The Italian Cup Semi Final
Beating Inter in the Champions League had felt like a statement.
The Coppa Italia semi-final felt like a test of endurance.
The first leg at the San Siro had finished goalless, leaving everything to be decided in Rome. I walked into the second leg quietly confident. We’d already eliminated them once this month and, for forty-five minutes, it looked as though we were about to do it again.
We controlled the first half from start to finish. Inter struggled to establish any rhythm while we repeatedly found space in the final third, and when Taty Castellanos gave us the lead midway through the half it felt thoroughly deserved. We went into the interval one goal to the good and, perhaps more importantly, looking like the better side.
Inter rarely stay quiet for long.
They emerged after the break a completely different team. The control we’d enjoyed before half-time slowly disappeared as wave after wave of black and blue shirts began pushing us deeper towards our own penalty area. When Pedro Gonçalves equalised just after the hour, it was difficult to argue with it. Momentum had swung completely.
The game had become one of those cup ties where every attack felt significant.
Then, with less than ten minutes remaining, Pietro Pellegri produced what I thought would become one of the great goals of our season. A cross from the right was met first time on the volley, the ball flying past the goalkeeper before he had time to react. The stadium erupted.
Then came the familiar pause.
VAR.
Football has somehow managed to invent a system capable of delaying both joy and disappointment simultaneously. We all knew what was coming before the referee even reached for his ear.
Offside.
The celebrations evaporated as quickly as they had begun.
Extra time belonged almost entirely to Inter. We simply couldn’t get hold of the ball. Every clearance came straight back at us, every attack seemed to end with another corner or another dangerous cross into the box. It felt less like defending a football match and more like trying to survive a siege.
Then came the moment I was convinced had ended our season.
Matheus Nunes lunged into a challenge inside the penalty area. Penalty. Second yellow card. Down to ten men.
There are moments in football where you stop thinking about tactics altogether because the situation has drifted beyond your control. This was one of them.
Lautaro Martínez placed the ball on the spot.
Jonas Urbig stood on his line.
Looking back, thirty million pounds suddenly didn’t seem quite so expensive.
Urbig guessed correctly and pushed the penalty away.
The Olimpico exploded.
Inter responded by striking the crossbar and forcing a succession of desperate blocks from defenders who seemed determined to throw every available body between the ball and the goal. Somehow we were still alive.
Until we weren’t.
With only minutes remaining, Ibrahim Bamba completely misjudged a bouncing ball, gifting Matt O’Riley the simplest of finishes. As Inter celebrated, I remember thinking that football had finally caught up with us. We’d escaped too many times already.
With ten men and barely any time left, there wasn’t really a plan anymore.
There was only hope.
I pushed everyone forward.
Centre-backs became attackers. Midfielders abandoned any pretence of defending. If we were going out, we might as well do it swinging.
Then, in the 121st minute, Luca Pellegrini collected the ball on the left-hand side.
Football has an extraordinary sense of timing.
Only weeks earlier he’d been sent off against Juventus, costing us two valuable league points. Now, with our season hanging by its fingertips, he unleashed a strike that arced into the far corner beyond Sommer’s reach.
Pandemonium.
Before anyone had time to breathe, we won the ball back straight from the restart. One final attack. One final chance. Osimhen raced through with what was literally the last kick of the match.
This was it.
The winner.
The fairy-tale ending.
Instead, he hit it straight at the goalkeeper.
Of course he did.
Some things, it seems, never change.
Penalties awaited.
As the players gathered before the shootout, I felt strangely calm.
That probably sounds ridiculous given the previous one hundred and twenty minutes, but unlike most penalty shootouts, this one hadn’t arrived unexpectedly. We’d practised penalties before the Champions League tie against Inter, and we’d done exactly the same before this cup semi-final. If the evening was going to be decided from twelve yards, then at least we’d given ourselves every possible chance.
There was also one rather significant advantage.
Jonas Urbig.
By this point I trusted him implicitly. Some goalkeepers save penalties through instinct. Others save them through presence alone. Urbig somehow managed both.
Lautaro Martínez walked forward first.
This time there would be no heroic save. He found the corner and Inter had the perfect start.
It hardly mattered.
Hakan Çalhanoğlu, facing the club he’d left only a few months earlier, calmly rolled our first penalty beyond the goalkeeper. If there were any lingering loyalties, he hid them remarkably well.
Denzel Dumfries was next for Inter.
Urbig guessed correctly.
Again.
The save wasn’t spectacular, but it didn’t need to be. He threw himself low to his right, pushed the ball away and suddenly the advantage belonged to us.
Victor Osimhen stepped up knowing he could put daylight between the sides. Given his habit of making straightforward finishes unnecessarily complicated, I briefly considered looking away.
Thankfully, penalties appear to be considerably easier than open goals.
He buried it.
Nicolò Barella responded for Inter before Aleksandar Stanković calmly converted our third. By now I almost expected him to score. Somewhere along the line he’d stopped being the midfielder I’d signed and quietly reinvented himself as one of the most reliable centre-backs in Italy.
Inter refused to disappear. Topalović squeezed his penalty just beyond Urbig’s fingertips, keeping them alive.
Akhomach followed.
Only days earlier he’d made his debut for Spain and marked the occasion by scoring a penalty. Apparently international football had done little to affect his confidence because he dispatched this one with exactly the same authority.
Four from four.
Inter’s final hope rested with Dean Huijsen, a player I’d come remarkably close to signing the previous season. He smashed his effort into the top corner, leaving Urbig no chance.
Which meant it all came down to Giovanni Fabbian.
Football has a habit of choosing unlikely heroes.
Fabbian had found himself spending more time on the bench in recent weeks, despite never really giving me a reason to leave him there. I’d been telling myself he deserved more opportunities.
He chose the perfect moment to prove me right.
Without the slightest hint of nerves, he sent Josep Martínez the wrong way before wheeling away in celebration.
Five penalties.
Five goals.
After one hundred and twenty-one exhausting minutes, a missed penalty, a red card, a goal in the final seconds of extra time and one final twist from the penalty spot, we had eliminated Inter for the second time in the space of a fortnight.
Looking back, I don’t think we simply knocked Inter out of two competitions.
I think that was the moment we finally stopped fearing them.