Has there been a Champions League tie since that has felt more consequential? As Inter travel to Barcelona for Wednesday’s semi-final first leg, the mind turns inevitably to their 1-0 reverse at the Camp Nou 15 years ago – “the most beautiful defeat of my career” as José Mourinho has described it.
Playing with 10 men for a little over an hour, Inter secured a 3-2 aggregate victory. Suddenly it became apparent that it didn’t matter whether you had the ball or not: you could win even with 19% possession. But the outcome was only part of it. The whole tie was played out amid an apocalyptic atmosphere symbolised by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, whose eruption made it impossible to fly over western Europe, forcing Barcelona to travel to Milan for the first leg by bus.
For some it was good against evil; for others an upstart rebel daring to challenge the empire of aesthetic order. It felt fundamental. At the time, Barcelona, with Lionel Messi in his early pomp, seemed invincible. Pep Guardiola had won the treble in his first season and, more than that, had revolutionised how football was played. The game suddenly became an enormous rondo, supreme technique allying with developments in playing surfaces so first touches could be taken for granted and superiority was achieved by the manipulation of space on the pitch.
It was Total Football reimagined for the modern age, and its devotees took its principles with a zeal that at times tipped into sanctimony. For Mourinho, being overlooked for the Barcelona job confirmed in his mind that in his time as a coach at Barcelona under Bobby Robson and Louis van Gaal he had never truly been accepted.
They had called him the Translator, not only because that was what he had initially been, but to highlight that he had never been a player, that he was not of the club, that he was an outsider. He was not, as Guardiola was, one of their own.
There had always been a cynical streak to Mourinho’s football but at Porto and Chelsea his grounding at Barcelona had been apparent. His side had pressed and been capable of dominating games by controlling possession. But at Inter he began the move to becoming the anti-Barcelona: if they want the ball, we will play without it; if they want to press high, we will sit low.
There were still moments of counterintuitive attacking, but the shift to the “he who has the ball has fear” phase of his career was under way. Barcelona would end that season in La Liga with 99 points; they lost only four games in all competitions. They seemed almost invincible, dominant and revolutionary, likely to become the first club in the Champions League era to successfully defend the European title.
Whatever impact that 14-hour bus journey had on Barça, Inter played brilliantly in the first leg. Pedro put Barça ahead but Wesley Sneijder levelled before half-time. Mourinho told his players that if they kept playing as they had they would win 4-1. He was one off, as Maicon and Diego Milito hit second-half goals. Milito had been just offside and Barça probably should have had a penalty, which allowed them to claim they had been unfortunate, but Inter had won comfortably.
That weekend, having been left on the bench for a game at Villarreal, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a big-money signing from Inter the previous summer, raged at Guardiola in the dressing room, kicking over a metal skip that was used to transport kit. Guardiola simply picked it up and walked out. For Ibrahimovic, this was proof of Guardiola’s beta status: he was a “frightened little overthinker” with his team of “obedient little schoolboys”, far removed from the charismatic leadership of Mourinho.
This was football as soap opera and psychodrama, subplots everywhere. Mourinho named the same starting XI as in the first leg but, shortly before kick-off, it emerged that Goran Pandev had been injured in the warm-up and he was replaced on the left of midfield by the Romanian full-back Cristian Chivu. It was probably happenstance rather than being part of the some great Mourinho plot, but it fitted the narrative of him as some great Machiavellian puppet master.
Inter were absorbing the pressure well when, with 28 minutes gone, Thiago Motta was shown a straight red after a slight flex of the fingers in the face of Sergio Busquets. The Barça man clearly overreacted, at one point peeking between his fingers to see what action the referee was taking. But Motta, who had already been booked, did (lightly) push him in the face; a second yellow would have been entirely reasonable.
No matter: pro-Mourinho forces and those weary of Barça’s occasional self-righteousness cried scandal, an early example of football’s descent into a post-truth world.
Inter held on until Gerard Piqué, having been thrust up front, eventually got one back with six minutes remaining. Bojan Krkic then had the ball in the net for what would have been an away-goals winner, but the goal was ruled out for a handball by Yaya Touré, a decision that could have gone either way and was debated just as furiously as the red card.
As Mourinho charged on to the pitch in celebration, Barcelona turned on the sprinklers. That, perhaps, was his greatest triumph: to reduce the club that had spurned him to an act of pettiness. Their halo had slipped and it was he who had dislodged it. Mourinho, having shown he could tame Barça, got the Real Madrid job as a result, leading to perhaps the most all-consuming drama football has ever known as Guardiola reached his apogee, winning a third straight title and another Champions League, then resigned, exhausted, after Mourinho’s Madrid had claimed the league the following season.
Madrid, once a club obsessed by señorío, doing things the right way, became seduced by the consolations of imagined persecution, a trait they have still not shaken off.
That 2010 semi-final was a thrilling, operatic tie that had profound consequences. Teams learned to ignore the siren call of Barcelona’s possession, to stay in shape and play without the ball, as Chelsea did in beating them in their 2012 semi-final. And clubs and fans realised that you could choose your own truth, live in your own world of alternative facts. Football has never been quite the same.
