tackle and every passing minute brought us a little closer.
When the final whistle sounded there was no dramatic collapse, no late sucker punch and no cruel twist waiting around the corner.
We had beaten the champions of Italy over two legs.
After Manchester City, people might have suggested we’d ridden our luck.
After Inter, they could no longer say it was a fluke.
For the first time, it genuinely felt as though this team belonged among Europe’s elite.