saw Dutch midfielder Clarence Seedorf, Croatian defender Dario Simic and much talked about trequartista (playmaker) Andrea Pirlo switch to Milan, following midfielder Cristiano Brocchi the season before. ‘I could never have changed from nerazzurri to Milan, no never,’ affirms the 61-year-old Corso. ‘I had the opportunity,’ reveals Maldini, ‘back before Paolo was born. Moratti (Angelo, father of current Inter president, Massimo) wanted me but it didn’t come off. In those days it was almost unthinkable to change colours. The players had certain bars and places we went to. Really, it was unthinkable.’
But Alberto Costa, Milan correspondent at the Corriere della Sera, insists switching shirts is not solely a modern phenomenon. ‘There are precedents. When Milan were relegated to Serie B in 1982 they were in a very bad way financially. Inter helped them out by lending them three players, Aldo Serena, Canuti, and Pasinato. They came straight back up into Serie A.’
A modern echo of that camaraderie came last November. Inter’s Christian Vieri sent a congratulatory text message to Andriy Shevchenko when the back-from-injury Milan striker scored the vital Champions League winner against Real Madrid. A week later the gesture was reciprocated when ‘Bobo’ Vieri himself ended a goal drought by blasting all four against Brescia.
The Corriere della Sera man sums up the relations between the Milan giants: ‘On the pitch, between the players, there is great rivalry. But it’s very, let’s say, very “English”: it’s hard competition between professionals, it means a lot, but it’s all done with fair play.’ He makes a telling point: ‘When they changed the name of the San Siro it wasn’t by accident that they re-named it the Giuseppe Meazza stadium.’ Meazza was an Inter hero whose career spanned twenty years until 1947, scoring 283 goals in 408 matches. ‘But he actually played the last two seasons of his career with the rossoneri’, says Costa. ‘He represents both clubs.’ The new San Siro museum has memorabilia and trophies of both teams exhibited together.
The derby may well serve to emphasise the original closeness of the Milanese clubs, but it also points up the peculiar differences in club ‘culture’. The old delineation of working class reds and aristocratic blues may be long gone. But Inter still hang on to that old patina of prestige, the first of the two to win the yellow star. Nowadays, however, without a title win since 1989, it is an illustrious history that weighs ever heavier. ‘Two different realities,’ is how the two institutions are summed up by Federica Zangalli, whose role as football reporter for TeleLombardia, the leading regional TV station, gives her a unique insight. ‘As a club Inter are still very much run like a family firm, dominated by Massimo Moratti. He is a fan, he loves the club. The criticism is that he loves it too much. There is no “wall” dividing the owner from the management who run the club, the team. If he sees a player he likes, he buys him.’ This is why only Inter could have tolerated for so long the Ronaldo saga. Juventus, for example would have cut their losses and offloaded the troublesome star much sooner, as they did with Zidane. ‘Moratti is a lovely man, a romantic, which football needs. But perhaps he is too nice a person for this modern business of football.’
‘The arrival of Berlusconi in 1986 revolutionised Milan. They are now run like a multi-national company. Unlike Inter everyone knows their specific role and little things don’t blow up into great big problems.’ The enormous Berlusconi-era successes – six Serie A titles, three European Cups, three European Super Cups, and two Intercontinental cups – reversed the imbalance in silverware with their neighbours. The rossoneri now have sixteen scudetto to Inter’s thirteen.
‘Whereas at Milan there’s an upbeat approach, at Inter there is this culture of suffering,’ observes Zangalli. ‘It is almost as though it’s in their DNA to suffer. The more they miss out on winning something, the more anxious they become, the fans, the club, so the more pressure there is to win something. It’s a classic vicious circle.’
But former player Corso denies Inter’s is a culture of pessimism. ‘There is a lot of irony, very self-deprecating. It’s always been like that.’ It is perhaps no coincidence that many comics and literary figures are numbered among Inter’s celebrity fans. Away from the ultra-dominated curva, Inter supporters in the costlier seats are notoriously the most impatient in Serie A. ‘Yes, it’s true, they are very negative,’ says Fabio Monti, Il Corriere’s Inter-watcher. ‘If at half-time they are not winning they start to whistle against their own players every time they make a mistake.’ Zangalli agrees: ‘That, of course, makes the players more nervous still. Several players have moved from Inter to Milan in recent seasons, and they all notice the difference arriving at AC.’ Is it just that success breeds success so the Milanisti are more relaxed and patient? ‘No, Inter fans have always been like that,’ bemoans Monti. ‘Even before this barren period they were always more negative, more critical of their side. Perhaps it comes from having such great expectations because of their history, it’s difficult to say,’ he admits with an exasperated shake of the head.
Milan and Inter, the odd couple indeed. If AC are now the laid-back slightly devilish Walter Matthau, then Inter are the neurotic Jack Lemmon, trying too hard and beset by self-doubt. Simplistically speaking, AC Milan’s game classically is founded on a patient passing approach, dubbed by detractors as gioco orrizontale – the square ball. Inter’s is traditionally built around one outstanding world-beater – Sandro Mazzola in the 1960s, Ronaldo in the late-1990s, Vieri now – exploiting the gioco verticale, the direct long ball. Peppino Prisco, the rascally former Inter vice president, once defended the team’s style by referring to the famous 1949 derby victory: ‘square ball five, long ball six.’
Milan sold more than 53,000 season tickets for this current season. Inter, despite not having lifted that championship shield since 1989, and despite having inexplicably thrown it away by losing to Lazio on the final day of last season, sold only a shade fewer. The odd couple look destined to share domestic life for some time yet.
The Mother of All Battles Al Ahly v Zamalek, January 2003
In the land of the Pharaohs, behold a ritual as immense as the pyramids yet mysterious as the Sphinx: this is the Al Ahly–Zamalek derby.
In a city as crowded and polluted as modern day Cairo it is easy to lose any sensation that you are in the midst of the world’s oldest civilisation. Cairo houses a quarter of Egypt’s seventy million people alongside the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramids, still standing after four and half millennia.
Cairo is a Middle Eastern city where Christian and Muslim live together in something close to harmony. A city that can be seen from space – not because of any mammoth feat of human ingenuity but thanks to the enormous cloud of pollution that pinpoints it on satellite pictures. Cairo’s exploding population has already engulfed a dozen towns that were once a desert away from the capital, and within twenty years the Great Pyramids will no longer be a coach ride from the city but in the heart of downtown.
While the unrivalled chaos of the last century has left a city coming to grips with its collapsing economy, a youth culture trying to drag its elders into the 21st century, and all the inherent issues that having Libya and Israel as your immediate neighbours brings, one thing has remained a constant – a footballing rivalry that can genuinely claim to dwarf Real v Barça and Boca v River Plate.
Al Ahly v Zamalek goes beyond fanatical. It is part football match, part political rally, part history lesson and generally a good excuse for the locals to hurl rocks at each other. Throughout most of the Egyptian league calendar Al Ahly and Zamalek appear to be no more than successful teams in an average league. Neither club have a huge home ground. Zamalek’s Hassan Helmi stadium holds a shade under 40,000 while the larger club, Al Ahly, paradoxically hosts less than 20,000 in their Mokhtar el Tetch. Yet come derby day the supporters
