The biggest match of this Serie A season to date was preceded by its biggest non-story. Inter were travelling south as league leaders, to take on a Napoli team that had lately played some of the most spellbinding football on the continent, and yet for some news outlets this still was not enough. A controversy was sought to lend this fixture added bite.
In an interview last week, Gazzetta dello Sport had asked Felipe Melo how any team could contain Gonzalo Higuaín. Reminded by his interviewer that he had once professed to “roughing up” Mario Balotelli to get the better of him, the Inter midfielder was asked if the same approach was required.
Melo responded by insisting that his Balotelli comments had only ever been intended in good humour. “I said it smiling,” he asserted. “I said it because Balotelli is a different player to the rest. Like Higuaín. You need to dedicate a lot of attention to him.”
That he was attempting to defuse this story could hardly have been any clearer. And yet, over the next few days, one Napoli employee after another found themselves answering questions about Melo’s ‘plan’ to dish out tough treatment to Higuaín. “They’ll have to catch him first,” quipped Lorenzo Insigne. Happily, that was about as close as anyone came to rising to the bait.
This habit for a quarrel comes naturally to Italian football. Controversy has been the default setting atop Serie A for as long as anyone cares to remember. In the nine years since the Calciopoli scandal, we have seen Rudi García lament refereeing performances that “truly damage” the national game, Adriano Galliani write open letters debating the semantics of unbeaten records and José Mourinho feud his way to a treble.
But this year, so far, has felt different. Perhaps it is because Inter and Napoli – along with fellow front-runners Fiorentina – did not expect to find themselves in the positions that they do. None had finished in the top three last season, and both Juventus and Roma still seemed a long way ahead.
As such, early season successes bred only enthusiasm – not nervous tension. More revealing than anything Melo said, when it came to capturing the mood of Monday’s fixture, was an article published by Gazzetta Sportiva, in which the newspaper asked elementary school students in Naples for their thoughts on the big match.
“On Monday before the game I will kneel down and ask San Gennaro to help us win,” said one of the children, Agrippino, while another, Giovanni, declared himself to have “told my dad that if Napoli win he will have to give me a Mohawk like Hamsik”.
More candid was Carmen, who wrote that: “Napoli need to win, otherwise my father will say bad words and shout and then it’s best not to talk to him for the whole day.” Most honest of all, meanwhile, was Cinzia. “I’m not a true fan,” she acknowledged. “But if Napoli win then I will become a serious fan.”
From an adult such words would be mocked, but from a child they were perfect in their honesty. Besides, even grown-ups are not immune to jumping on a bandwagon. Monday’s game would be the first to sell-out with time to spare at the Stadio San Paolo for a good couple of years.
Naples is a city that lives by its emotions, especially where football is involved. Fans famously daubed gravestones with the message “you don’t know what you’re missing” in the wake of the club’s first Scudetto win in 1989, while John Foot recorded in his history of Italian football, Calcio, that as many as 25% of newborn boys in one parish were being named after Diego Maradona.
If this year’s team still have a way to go to match those heights, then few living fans would have wanted to miss Monday’s game. Under Maurizio Sarri – himself Neapolitan-born and loved all the more for having worked his way up from the bottom of the football pyramid after quitting his previous job as a bank manager – Napoli had played football that was at once both harmonious and devastating.
Although unbeaten in 17 matches across all competitions, the real turning point had arrived two games into that run, when Sarri rearranged them from a 4-3-1-2 formation into a 4-3-3. Since that point, Napoli had scored 32 goals and conceded just three. Inter were considered a less thrilling watch. Despite being top of the table, they had only won a single game – the most recent, at home to Frosinone – by more than a single goal. Their strength was a defence that had conceded only seven times in 13 games.
Where Sarri had found a winning formula and stuck to it, Inter’s strength lay in their versatility – Roberto Mancini altering his formation constantly to match that of his opponent, no matter who that might be. As Luca Vialli told Il Mattino: “There is a certain beauty in the way they force others to play badly.”
Those words cut to the core of Napoli supporters’ anxieties. It was not an irresistible Inter that they feared at the Stadio San Paolo, but one that could make their own team ugly.
That possibility was dispelled within 64 seconds of kick-off. For once, it was Inter’s defending that took a turn for the grotesque – Jeison Murillo failing to get a proper clearance on Lorenzo Insigne’s cross from the left and instead prodding it into the path of José Callejón. The Spaniard immediately served Higuaín, who crashed the ball past Samir Handanovic at the near post.
It had to be Higuaín. Not because of any non-existent feud with Melo (who did not even make it into Inter’s starting XI), but simply because the striker’s form has been extraordinary. This was the eighth consecutive Serie A home game in which he had scored – as well as the ninth game in 11 overall.
Higuaín has been a hit from day one at Napoli, piling up 53 goals across all competitions these last two seasons, but over the last three months he has taken things up another level – looking the sharpest he has ever done in his career.
In part, that might come down to a new diet – heavy on fish and light on red meats – suggested to him by the Italian nutritionist Giuliano Poser, who has also been working with his international team-mates Leo Messi and Sergio Aguero. Higuaín told the Argentinian sports newspaper Olé recently that he had lost 4kg over the summer.
Once again, though, Sarri may be due a slice of the credit. As the manager tells it, the first time he met with his new striker: “I said right away that he needed to work on his laziness”. The message seems to be having its desired effect. On this night, Higuaín declined to rest on his laurels. In the 62nd minute he added a second goal, chasing on to a Raúl Albiol header forward from midfield before surging between two defenders and finishing with aplomb. With Inter a man down after Yuto Nagatomo collected a pair of first-half yellow cards, Napoli seemed to have all three points in the bag.
Inter quickly disabused them of that notion, Adem Ljajic capitalising on some uncharacteristically sloppy Napoli defending to pull a goal back five minutes later. The same player pulled Napoli open again as he shared a delicious one-two with Ivan Perisic soon after, before fluffing his eventual cross.
In the end, this match would come down to agonisingly fine margins. Higuaín drew a fine save from Handanovic at the far end, before Inter hit the woodwork twice inside the final minute. Were it not for a fabulous intervention from Pepe Reina, the second of those two attempts would undoubtedly have finished up in the net.
When the final whistle blew, the Stadio San Paolo roared with relief as much as joy. Napoli had been hanging on at the end, but this victory was still deserved. And now, for the first time since April 1990, their team stood alone atop Serie A. That season, of course, ended with a second Serie A title.
There was disagreement afterwards about whether the time had yet arrived to start believing in a third. “To dream is legitimate,” said Higuaín, though he added quickly that the most important thing was to take one match at a time.
Sarri was more cautious. “I still say that it is blasphemy,” he replied when asked whether he was ready yet to say the word ‘Scudetto’. “So don’t make me get excommunicated. There are still 72 points up for grabs; with 31 we’re not even safe yet.”
He might well have the right of it. Almost six months remain in this Serie A season. There is plenty of time yet for more twists, turns and no doubt also a few controversies at the top. Most of all, though, we should hope for a few more games as compelling as the one we saw on Monday night.
