APPIANO GENTILE – Twelve. That's a mark, not a shirt number. And it's the mark (out of ten) that Dejan Stankovic gave the Nerazzurri fans – those who were at the stadium on Tuesday evening and those who wrote to him through Inter Channel. The Dragon, today's guest on Prima Serata, was touched when Edoardo Caldara read out some of the messages: compliments in the form of comments and thanks from people who have been through years of success with him and who haven't forgotten that now that Inter are experiencing a different kind of season.
"It still brings a shiver down my spine when I think about what I felt during the warm-up the other night, during the game and at the end. When, right at the very end, exhausted, I looked up and saw the fans applauding. They knew we had given it everything, really everything. Marseille hadn't created anything and then that thing that happened... Nine times out of ten the referee blows when the striker pushes the defender like that, even a little push like the one on Lucio. Then that bounce, the control, the shot – which I think he actually mishit... It was incredible, although incredible isn't even the word for it. A bad year, that's what it is. Now we're fighting to save our season, to end it as well as we can. As for the future, we'll see. I have great faith in Moratti, he's always been very hands-on and determined to be successful and he still has that – it comes across every time he speaks to us. I'm very confident. We'll hold our heads up and move on."
The relationship between the fans and the team - so also the fans and Stankovic - was one of the main themes of this week's episode of Prima Serata. Dejan observed that "at the start of the losing run they were angrier, then little by little they understood the situation and they got closer to us. They were there in Verona and they made themselves heard, then 70,000 of them turned up on Tuesday and gave us everything they could. That's why I wanted to thank them at the end. I went over to the north stand and the only way I could make myself understood was to bow. And I held out my arms to say 'we gave it everything we had too; we went for it'."
Read the next instalment of Dejan Stankovic's Prima Serata interview on Inter Channel at 18:00.
