It also created a disingenuous image of this rivalry. “That flare did more damage to Italian football than it did to me,” Dida said. In the end, the punishment was a fine and four European games to be played behind closed doors. Inter, meanwhile, lived in fear of a year’s ban from the Champions League. “You conquered f*** all.”Īfter an inquiry, UEFA awarded Milan a bye to the semi-finals. Milan ultras would later unfurl a banner in response to Inter’s pre-match choreography which had depicted the board game Risk with the caption: “Objective: Destroy the red and black armada and conquer Europe.” The retort was cutting. “Idiots! Idiots!” Milan’s Curva Sud shouted across San Siro to their Inter counterparts in the Nord. “I saw the burn mark on his back and the hole in his jersey,” Milan’s backup goalkeeper Christian Abbiati said. “He should have got out of there sooner.”Īs firemen in protective helmets picked up the spitting flares and dropped them in metal buckets, another one came down and struck Dida on his shoulder, the sparks bouncing off him as he fell to the turf. “He stayed out there too long,” his team-mate Alessandro Nesta said. Milan’s goalkeeper Nelson Dida, the penalty shootout hero from the Champions League final two years earlier, was defending the goal below. They began chanting: “We couldn’t give a f*** about this game,” and all of a sudden the sky above San Siro fell in. It was an away goal, leaving Inter 3-0 behind on aggregate and in need of a 20-minute miracle just to take the tie to extra time. Inter were 1-0 down on the night after their nemesis Andriy Shevchenko, the all-time top scorer in the derby with 14 goals, tormented Milan’s ‘cousins’ again. Hope is always the last thing to die but die it did on that occasion. The ultras were furious at his decision to disallow a goal by Esteban Cambiasso, who was shown a yellow card for his vociferous protests. The German referee Markus Merk suspended the game in the 71st minute after projectiles rained down from Inter’s Curva Nord. BucTs9LbqfĪ headline in La Gazzetta dello Sport the morning after the second leg of the 2005 Champions League quarter-final called it the ‘Derby della Vergogna’: the Derby of Shame. Marco Materazzi and Rui Costa during the Milan derby. One of the best photos ever taken in football. The image captured by the former Reuters photographer Stefano Rellandini came to define the Milan derby at its most extreme. Instead, they stood in shock and awe at what was going on in front of them, as plumes of grapefruit-coloured smoke streamed from dozens of flares. Inter’s enforcer did not seek to hurt Milan’s playmaker.
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