This sweet beloved Inter does leave you pretty mentally disturbed after a couple of years. Without any jokes involved, but I’ve woken up in the middle of the night from a nightmare where I see the lower back tattoo of Philippe Mexes placed on Javier Zanetti’s back. Vicious thought. I’ve been at dates and having dinner with a beautiful woman. She talks, I smile but in my head, I’m thinking transfer market. In the same way, this mental illness that I like to call “Nerazzurri Syndrome” struck me and my co-worker Danny after the last derby. In the middle of a regular conversation ,we could both burst out singing, “Balotelli, figlio di…” you know the rest.
If “Nerazzurri Syndrome” were to be classed as a proper disease, I would be rather happy to have it. It is a rather fantastic thing to have. It makes you feel special in some way. Especially in a country like Sweden were you have to look really, really hard to find somebody other than you wearing and Inter-jersey on the street. If you, despite all, find someone with an identical jersey, then it’s a little party on the street where you exchange chants before moving on. Unless you just saw your own reflection in the window, leaving the psychiatrist’s office and question if you should go back in for another session.
Anyhow, I believe that this thing, this obsession is rather inevitable when you’re rooting for a team that is not that popular around your ways. In Sweden, it is more or less just Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United (and a whole lot of West Ham supporters, I don’t know how, but there is always one). So when you tell one of the tiki-taka-people that your team is Inter and nothing else, you’ll have to explain why. Have anybody, anywhere, anytime, been asked to motivate why they’re rooting for Barcelona? It is not odd at all, in a country of ten million people there might be three thousand Inter-fans. The best three thousand fans in the country. The preacher of the minority has spoken, don’t you dare question me!
You’ll have to defend your opinion, especially after 2010. Back then your only problem was convincing the rest of your friends that you weren’t just cheering for Inter because they were winning. Now you just have to defend your team after they get decapitated by teams like Siena. Twice. All this, just makes it so much more fun and you’re thrown into a more passionate state than you expected yourself and you get a much tighter connection with your fellow supporters, the smaller the circle is, the better the mood. Inter, needed to be mentioned, is not a small club. Imagine a guy walking around in Stockholm or London or New York City wearing an AS Lecce-shirt and just happens to meet another Lecce-supporter. They would have to become best friends, their probably the only two people in the country that owns a red and yellow shirt, trademark of the team on the southeast coast of Italy.
My point in all of this? It is not easy to be an Inter-supporter. It is just like life really. Gods favorites have a hard time and those who go through the rough patches, seems to appreciate life a little bit more after that. I started rooting for Inter in 2006 and I cried when the final whistle was blown on Bernabeu on May 22 2010. I waited four years for that title. Imagine the feeling for someone who waited forty years?
