And so to Milan’s Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, more familiarly known as the San Siro, for our Wednesday evening Champions League match against Internazionale with the mini-league phase reaching its half-way point.

Yet again, it falls to my lot to preview a football match against a club whose roots lie with cricketers. Inter was a breakaway from the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, now simply AC Milan, whose own origin story involves a drunken evening of British expats (che sorpresa!) waxing nostalgic in 1899 about the games they played in the Old Country.

The nub of the Milanese schism was the Italian Football Federation’s attempt in 1907 to limit the number of foreign players. It had the cockamamie idea of restricting the Italian championship to teams with only Italians while creating a junior competition for teams that included foreigners. This prompted the leading teams, including Milan, to sit out both competitions in protest. However, for the following season, some proposed boycotting just the championship, making the lesser competition the superior one. 

It is not definitively clear how the arguments broke within the Milan club: to be all-expat, all-Italian, mixed, limited mixed. However, it is beyond doubt that its officials and members were deeply riven. In March 1908, the club’s assistant secretary, Giorgio Muggiani, a Milanese who had discovered a love of football while in boarding school in Switzerland, led a breakaway group of 43 other members who wanted the club to keep accepting foreign players alongside Italians. They set up their own team and named it Internazionale because, as Muggiani famously declared, ‘we are brothers of the world’.

Muggiani was an illustrator who became a distinguished Futurist graphic artist and created celebrated advertising posters for the likes of Pirelli, Campari and Martini. A story attributed to his son is that Inter’s colours derive from the crest his father drew for the new club. He wanted that to be as diametrically opposed to Milan’s predominantly fire-red insignia as he could get. The colour on the other end of his two-coloured red drawing pencil was blue. 

It sounds apocryphal, but perhaps no more incredible than Muggiani’s assertion that the midnight blue night sky over the l’Orologio restaurant, the artists’ hang-out where the separatists met, inspired Inter’s black and blue.

Black, blue and silver

The Nerazzurri have seen plenty of silverware of the non-culinary variety since that night: 20 league championships, nine Copa Italia, eight Supercopa Italia, three Champions League trophies, the same number of UEFA Cups and a World Club Cup. 

They wear the scudetto this season as defending Serie A champions and sit second, a point behind Napoli, whom they play next weekend. They have won seven of their 11 league games; their only defeat came in the Milan derby. In the CL, they have drawn at the Etihad, beaten Red Star at home and Young Boys away — all without conceding a goal, but neither have we. In the CL mini-league, we both have seven points. They sit two slots above the eighth-place cut-off for automatic qualification for the knock-out phase; we are one place below.

Simone Inzaghi, now in his fourth season in charge, consistently starts a 3-5-2, but it quickly becomes a 2-3-3-2 with the ball and a 5-3-2 without it. His team does not press high but looks to control the game with a mid-block and create the space to attack behind an opponent’s back line. Its wing-backs will put a lot of early crosses into those spaces, and its deep-lying playmaker, Turkey’s Hakan Calhanoglu, will also target those areas with long cross-field balls and late runs into the box. 

Without the ball, falling back into 5-3-2 blocks the centre and forces the opposition to work around the flanks. Inter allows the opposition plenty of shots (sixth highest among this season’s CL teams for shots conceded), but they have not yet led to any goals. In his pre-match press conference, Inzaghi stressed the importance of not letting us do anything with the ball when we have it. We have found breaking down that sort of defending tough sledging this season. The game has the makings of an attritional one.

Inter

With first-choice centre-back former Italian international Francesco Acerbi just returning from a hamstring injury, expect Inzaghi to start Switzerland’s keeper Yann Sommer, who has kept seven clean sheets in his 10 CL games with Inter, in front of a back line comprising veteran Dutch international Stefan de Vrij, France’s Benjamin Pavard, and Alessandro Bastoni, who has a propensity to drive high up the pitch in the manner of Calafiori, whom he plays alongside in the Italian national team. Promising young German defender Yann Bisseck will be on the bench.

Calhanoglu played 20 minutes off the bench at the weekend after missing the previous two games with a muscle injury. Thus, he will likely share the midfield duties across the 90 with Italy’s Nicolo Barella, Davide Fattesi, who arrived from Sassuolo in the summer, Piotr Zielinksi, who was picked up on a free from Napoli in the off-season and skippers Poland when Lewandowski is not playing, and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, formerly of this parish but enjoying an Indian summer to his career at 35. 

Dutch international Denzil Dumfries and Italian veteran Matteo Darmian are the right-wing-back candidates. Darmian did Inter’s pre-match press conference with Inzaghi, so he may be the one to get the nod. Brazilian Carlos Augusto is an injury doubt, so Italy’s Frederico Dimarco should start on the left. At 26, Dimarco is relatively youthful for this Inter side; the average age of the likely starting XI is approaching 31.

Club captain Lautaro Martinez and French international Marcus Thuram will be up top. The pairing will arguably be Gabriel and Saliba’s sternest test this season. Thuram is Inter’s leading goal scorer this term in the league with seven, plus five assists, followed by Martinez (5+3). The prolific Argentine was Serie A’s top scorer last season with 24 and headed the winner at the weekend from a Dimarco cross.

Mehdi Taremi, who captains the Iranian national side, for which he has scored 51 goals in 89 matches, and Marko Arnautovic (120 caps for Austria), a former West Ham teammate of Declan Rice, will be available from the bench. However, the Austrian is struggling to get over an eye infection. At 32 and 35, respectively, they were a couple of bargain pick-ups in the off-season to add seasoned squad depth. 

The Arsenal

After the meh-ness at St James’s Park, we need a lively response in a sold-out San Siro. The injury list is getting shorter but shifting: Rice has unexpectedly joined its ranks. While the return of Martin Ødegaard to training is heartening, we would see him on the bench at best; it looks from the training pictures that his ankle is still strapped. I’m not sure White and Timber have 90 minutes in their legs yet, but we will need Partey’s verticality in midfield even more in Rice’s absence. Thus: 

Raya

White, Saliba, Gabriel, Timber

Partey, Merino, Trossard

Saka, Havertz, Martinelli

We have played Inter only twice before, in the CL group stage in 2003-04. After losing 3-0 at Highbury, we had a glorious 5-1 win in the San Siro with goals from Henry (2), Ljungberg, Edu and Pires. Since then, we have failed to win or even score in our last four CL away trips to Italy.

A draw against Inter would not be terrible. Yet I will latch onto the fact that the Nerazzurri have never kept four consecutive clean sheets in the CL, and thus, we shall end a run of three winless games by grinding out a classic 1-0 to the Arsenal.

Enjoy the game ‘holics, near and far.