notch, but Iran stay in charge.
Half-time and Blazevic is pleased. ‘More goals lads,’ he tells Mr Challangar to tell his boys. But the second half comes too soon for the Iranians. They are still playing the first half in their heads. They create a great chance, but miss and the Iraqis counter-attack quickly. Qathan Drain converts a well-worked move to bring the scores level.
The fans turn up the volume, and Iran respond. They show all the spirit, all the unity that Blazevic had told me about. The game is at their mercy. Chances come and chances go. The anxiety level reaches fever pitch…and then the dam bursts. Iran’s latest pin-up Ali Karimi scores. With seventy minutes gone, it’s 2–1. For the remaining twenty minutes the Iraqis pour forward, desperately chasing the game and, when it comes, the final whistle is like the mercury bursting on a thermometer. The relief is tangible. The crowd cheer, cry, hug each other. Iraq, the old foe, has been defeated. But much more importantly, the World Cup finals are a step nearer.
But after the joy comes the release of pent-up anger. The Iranian footballers have become symbols of national pride, that rare thing in Iran, a totem around which to gather, a lightning rod for dissent against the unhappiness that people feel in their otherwise humdrum lives. Here were ninety minutes of exultation for the masses, but what is there for them now?
In the wake of the victory, the crowds take to the streets. Their delight turns into a violent reaction to the harsh circumstances they face. Tyres are set ablaze, telephone booths vandalised, windows smashed, and anti-regime chants are heard across Tehran and Iran’s other cities. Some claim this is a spontaneous reaction and to some extent they are right. But in a country where boys and girls fear holding hands in case the special morality police take them in or, worse, send them to a moral correction unit, football may not be enough to contain their passions.
Tomorrow La Scala AC Milan v Inter, November 2002
The world’s capital of fashion and opera, Milan was never going to stage just any old footballing derby. This is the story of the nine-decade duet between two very different teams.
On a damp Saturday night 80,000 expectant fans flock to the leafy, well-heeled western outskirts of Milan, Italy’s football and fashion capital. From the outside, the three-tiered San Siro stadium resembles a giant Hallowe’en pumpkin, shafts of white light beaming out through the slits of the six huge spiralling walkways around its perimeter.
Once inside, each end suddenly explodes ten minutes before kick-off into huge, perfectly choreographed displays of banners, slogans, and colour-coded placards. The whole vibrant spectacle is down to the dedicated work of hundreds of members of the much-maligned ultras, the organised supporters groups only some of whose members engage in violence. But tonight they compete in an artistic battle orchestrated with a synchronisation worthy of La Scala, the city’s other famous theatre a few kilometres away to the east in Milan’s cobble-stoned city centre.
The second tier of the curva sud – south bank – of the ‘home’ side disappears under a red-and-black sea of placards. In a seamless scene-change, an enormous banner unrolls above the crowd, forty metres by thirty, depicting a cartoon scene of Milan stars with the slogan, La Storia Infinita – the never-ending story. The 7,300 ‘visiting’ Inter contingent respond by making the curva nord shimmer with hundreds of shiny blue-and-black placards, dotted with the famous bright yellow stars, sported only by teams who have won at least ten titles.
Then they too unfurl above their heads a huge banner featuring Giuseppe ‘Peppino’ Prisco, one of the club’s most popular directors, who died last season. Much loved for his mischievous media comments, the elderly lawyer is shown with his trademark wicked grin and making a vulgar hand gesture. His message ‘to the worms in Hell’ is not lost on Milan’s diavoli rossi, the red devils. From the Milan end, fireworks shoot into the night sky from the front of the second tier. The whole show is carried off with style and humour, provoking gasps and applause from around the packed stadium, and will lead the evening TV sports bulletins.
Tonight’s derby – in Italy the English term is used – has an importance beyond its usual city confines. For the first time in a decade Milan’s two teams are simultaneously tilting for the Serie A title. Just one week before they had found themselves sharing the very top spot in the table, an event not seen for an astonishing thirty years. The lineups feature a string of top Italians – Christian Vieri of Inter and his best friend Filippo ‘Pippo’ Inzaghi of Milan, Gigi di Biaggio, Francesco Toldo, Paolo Maldini and his defensive sidekick of fifteen years, Alessandro ‘Billy’ Costacurta – but on the night this 253rd Milanese derby is won for Milan by a 12th-minute display of Brazilian football geometry.
The gangly Rivaldo threads a flat diagonal pass from the centre circle towards wide player Serginho on the left edge of the Inter box. Inter’s Argentinian defender Nelson Vivas, standing in for countryman Javier Zanetti after the latter’s midweek international duties, desperately stretches but can’t cut out the inch-perfect ball. With one deft touch the spidery Serginho takes the ball sharply square inside, wrong-footing keeper Francesco Toldo who is shaping to anticipate a burst towards the left byline. The move ends with a hard grass-cutting shot into the gaping Inter net, and the San Siro erupts with an earringing roar. It is AC Milan’s 97th derby win, now ten more than Inter. Gate receipts are around €1.4m. The worldwide TV audience runs into tens of millions.
It wasn’t always thus.
In the very last days of the final year of the 19th century, a small group of enthusiasts met one evening to establish the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Most football historians quote the date as 16 December 1899, but in reality the original document of the club’s founding statute was lost, so the gathering could have been any time between the 9th and the 17th of the month. There is also doubt over its location. Some accounts refer to the Hotel du Nord in Piazza Repubblica, others locate it at the nearby Bar Fiaschetteria in Via Berchet, which certainly became the regular meeting place. No exact figures exist for the numbers in attendance.
But what is not in doubt is the club’s English roots. Half a dozen English names featured in the association’s original membership and the driving force behind that inaugural meeting of what would later become the mighty Associazione Calcio Milan – AC Milan – was an English textile worker, one Herbert Kilpin.
A keen striker, Kilpin – the 29-year-old son of a Nottingham butcher – was the team’s first captain, its first club president being one Alfred Edwards. So it was that the final letter ‘o’ was dropped from Milano to adopt the English spelling. The club’s original pitch was on the site of what is now Stazione Centrale, Milan’s main railway station, a huge marble masterpiece of Italy’s Fascist era of public works of the 1920s and 1930s.
But the history of the Milan derby is the history of a sporting divorce. The two parties separated over a point of principle without ever coming to blows, then ended up sharing the same home without ever quite kissing and making up. They are football’s odd couple.
The separation came just a little over eight years after that original gathering. A splinter group led by artist Giorgio Muggiani, broke away because it wanted to permit foreigners to play for the side, contrary to Federation regulations. On 9 March 1908 a group of like-minded rebels gathered together at the L’Orologio restaurant in Via Orefici just a goalkeeper’s kick away from the city’s famous landmark, the giant Duomo cathedral. And thus was born Internazionale Milano, the new name proudly reflecting the reasons for the divorce.
‘The colours they chose for their new kit reflected these early romantic leanings,’ says Fabio Monti, Inter expert at the Milan-based Il Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading
