The pumpkins carved with team logos told us it must be Halloween, but this felt more like Groundhog Day. For the second weekend in a row, Serie A was headlined by a clash of first versus joint-second, with the league’s most prolific attack taking on its stingiest defence.
Six days previously, it was Roma who leapfrogged Fiorentina to go top of the table – becoming the first team all season to breach the Viola’s defence at the Stadio Artemio Franchi. Now it was the turn of Inter, keepers of six clean sheets in their first 10 games, to try and slow down opponents who had already scored 25 times.
“Scudetto o scherzetto?” asked Sebastiano Vernazza in Saturday’s Gazzetta dello Sport – twisting the classic Halloween question into: “Trick or title?” Were either of these teams truly contenders, or were they just masquerading as such? More than a quarter of the way through this campaign, nobody has quite been able to agree on which teams are even in the running to win Serie A.
Juventus’s early-season struggles had opened the door for somebody else to establish themselves as front-runners, but all of the would-be contenders appear flawed. Roma were flimsy at the back, having kept only a single clean sheet – and that in September against a Frosinone team still adjusting to the top flight. Inter, for all their resolute defending, had only scored as many goals (10) as last-placed Carpi.
Fiorentina’s problem was a perceived lack of top-end quality, a shortage of world-class players who could make the difference in matches against direct rivals. This was supposedly exposed in consecutive losses to Roma and Napoli, and yet they won 4-1 away to Inter. Napoli were hardest to fault, almost unstoppable over the past six weeks, but had only recently caught up to the chasing pack after a slow start under the new manager, Maurizio Sarri.
And so all eyes turned back to San Siro on Saturday night, hoping to find some fresh clues. What they saw was something quite unexpected: a 25-yard screamer from Gary Medel.
There were 30 minutes played when Stevan Jovetic fed the man they call Pitbull, advancing into space inside the Roma half. Medel’s strike lacked a little pace – Roma’s manager, Rudi García, would reflect bitterly afterwards that “it could not have belonged to [Johan] Neeskens” – but the angle was absolutely spot-on. The shot beat Wojciech Szczesny’s dive and tucked into the bottom left corner.
This was an improbable moment – Medel had not scored a goal in club football for more than two years – but also a fitting one. No player embodies Roberto Mancini’s second Inter tenure quite like Medel: rugged, relentless and endlessly willing to sacrifice himself for the team. Alternating between centre-back and central midfield this season, he has played more minutes than any other outfield team-mate.
Back in August, Mancini opined that with 24 Medels and one Messi he would win every single game. The Chilean has, after all, played every position except keeper and centre-forward at some point in his career. A few more goals like this one, and the manager might conclude he does not need Leo after all.
This one did admittedly arrive against the run of play. Roma had begun the match full of attacking intent, and Inter’s defence hardly looked impenetrable as Edin Dzeko was granted a free header on the edge of the six-yard box in the 15th minute. Samir Handanovic palmed his disappointing effort away, before doing the same to a more taxing shot from Maicon a few moments later. Dzeko’s attempt to convert the rebound was this time thwarted by a challenge from Danilo D’Ambrosio.
Medel’s goal changed the dynamic of the game, framing the remaining hour precisely as Inter would have wanted it. Where Roma had defeated Fiorentina with rapid counter-attacks, exploiting the pace of Gervinho and Mohamed Salah, now they would need to come up with something different to unpick a packed defence.
Even so, the visitors continued to create chances. Only a triple save from Handanovic kept Inter ahead in the 61st minute, the goalkeeper pushing Alessandro Florenzi’s long-range effort into the path of Salah before blocking the Egyptian’s follow-up and then swatting the ball away again after it ricocheted back towards goal off his team-mate Jeison Murillo.
Not long after that, Antonio Rüdiger headed wide when unmarked at a corner. But then Miralem Pjanic was sent off for Roma, leaving the visitors a man down and shorn of their most influential creator. Inter clung on, taking all three points and vaulting back to the top of the table – where they would be joined by Fiorentina a day later.
Was it time, at last, to anoint Mancini’s team as genuine title challengers? Not according to the manager. “We are only 11 games in, there are five teams within a point of each other,” he deflected inaccurately (the weekend would finish with four teams within two points of each other). “I don’t know if this is the year, we’ll need to wait and see.”
It is easy enough to find fault with his team. Inter did lose Medel to injury at the start of the second half, but even so, you would have liked to see them defend with a little more assuredness. Every one of their seven victories in Serie A has been by a single goal; indeed six of them have been by a 1-0 scoreline. Can a team really last the pace when dealing constantly in such fine margins?
Then again, how can we reasonably dismiss a team that has lost only once all season? Two days before this match, Medel had given a fascinating and wide-ranging interview to Gazzetta, talking about the 2009 car accident in which he went through the windshield of his car at 140kph (“I arrived at hospital and I couldn’t feel my leg any more”), and about life’s sliding doors (“If I had not made it with football I might have become a drug dealer”).
But he also addressed the more mundane topic of Inter’s recent form. “You can play well or badly, and that can be a subjective thing or it can be obvious,” he said. “The thing that matters is picking up three points.”
That is what Inter did, with his help, on Sunday. It is why they once again find themselves level at the front of a race that has no other clear favourite.
Talking points
• Boring, boring Serie A? There were three goalless games on Sunday, more than there had been in the entire season to date. To be fair, one of those would not have happened without a brilliant performance from Mattia Perin, who thwarted Napoli again and again. The Partenopei had 18 shots, eight of them on target, but simply could not beat him. They should also have had a penalty when Gonzalo Higuaín was manhandled by Nicolás Burdisso in the box, though with Perin in this sort of form there’s no guaranteeing that they would have scored it.
• There might have been divided loyalties in the Mihajlovic household on Sunday night, with Sinisa managing Milan and his 13-year-old son, Dusan, serving as a ballboy for their opponents (and dad’s former team) Lazio – whose youth team he also plays for. But Sinisa grinned as they goofed around before kick-off, and he was smiling again at full-time after the Rossoneri pulled off a hugely impressive 3-1 victory. After achieving just three wins from their first eight games, Milan have now doubled that number in the space of a week. Most pleasing of all was the performance of Giacomo Bonaventura, creator of two assists but also this cheeky elastico to get past Dusan Basta.
• Hired as Bologna manager on Wednesday, Roberto Donadoni inherited a team whose only points this season had come from one-goal wins over fellow newly-promoted sides Carpi and Frosinone. Expectations were modest for Sunday’s game against Atalanta, and it’s safe to say that he smashed them with a 3-0 victory. His team did get a helping hand from Rafael Tolói, whose woeful back-pass set up Emmanuele Giaccherini for the game’s opening goal, but it was hugely encouraging to see Mattia Destro grab the second five minutes later. He had previously gone 10 games without a goal since joining from Roma in the summer.
• You won’t see many victories more emphatic than the one that Fiorentina enjoyed over Frosinone, enjoying 73.4% of possession en route to a 4-1 final scoreline. This with a heavily rotated side, too – Josip Ilicic, Nikola Kalinic and Matías Vecino watching from the bench. It will be interesting to see if those players start away to Lech Poznan in the Europa League on Thursday night, with the Viola really needing a positive result if they are going to make it through to the knockout phase.
• Poor Torino. For the second year running, the Granata lost away to Juventus with a goal in the 93rd minute. Last season it was Andrea Pirlo who sank them with a brilliant strike from outside the box, and this time it was Juan Cuadrado sliding in to poke the ball across the line from two yards. It was a less aesthetically pleasing note to end on, after fearsome efforts from Paul Pogba and Cesare Bovo, but I have a hunch that nobody at Juventus will mind.
Results: Bologna 3-0 Atalanta, Carpi 0-0 Verona, Fiorentina 4-1 Frosinone, Genoa 0-0 Napoli, Inter 1-0 Roma, Juventus 2-1 Torino, Lazio 1-3 Milan, Udinese 0-0 Sassuolo
