Sliding Doors: The Goal and the 'Grinta' That Got Inter Milan Back in Business

For one group of former Inter Milan players, there is a tiny rural corner of eastern England that will be forever blue and black.

On May 20 this year, Norwich City's Carrow Road staged a charity football match between a team of former Norwich players and an Inter Forever XI featuring such famous names as Francesco Toldo, Javier Zanetti, Marco Materazzi and Jurgen Klinsmann.

After the match (which Inter's old boys won 2-1), some members of the touring party made the most of the early-summer sunshine by taking a boat trip along one of the rivers of the Norfolk Broads. The voyage began and ended at the Water's Edge, a 17th-century pub on the southern bank of the River Yare, a mile north of the village of Bramerton, and it was there that Inter's former stalwarts gathered to watch one of the most significant matches in the club's recent history.

Inter were away to Lazio on the final day of the Serie A season with a place in the Champions League at stake. In order to secure a seat at Europe's top table for the first time since 2012, Inter had to win. Any other result would send Lazio into the competition at their expense.

The score at the Stadio Olimpico was 2-2 and the game had entered the final 10 minutes when, in a red-brick side room at the Water's Edge, former Inter midfielder Nicola Berti leapt to his feet and started celebrating. He was on the phone to his 12-year-old son, Leonardo, who was watching on television in Italy and had just seen Matias Vecino score for Inter. The television stream in the Norfolk pub was a minute or so behind.

"Nicola Berti was on his phone and he said, 'We've scored!'" former Inter defender Massimo Paganin tells Bleacher Report.

"And we said, 'No, we haven't!' And he said, 'No, no, we've scored!' After a few moments Vecino scored, and we were all shouting. It was amazing, and really emotional, because we were all together."

Vecino scored in the 81st minute, rising at the near post to head home a corner from the right taken by Marcelo Brozovic. His goal earned Inter a 3-2 win and gave the club what Paganin describes as a "sliding doors moment." Champions League qualification eased Inter's financial fair play fears and moved majority shareholder Suning, the Chinese retail giant, to significantly strengthen the squad, with Radja Nainggolan, Stefan de Vrij, Kwadwo Asamoah and Matteo Politano among the players to arrive in the transfer window.

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"They wouldn't have got players like that without Vecino's goal," says Aaron Deckers, a Dutch football journalist based in Milan. "It would have been a totally different season."

Crucially, Inter's Champions League return also enabled them to hold on to players like emblematic striker Mauro Icardi, whose heads might otherwise have been turned. Last Sunday, Icardi scored a stoppage-time winner in the derby against AC Milan to give Inter a seventh successive win in all competitions and move them up to third place in Serie A.

The Nerazzurri have not won so many consecutive games inside 90 minutes since a series of 10 straight victories from September to November 2012. But it is a run that very nearly never got going.

With five minutes remaining of their opening Champions League group game at home to Tottenham last month, Inter were 1-0 down and appeared to have run out of ideas, only for Icardi to thrash home a stunning volleyed equaliser from the edge of the box. Minutes later, Vecino (him again) nodded in a close-range injury-time winner.

Inter's transfer business had seen them talked up as potential challengers to Juventus' seven-year Serie A hegemony—"the anti-Juve"—but a disappointing start to the season put coach Luciano Spalletti under pressure. Inter lost 1-0 at Sassuolo on the season's opening weekend, drew 2-2 with Torino and then went down 1-0 at home to promoted Parma. The storm clouds grew blacker still when Christian Eriksen put Tottenham in front at San Siro, but Inter's comeback chased them away, and there have been blue skies overhead ever since.

"Everything changed in those five minutes against Tottenham," says Valerio Clari, a reporter from La Gazzetta dello Sport. "Inter went into the game after three bad results, and another bad result would have put Spalletti's work in jeopardy. Since then they've had this run of seven straight wins and you can see the team growing."

De Vrij and Asamoah gave the team a valuable injection of defensive know-how when they arrived, from Lazio and Juventus respectively, and only Sampdoria have conceded fewer goals in Serie A this term than the six shipped by Inter. In attack, the signings of Nainggolan (Inter's headline €38 million acquisition from Roma), Italian winger Politano, Senegal forward Keita Balde and Argentinian starlet Lautaro Martinez have eased the burden on Icardi and Ivan Perisic, who between them scored 40 of the 66 goals that the squad mustered last season. Spalletti has repeatedly emphasised the benefits of having a deeper squad, which has made it easier for him to rotate his team between Champions League matches.

With right-back Sime Vrsaljko's arrival on loan from Atletico Madrid to link up with compatriots Perisic and Brozovic, Inter now boast three members of the steely Croatia side that battled their way to the World Cup final. Luka Modric might not have joined his compatriots in Milan last summer, despite persistent speculation that linked him with a move away from Real Madrid, but the fact that he entered the conversation in the first place reinforced the sense that Inter were a club on an upward trajectory.

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For his part, Spalletti has brought some much-needed stability and clear focus to Inter, who had gone through three permanent head coaches in 12 months (Roberto Mancini, Frank de Boer and Stefano Pioli) prior to appointing him in June 2017.

"The Italian word is 'grinta' [grit]. That's the main thing he brought to the players: professionalism and giving everything to win," says Deckers.

"He's made them a team and that's something that wasn't there at Inter before. In the last 20 years, they've always had great players, but many times they weren't a team. Spalletti is bringing it all together."

Inter have displayed greater mental resolve and physical stamina under Spalletti this season. They have come from behind to win in each of their two Champions League games to date—following up the 2-1 win over Tottenham with a 2-1 defeat of PSV Eindhoven—and have scored more goals in the last 15 minutes of their league matches than any other team in Serie A, per Opta Paolo. "It's happening too often now that we score crucial goals late on, so it's not a coincidence," Vecino said after the derby.

"It's not been easy, but Spalletti convinced all the players to believe in his project," says Paganin, who won the UEFA Cup with Inter in 1994. "When you believe in something, you believe until the end."

Inter's progress on the sporting front has been reflected off the pitch. The club's training base in Appiano Gentile is being given a facelift, and Suning successfully lobbied the city's local authorities to approve a renovation plan for the down-at-heel San Siro (having reportedly overcome resistance from co-tenants Milan in the process). Suning, which purchased a controlling 68.55 per cent stake in Inter in 2016, has also been working to increase the size of the club's global marketing footprint with a focus on Asia, in particular China, and South America.

"If you just judge them by their work, they're doing very good work because they took a club that was full of debt and now it's working," says Clari.

"They're not just investing money to service the debt, but they're trying to build a club that could work by itself. They're working on marketing, sponsorship and developing social media in other languages. They're trying to make Inter a global brand and a global club."

Those who watch Inter closely accept that they are probably two or three years away from being able to compete for the title with Juventus. It will take even longer before Inter can dream of lifting the European Cup for the first time since 2010. But the forthcoming Champions League doubleheader with Group B leaders Barcelona, which kicks off at Camp Nou on Wednesday, will serve as an intriguing yardstick for how far they have come.

"As AC/DC sang, 'It's a long way to the top if you want to rock'n'roll,'" says Paganin. "It's the same in football. You have to work every day.

"Every building you want to build starts with the foundations, and the building can only be as big as its foundations. [Inter's owners] know exactly what they want to do. They've finished building the foundations. Now they're starting to build the building."