A crazy classic as Inter beat Barca, Trump picks Giuliani Jnr for World Cup task force

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Hello! It was the Champions League tie with a million sub-plots and more. Football just doesn’t get any better.

On the way:

👀 Inter stun Barca to reach final

🏆 Trump hands Giuliani 2026 role

🆚 Club World Cup showdown

☎️ Portugal call up Cristiano Jr

Crazy classic: Inter beat Barcelona to reach CL final in match for the ages

Two questions will be simultaneously haunting Barcelona this morning: how on earth did they come to be seconds from the Champions League final? And how on earth did they end up missing the boat?

There are no easy answers.

As for Inter — a club appropriately known as pazza, or ‘crazy’, in Italy — the same mystery in reverse. How, from leading by two goals twice in as box-office a semi-final as the Champions League could dream of (the joint highest-scoring in the tournament’s history) were they seconds from elimination, yet are finalists at Barca’s expense regardless?

We’ll try to explain.

Revived by a 37-year-old centre-back

I’ve seen mayhem in my time but Inter versus Barca goes down as a tie in which knockout punch after knockout punch failed to knock anybody out, until Inter’s Davide Frattesi curled in the decisive goal of 13 across two legs (below). To quote one Inter fan within earshot of our James Horncastle: “Has anyone got any oxygen?”

Extra time was raging when Frattesi scored and marbles had been lost. Barcelona, who were no more inclined to go quietly, finally held their peace.

(TNT Sports)

So it is that Simone Inzaghi takes Inter to Munich, Germany, on May 31, driven by the sting of defeat to Manchester City in the 2023 final and aiming to emulate Jose Mourinho’s 2010 Inter masterpiece. Across the entire semi, Barca led for a mere five minutes — yet Inter’s heart had all but stopped beating before a 37-year-old revived them in the 93rd. Francesco Acerbi (below) was their unlikely defibrillator.

(TNT Sports)

Sensational Sommer

Acerbi is a wizened, Italian centre-back with two decades as a professional behind him (not to mention a man who has twice recovered from diagnoses of testicular cancer). He’s a one-goal a season man because that’s simply not his job. Before last night, he’d never scored in Europe.

But he was out of his comfort zone in added time at the end of normal time, because Inter were shattered and had no other stunts to pull. They trailed 3-2 on the night and 6-5 on aggregate when Acerbi drove a centre-forward’s finish in at the near post. With his weaker foot. Where that came from, God knows. “There’ll never be another match like that,” said Frattesi, who made sure Acerbi’s finish was divine intervention.

What went before that was frankly baffling. Inter led 2-0 at half-time but retreated and pulled down the shutters. Without any possession and camped 35 yards out, against a team as phenomenal as Barca, it doesn’t matter how elite your game management is; not when Lamine Yamal is free to line you up at will. The evening turned completely.

Yamal had something freakish in his way at San Siro, though. The teenager hit the post seconds before Acerbi levelled things up. He missed a better chance straight after Acerbi’s goal. The VAR denied him a penalty for a foul an inch outside the box. In extra time, he fell foul of a world-class save (below) from a world-class Yann Sommer, who made 14 saves all told in the tie.

(TNT Sports)

It wasn’t Yamal’s time. It wouldn’t fall for Barca either, and they’re now 10 years without a Champions League final appearance. But when the annals of football record this classic, they’ll have a job articulating how.

• Barca defender Inigo Martinez has denied deliberately spitting at Acerbi after Inter scored their second goal in first-half added time. Neither the VAR nor the match referee took any action in the heat of the moment, despite Acerbi’s furious complaints. Barca and UEFA are declining to comment.

Catch today’s match

(Times ET/UK): Champions League semi-final second leg: Paris Saint-Germain vs Arsenal, 3pm/8pm — CBS, Paramount+, Fubo.

News round-up

CWC Face-Off: LAFC to play Club America for final tournament spot

Another hot date could be set for May 31: the day when FIFA belatedly completes its line-up for the Club World Cup (CWC).

One of 32 places is still up for grabs after Club Leon’s expulsion for breaching multi-club ownership rules. Leon lost an appeal yesterday so their ticket will go to either Los Angeles FC or Club America. A one-game play-off between those teams is pending, and has been pencilled in for the last day of this month.

LAFC are the highest-ranked Concacaf side who weren’t already in the competition. Club America lost to Leon in the 2023 Copa Libertadores, the means by which Leon qualified in the first place. To that end, the match-up makes sense.

Even so, it’s a last-minute scramble. If May 31 is confirmed as showdown time, the winners will have a mere two weeks to get it together for the CWC itself. It’s not ideal preparation — but then FIFA has been flying by the seat of its pants from the moment of the tournament’s conception. Why should this be any more orderly?

• Here’s an interesting aspect of Trent Alexander-Arnold’s imminent free-agent move from Liverpool to Real Madrid. Will he play for Madrid at the CWC? The competition kicks off on June 14 but his contract at Anfield doesn’t expire until July 1. Unless, of course, the clubs do a deal. Read on…

Show Viz

Premier League clubs are awash with cash, good and bad. In contrast, lower-league sides are mostly skint — so a certain Welsh team have broken the mould.

Wrexham, plainly, are not skint, and the deeper you get into Chris Weatherspoon’s dissection of their earnings and outgoings, the more you appreciate why they’ve been unstoppable in recent years, from the fifth-tier National League to the second-tier Championship. Their advance is like an inverted avalanche.

Exhibit A: in 2023-24, when Wrexham were a League Two entity, their commercial revenue exceeded that of five Premier League clubs during the same season. For the record, those were Brentford, Bournemouth, Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton Town. Wrexham’s overall income of £26.7m in the fourth division wasn’t far off setting a record for League One, one level higher. How to live with that?

The Championship is a slightly different world, though. While their wage bill will have increased in 2024-25, salary costs of £11m last season were miles below the second tier’s average of £37.2m. They’ll have to dig deep and close that gap.

The bonus, however, is that Wrexham could lose £34m in 2025-26 and still comply with profit and sustainability (PSR) rules. In layman’s terms, their spending power hasn’t vanished. Chris isn’t calling a fourth straight promotion but he’s not counting it out either.

And finally…

(Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images)

In February, TAFC covered the social media accounts using tall tales (we’re being generous here) about the sons of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi for marketing purposes. If you missed it at the time, suspend disbelief and have a gander here.

According to one post on X, Ronaldo Junior had scored 10 goals in a single junior game for Al Nassr while Thiago Messi was notching 11 in a fixture for Inter Miami. Chips off the old block, indeed… apart from the fact that neither reported feat was real.

Both, however, are actual adolescent prospects and yesterday, Ronaldo Jr, aged 14, was called up to Portugal’s youth ranks for the first time, as part of their under-15s squad. He might not have bagged 10 goals in one swoop but, given the genes, don’t assume he doesn’t have it in him.

(Top photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

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