Nine points clear. Nine. They've just put Roma to the sword and they're cantering to the Scudetto like a racehorse running against donkeys. And what are we talking about in England? Whether Cole Palmer should be wearing an armband. Give me strength.

Inter Milan are having one of the great title-winning seasons in modern European football and I guarantee you couldn't find one pundit on the telly over here who could name their starting centre-back pairing without Googling it. Go on. Try it at your local. You'll get blank stares. You'll get someone saying "Is Skriniar still there?" He is not. He has not been there for some time.

In my day, we respected European football. We watched it. We cared about it. When AC Milan were dismantling sides in the early nineties, your average bloke down the pub could name Baresi, Costacurta, Maldini. He could tell you Sacchi's formation. He could hum the Champions League anthem before it even existed. Now? Now people act like football stops at the English Channel.

That's the problem with modern football. We've got 47 cameras at every Premier League ground, we've got xG breakdowns for Brentford versus Wolves, we've got tactical analysis podcasts that last longer than the actual matches. But ask anyone what's happening in Serie A and they look at you like you've asked them to solve long division.

Inter romped past Roma this weekend. Romped. It wasn't a contest. It was a demonstration. Simone Inzaghi has built something genuinely brilliant over there. A side that controls games, that suffocates opponents, that plays with the kind of ruthless efficiency that English clubs spend four hundred million trying to buy. And Roma, a club with a proud history, a club that used to terrify European opposition, just got taken apart like flat-pack furniture.

Don't get me started on the coverage. I checked the back pages this morning. Not a whisper. Not a sniff. You'd think nothing happened outside of England at all. Meanwhile there's a full page on whether some midfielder's body language in the tunnel suggested he might be unhappy. Body language. In a tunnel. That's what passes for football journalism now.

I managed in the lower leagues for twenty years. You know what I did on my Tuesday nights off? I watched European football. Italian football especially. Because that's where you learned about defending. Real defending. Not this inverted full-back nonsense where your right-back ends up playing as a number six and nobody knows where anyone is, least of all the poor lad who's supposed to be marking the winger.

Inter are nine points clear and they're doing it with structure, discipline, and tactical intelligence. Three things English football has decided are boring. We don't want boring here. We want vibes. We want teenagers doing stepovers. We want managers who look good in a tracksuit saying mysterious things in press conferences.

I'll tell you what really gets me. Half the players people rave about in the Premier League came from Serie A, or will end up there. We strip-mine their league for talent, ignore their football completely, and then act surprised when an Italian side knocks an English club out of Europe. Happens every other year and every time it's treated like some great shock.

Nine points clear. A rout against Roma. One of the most complete sides on the continent. And it won't even make the bottom of the ticker on your evening highlights show.

Watch more football. Watch foreign football. Broaden your horizons. Or don't. Stay in your little Premier League bubble arguing about armband ceremonies and tunnel body language.

In my day, we knew what was happening in Milan, Madrid, and Munich. Now we can barely see past Manchester.

Shame on the lot of us.