“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” Placing that quotation from Dante at the entrance of a serie-A team’s training centre would not be the height of taste. But even without inscriptions, it would be worse if a visitor should form the conviction that it were true.

The place we are talking about is, or better was, to use the more appropriate past tense, Appiano Gentile, headquarters of Inter, the Milan-based football club. Symbolizing recent worries and defeats, the team’s secluded training centre has come to represent, for supporters, the place where lack of organisation and discipline develop their effects. For the team owner, Massimo Moratti, whose father Angelo introduced the team’s finest period of victories, the buying of Inter has turned out to be one thorny rose. A succession of failed projects linked with the personalities of the various trainers, and the consequent series of alternating results, have thrown Inter supporters into despair, with no clear way out in view. Many doctors have been called to treat the great invalid of Italian football, which seems to suffer from periodic fits of self-destructing schizophrenia interspersed with occasional bouts of proud performances. From the imperturbable Ottavio Bianchi to the poised Englishman Hodgson, from the mistreated Simoni (the only trainer in seven years of Moratti rule, however, to produce a result – the UEFA Cup) to the ridiculous post-sacking interludes of Castellini, Lucescu and, again, Hodgson. And then a run of supposed drillmasters, first Lippi and then Tardelli, both destined to founder pitifully amid the general chaos. Those two failures in particular, associated with helmsmen having dominating characters, did nor forebode well when, last summer, Moratti’s choice fell on another trainer known for his firm hand, the Spain-based Argentine Hector Cuper.

Detractors made themselves heard immediately, with arguments that even some team supporters picked up: the man has no experience of Italian football, he lost all the European finals (three matches: two in Champions League and a Cupwinners’ Cup final), and, finally, a third strong-armed trainer could hardly be expected to succeed where two others had failed. Who could blame these chronic pessimists, disheartened by years of bitter disappointments and, even worse, mocked by fellow-citizen supporters of AC Milan, who, under the Berlusconi management, could boast a stream of successes. But destiny is unpredictable, and unexpected turns can come from the bleakest premises. Mr Cuper was quick in identifying the team’s symptoms and maladies, and his cure was not of the mild kind. Work, work and more work, total devotion to the team’s cause, and above all, strict discipline. There would be no room for prima donnas, zero tolerance for tantrums, and mistakes would be paid for. Watching the new trainer at work, Moratti may have realized his earlier errors – Cuper was no forgiving father, but a professional who expected the same degree of responsibility from the players. His rulebook might appear as the epitome of the obvious. Yet, the former boy from Buenos Aires who used to work as a dishwasher to support himself in the capital and continue to play football, had direct experience of what it takes to make it through hard times. Having lost his father at a young age, and having worked as a farm-hand and clothing salesman, Cuper learned how to seize opportunities to better himself. So when the time came to explain to his players the meaning of conviction, humility, practicality and, especially, balance (a word that recurs in all his interviews) it became clear to all that the trainer was speaking from a hard-earned pulpit. Now that the team is at the top, fighting for a title that it has missed for 14 years, Cuper’s gestures and actions during matches have become all but an object of cult. On his feet from start to finish, his eyes trained on the field, he sometimes makes signs in the air to show the players what to do. But it’s the slap on the back that he gives the players on their way through the entrance tunnel that touches them, as if to say: “You do your stuff, and I’ll always be on your side”. And that’s it. On the few occasions in which Inter made a false step during the current tournament, it always fell as a team, without particular faults of individual players and without further disputes. And that may be why the team has always been quick to recover, leaving mistakes behind. And to those who would split hairs, saying that the group is not nice to look at, meaning that it doesn’t play a sparkling game but it only looks for effectiveness, his answer is disarming: “What’s wrong with being effective?” Which just goes to show. (Trad. Interpres SaS)