Marko Arnautovic to the fore as Inter leave it late to drop their mask

San Siro doesn’t do skyboxes. The VIPs instead sit at ground level.

While Inter’s former striker Christian Vieri, one of the many ex-footballers to take up padel, talked to tennis player Fabio Fognini, presumably about how to improve his short game, Kanye West took his place pitch-side. Vieri could be forgiven if he didn’t recognise him. Kanye had his hood up, tied close and one of his all over face masks on.

It could have been Inter chairman Steven Zhang for all anyone knew except Zhang, present for each of Inter’s Champions League knock-out games last season, has still yet to attend a game this campaign and was conspicuous by his absence amid the need to refinance or repay the loan Inter’s owners Suning took out to prop up the club during the Covid-19 pandemic.

To Kanye’s left were the ultras of the Curva Nord whose chants feature on a couple of tracks of his new album; a badge of honour, one might say, for notorious groups that thrive on outsider culture and occasionally saying the unconscionable.

All of the lights came on before kick off. The famous Luci a San Siro reimagined as smart phone torches activated to make the stands twinkle like the night sky. Inter also shone in the first leg of their last 16 tie with Atletico Madrid. But it did feel for a while like they, too, were wearing one of Kanye’s all over face masks.

On the one hand, it did not matter too much. This Inter side can play with its eyes closed. On the other, it would have excused their blindness in front of goal. Inter approached Atletico’s penalty box with the blindfolded tentativeness of Sandra Bullock in Bird Box.

As the players joined hands and ran under the Nord to take the applause of the ultras at full-time, they should have been celebrating more than a 1-0 win. This tie should be over. “We could have scored more goals,” Henrikh Mkhitaryan said. “We weren’t mentally composed enough in the first half. We wanted to play as quickly as possible.”

Inter applied the stethoscope to the Atleti safe. They tried combination after combination and blew it open. The door swung on its hinges for what felt like an age, the win and so much more — qualification for the quarter-finals — lay in a manilla envelope there for the taking. But Inter showed what Fognini, as a tennis player, knows all too well: the dreaded braccino corto.

That feeling when you can’t close out match point and the arm that got you there suddenly shrinks.

Inter hit 19 shots. Their xG was nudging more than 2.0 and yet there were times when it felt like they wouldn’t have scored even if the game had continued into today. Still 0-0 until the final 10 minutes, the oddity of it all was that Jan Oblak had not needed to put in one of the best performances of his career. The former Benfica goalkeeper did not do what the current Benfica goalkeeper, Anatoliy Trubin, did on his visits here with Shakhtar Donetsk when a bag of rice could have been thrown at him and he would have caught every grain.

Inter were instead their own worst enemy.

They misplaced the final ball and, when they found it, they either struck a covering Atleti defender or the perspex barriers behind the goal. Lautaro Martinez’s glancing headers were too clean and when Marcus Thuram interrupted a Rodrigo De Paul free-kick then chased it down and squared it to his strike partner, Inter’s skipper took an extra touch allowing Jose Gimenez to recover and block his shot.

A sign that it might not be Inter’s night arrived when Thuram strained his right adductor taking a shot. He did not come out for the second half. Marko Arnautovic replaced him and eclipsed Lautaro’s misses with some of his own.

The first came at the end of a wonderful move started by goalkeeper Yann Sommer. It was followed by quarterback Hakan Calhanoglu finding him in a pocket of space, a neat one-two with Lautaro and another inexplicable error. The only thing missing from Inter’s performance was the finish. Frivolous and frustrating, the final touch did not match the standard of football they were playing.

Luckily, Atleti did not catch them with a sucker punch. Having been 5-0 winners against Las Palmas at the weekend, Diego Simeone’s reinvention of Marcos Llorente as a striker did not work. Antoine Griezmann hobbled off and Alvaro Morata, an early second-half substitute, wasn’t 100 per cent.

The only Atleti player to carry a threat was wing-back Samuel Lino. Other than his intermittent forays into the left half space, Inter did not give Atleti a sniff.

Stefan de Vrij, a back-up for Francesco Acerbi last season, expertly muzzled Atleti’s attackers. His midfield acted like a diligent screen and Inter did not concede a single shot on target in a Champions League game for the first time since 2006. They ended up keeping their 21st clean sheet of the season, a trait that does not get talked about enough.

It gave Inter the confidence to keep playing and, in the end, the goal summed up the performance: Lautaro’s shot hit Oblak in a one vs one, while Arnautovic’s follow up hit a defender. The pair did their best to miss but, this time, the ricochet careened in and all the pent up frustration inside San Siro frothed into euphoria.

The Austrian, who has a Champions League winners’ medal from Inter’s treble, found the net in November’s 3-3 draw with Benfica in Lisbon. It was his first goal in the competition for nearly 13 years, the longest time lapse between goals in Champions League history. “This is one of the most important goals of my career,” he said.

Arnautovic and Alexis Sanchez have been criticised for not backing up the first-choice strikers as effectively as Romelu Lukaku did this time last season. But, as Simone Inzaghi underlined, Sanchez scored in the 2-1 win over Salzburg in October and Arnautovic decided Tuesday night’s game. He also scored in the weekend’s blow-out against Salernitana. Thuram’s injury makes his ability to contribute even more vital if Inter are to return to the final and win a second star in Serie A.

“There’s huge satisfaction,” Inzaghi said. “The lads did very well against a physical and skilful side. It wasn’t easy and it’ll be tough in Madrid. Considering how much we created we deserved more. There’s some regret.”

If Inter do not make the quarter-finals, Lautaro and Arnautovic’s misses will haunt them. But Inter have won every game in 2024. They’ve yet to lose on the road all season and Sommer has picked up where Andre Onana left off in keeping clean sheets.

Inzaghi was keen to draw parallels with last year’s tie against Porto, another team coached by a former Lazio teammate and protege of Sven Goran Eriksson, Sergio Conceicao. “They were probably the team that caused us the most problems before the final,” he reflected. Inter won the first leg 1-0 at San Siro before defending heroically and qualifying with a 0-0 at the Dragao.

Could history repeat itself at the Wanda in a fortnight’s time?

(Top photo: Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu via Getty Images)