Milan and Napoli take Italian rivalry into the Champions League

An unfamiliar view of the future looms over San Siro, Milan, on Wednesday. It is a semi-final place in club football’s most esteemed competition.

Of the 22 AC Milan and Napoli footballers likely to be reaching for it at kick-off, only one, Milan’s Olivier Giroud, has been in that territory before.

At the same time, the players of Milan and Napoli, contesting the first leg of the all-Italian last-eight clash in a Champions League that has advertised Serie A’s renaissance in the European club hierarchy, might feel so familiar with one another as to be uncomfortable about it.

Milan, Italy’s league champions, need only look at the domestic table to know how utterly their defence of the title has been shattered: Napoli tower 22 points above them in Serie A.

Easy then, to pick the favourites? Not if you measure the clubs by their history, and weigh up whatever aura transmits around a youngish squad for being at a club who have won seven European Cups in their storied history, as Milan have. And then compare that with a Napoli who have never before reached a European Cup quarter-final and none of whose players, man for man, have gone beyond that stage in the competition with their previous employers.

Even to update the form guide is to challenge and confuse the hierarchy of the current domestic rankings. Only ten days ago Milan went to Naples and won 4-0.

How to explain that out-of-the-blue thrashing suffered by Serie A’s runaway leaders in their own stadium where in the course of a brilliant season, they have put four goals past Liverpool, four past Ajax, beaten Juventus 5-1 and last month swept away Eintracht Frankfurt 3-0 – and 5-0 on aggregate – to stride into the last eight of the Champions League?

Napoli must hope that