Article 36 — Inter 10–11
Jose Mourinho left after 2 seasons as mentioned in my previous post. He won 1 Supercoppa Italiana, 1 Coppa Italia, 1 Champions League and 2 Scudetti in his time at Inter. Mourinho was replaced by his English Premier League nemesis, Rafa Benitez, a man I call the “Fat Spanish Waiter”. It was an unpopular appointment due to his history with one of the teams I hate, Liverpool.
That aside, I didn’t feel he had what it takes to maintain our era of dominance started by Roberto Mancini. He is a very good manager and had won 2 La Ligas with Valencia which is impressive but in 6 seasons at Liverpool, he only truly challenged for the league title in one of those seasons. He did a miraculous Champions League in that time but having seen his work up close in England, I was not convinced he was good enough.
This season, 2010–11 would be the last time Inter would win anything and compare to what we were going to experience in future seasons, this was the best season of this decade.
After winning the Treble there was a whole host of awards won by the club and individual players in 2010. Julio Cesar won the UEFA Best Goalkeeper of the Year, Maicon UEFA Best Defender of the Year, Wesley Sneijder Best Midfielder of the Year, Diego Milito UEFA Best Forward of the Year and Club Footballer of the Year and Maicon, Wesley Sneijder and Jose Mourinho were included in the UEFA Team of the Year.
Maicon, Lucio and Wesley Sneijder were included in the FIFA/FIFPro World XI and Jose Mourinho won the FIFA World Coach of the Year for Men’s Football.
Diego Milito won the Serie A Footballer and Foreign Footballer of the Year awards, Julio Cesar won the Serie A Goalkeeper of the Year, Walter Samuel won the Serie A Defender of the Year, Jose Mourinho won the Serie A Coach of the Year and Maicon won Serie A Goal of the Year for the goal he scored against Juventus on the 16th April 2010 at San Siro. As a team, we won the European Club of the Year, Serie A Team of the Year and World’s Best Club by IFFHS.
Amazingly, not one Inter player made it even as far as one of the top 3 nominees for the Ballon D’Or. Wesley Sneijder won the Treble with Inter, reached the final of the World Cup with Holland where he won the Silver Ball for being the 2nd best player at the World Cup and Bronze Boot for finishing third in the scorer’s chart at the World Cup. I would have given him the award if it was up to me but he wasn’t even one of the three nominees for the award which I found astounding.
As far as transfers went this season, we bought Luca Castellazzi, McDonald Mariga was signed permanently, Jonathan Biabany was re-signed after initially signing for the club in 2007, Philippe Coutinho returned to Inter after being signed in 2008 and spending 2 years on loan in Brazil for Vasco Da Gama. Inter signed Andrea Ranocchia on a co-ownership deal from Genoa and was allowed to stay there for the first half of the season. In the winter transfer market, he was signed permanently. In that transfer window, Inter signed Italian striker Giampaolo Pazzini permanently, Yuto Nagatomo and Houssine Kharja were signed on loan. The winter signings gave Inter a boost and some freshness after a below-par first half of the season.
Ricardo Quaresma was sold in the summer, Francesco Toldo announced his retirement from football, Victor Obinna left on loan and in the winter, Mancini was sold, Biabany only lasted half a season and moved to Sampdoria in the same deal that brought us Pazzini. Nelson Rivas, Sulley Muntari and Davide Santon all left on loan too. Santon left in the same loan deal that brought us Nagatomo.
Inter began the Italian season by winning the Supercoppa Italiana 3–1 against Roma at San Siro, coming from a goal down to win. My personal hate story with the UEFA Super Cup continued as Inter lost 0–2 against Atletico Madrid.
In Serie A, the defence of our league title deteriorated. After winning the league title 4 seasons in a row on the pitch, 5 seasons in a row officially, it didn’t come as a big surprise that the team lacked the hunger and determination to defend the long-held league title. The hangover of the Treble meant that we reached Christmas 2010, 13 points behind our neighbours AC Milan.
As expected, Rafa Benitez couldn’t carry on the legacy left behind by Mancini and Mourinho, failing to bond with the team, antagonising the heroes of the Treble and was looking like a man with a personal vendetta against Mourinho, trying to make the players forget the high of last season and the popular Portuguese. He was sacked just before Christmas.
Inter made a surprise announcement in December by appointing former AC Milan player, director and coach, Leonardo as Benitez’s replacement. Leonardo had not done well in his previous spell as the manager of AC Milan so I was concerned with how he would do at Inter. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised when he came in, he brought with him new, positive energy and freed the shackles of the team. Tactically, he was suspect but Inter were playing a Brazilian style of football, free-flowing in attack without much thought on defence. He set a new Serie A record of collecting 33 points in 13 matches by 6th March 2011, in a surprisingly good start to life as Inter manager. We ended the season in 2nd place, 6 points behind eventual champions AC Milan which was an improvement from where we ended the first half of the season.
Before Rafa Benitez left, he brought Inter to the FIFA Club World Cup held at Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates on the back of Mourinho’s success in the Champions League the previous season. Inter won their semi-final over Asian champions, South Korea’s Seongnam Ilhwa Chunma 3–0 and won the final against African champions, Togo’s TP Mazembe 3–0 as well. This completed the Quintuple of trophies for Inter in the year of 2010 and we became the 4th club to achieve this. Samuel Eto’o won the adidas Golden Ball and TOYOTA Award as the best player of the tournament and Inter won the FIFA Fair Play Award for collecting only one yellow card over 2 matches.
In the Coppa Italia, we qualified for the final again, our 7th appearance in 8 seasons. We had beaten our regular final opponents AS Roma in the semi-final, 2–1 on aggregate to face Palermo in the final and we won the final with a good display to end the season on a high, 3–1 and retain the Coppa Italia.
Our defence of the Champions League went against the image we built of the team the previous season. In the group stage, we thrashed German team, Werder Bremen 4–0 in the 2nd game of the season and were coasting 4–0 against Tottenham Hotspur in the first half of our next match before letting our foot off the pedal and the Gareth Bale show took centre stage as he nearly overcame the deficit on his own. He ran out of time as we won 4–3. We finished 2nd in the group after losing 2 out of the last 3 matches.
The 2nd Round was a re-match of last season’s final. Bayern Munich won the first leg 1–0 thanks to an unusual error by Julio Cesar, an undeserved defeat. The second leg was a remarkable game of open football. We took the lead through Eto’o to equalise the tie over two legs but Bayern scored twice to lead 3–1, the first of which was again thanks to another horrendous and uncharacteristic error by Julio Cesar.
Cesar redeemed himself by making some important saves and Andrea Ranocchia had to perform a remarkable last-ditch sliding tackle to clear the ball off the line to keep us in the game in the first half as Bayern was finding space to attack and we were vulnerable in defence.
We pulled one back through Sneijder in the 2nd half. We were playing better now but Bayern still carried a threat going forward. We got the final goal of the game through Goran Pandev 2 minutes before the end to break Bayern hearts and knock the German champions out.
In the quarter-final, we played another German team, Schalke 04. In the first leg at San Siro, we took the lead first through a wonderful goal from long-range by Dejan Stankovic but that was as good as it got for us. The teams went into the break level at 2–2, again our defence was vulnerable and open. In the second half, we had no answer to Schalke who picked us off and punished our defensive fragility to win the first leg 5–2. A comeback like the one at Munich was not possible as the 2–5 first-leg defeat had knocked the win out of our sails. Schalke won the return leg 2–1 at home to win 7–3 on aggregate and end our defence of the Champions League.
That concluded season 2010–11 for us. We completed the Quintuple of trophies and that would sadly be the last of the trophies we would win for some time. Benitez had good ideas in mind to refresh the squad with younger players as the main players that achieved the Treble were already in their 30s. It is logical that as a manager he would want to implement his own tactics and strategy but the way he went about it, trying to get the players to forget about last season and Mourinho and antagonising senior players was not right. Leonardo was intelligent as he brought back the feel-good factor at the club but his Brazilian style of play of all-out attack was suicidal. Even though, we ended the season on a high, things were to go downhill from this point on.
