Before the international break, we saw the finest football Serie A has to offer – Juventus and Roma facing off in a match that was both bad-tempered and poorly-refereed, but nevertheless played to a high standard. A fortnight later, we turned our gaze to what should have been the next best thing. Inter and Napoli were billed before this season began as the teams with the greatest chance of challenging last season’s top two.
They were clubs with a good many similarities. For one thing Napoli and Inter had identical wage budgets, Gazzetta dello Sport noting in September that each had committed €70m to the salaries of their first-team squads this season. Both sides had a stated goal of qualifying for the Champions League, while their owners had spoken at length about upgrading their respective stadiums – without making much tangible progress.
And then there were the familiar faces sitting on either team’s bench. Walter Mazzarri spent four productive seasons as manager of Napoli, qualifying them twice for the Champions League, before he left to join Inter in the summer of 2013. He was replaced by Rafael Benítez – who had previously spent six months in charge of the Nerazzurri.
Gazzetta Sportiva took that shared history as an excuse to morph the two managers’ faces together on Saturday, creating a strangely unsettling hybrid of the two. Under the headline “Mazzarritez o Benízzarri”, the paper noted their shared traits. Both live apart from their families – Benítez’s wife and kids are in Liverpool, while Mazzarri’s remain in Empoli. Each manager has a habit of bringing up wage restrictions and club turnover whenever their work is criticised.
But in other ways, they were supposed to be quite different. When Aurelio De Laurentiis first hired Benítez, he hailed the Spaniard as something new: a man with the “international dimension” that the club needed to progress. The manager quickly made it clear that he would abandon Mazzarri’s three-man defence and reactive tactical schemes.
“In the past this team played only on the counter,” said Benítez last month, celebrating his own possession-based approach. Mazzarri reacted angrily, stating that he would “not respond to people who don’t understand football”.
That back-and-forth set the stage for a match that already felt significant. Both teams had endured a difficult start to this campaign, and each arrived at this game six points worse off than they had been at the corresponding point last year. Mazzarri was whistled and jeered by a section of the San Siro crowd before kick-off, and Benítez might have felt some empathy, given the frosty receptions he has had from certain supporters lately in Naples and during his time at Chelsea.
If both sets of fans hoped that such protests might inject a sense of urgency into their teams, then they would be disappointed. Where Juventus and Roma had brought blood and thunder a fortnight previously, Inter v Napoli could barely muster cloudy skies and a light bruise.
For 78 minutes, the two teams seemed content to stand off each other. Inter probed in the first-half, hitting the post through Hernanes, but never did they attack with any sense of urgency. Napoli improved after the break, Lorenzo Insigne striking the woodwork, but far from having any orchestrated plan, the visitors seemed to just be waiting for Inter to present them with opportunities.
Perhaps that was a sound strategy. Inter have been giving soft goals away all season, and they did so yet again here in the 79th minute, when Nemanja Vidic diverted a throw-in into the path of José Callejón. If there was any one player that the Nerazzurri could not afford to treat so generously, here he was. Callejón had scored in all of Napoli’s previous three league games, and made it four out of four with a cool finish into the bottom corner.
It was a goal that changed the tone of the match completely. Within three minutes, Inter equalised, Freddy Guarín prodding home from close range just seconds after being introduced as a substitute. Then, in the 90th minute, Callejón struck again, blasting a brilliant volley past Samir Handanovic after Andrea Ranocchia allowed him to run in behind.
Even that would not be the last twist in the tale. Barely a minute later, Hernanes made it 2-2 – heading home a cross from Dodo, before launching into a customary backflip.
In the stands, Erick Thohir celebrated with almost as much gusto. The club’s Indonesian owner had been hoping for a win to mark the one-year anniversary of his takeover of the club, but was prepared to accept this result as a point gained, rather than two lost. “On Saturday I explained the difference between winners and losers,” he said, referencing a meeting he had with the players. “When losers fall down, they don’t get back up; winners get back up and keep fighting.”
Not everyone will look on this performance so positively. Although it is to Inter’s credit that they hit back twice after conceding, fans would be justified in wondering why their team did not fight until their backs were up against the wall. Most of the match had been played at a discouragingly low tempo.
And while it was positive to see Guarín and Hernanes make decisive contributions, this was another bad day at the office for Vidic. Besides teeing up Callejón’s opener, he had also undermined Inter’s offside trap by sitting too deep ahead of Napoli’s second goal.
True enough, the centre-back did make some more positive contributions, including a crucial block from Gonzalo Higuaín in the 87th minute. But with one red card, two penalties conceded and two assists to opposing attackers in his first six Serie A games, he has an awful lot more to prove. The Monday morning papers variously rated his performance as either a 4 or 4.5 out of 10.
As for Napoli, it is tempting to wonder where they would even be this season if it were not for Callejón, who, with six goals and one assist, has now been directly involved in 70% of Napoli’s Serie A goals this season. His efforts are barely masking the flaws of a team for whom the likes of Higuaín and Marek Hamsik have contributed far too little.
A similar assessment might apply to Sunday’s draw, which bought Mazzarri and Benítez time, whilst still leaving plenty of doubt over their capacity to take their respective clubs forward. As Sebastiano Vernazza put it in Gazzetta: “The 2-2 is aspirin to two teams with a fever. Will they get better? It’s hard to say.”
Talking points
• Keeping pace with Callejón and Carlos Tevez at the top of Serie A’s goalscoring charts is Keisuke Honda – a man who few would have predicted to be there before the start of the season. Adriano Galliani offered a creative explanation for the Japanese forward’s dramatic improvement earlier this month, when he told reporters: “They sent us Honda’s brother [back in January]! We protested and now they have finally sent us the real one.”
• While Honda was the star of Milan’s 3-1 win away to Verona, the Rossoneri did also have an exquisitely taken own goal from Rafael Marques to thank for getting them off the mark. But not that Rafael Marquez, who, confusingly, also plays in the Verona backline. Incidentally, Verona revealed that Marquez’s signing had helped to drive up revenues by 20% at the club shop, as Mexican supporters sought out his replica shirt.
• Lazio had players involved on both sides of the abandoned Serbia-Albania game during the international break, so their manager Stefano Pioli welcomed them back to training on Thursday by bringing his whole squad together to sing the club anthem. Did it help to restore unity between players who were enemies just days previously? Who knows, but it was the Serbia striker Filip Djordjevic who opened the scoring in an impressive 2-0 win away to Fiorentina, and who now has five goals in three games for the Bianconcelesti.
• Sampdoria remain unbeaten, but they were disappointed to settle for a 2-2 draw away to Cagliari this weekend after opening a two-goal lead in the first-half. The game turned in the 58th minute, when Fabrizio Cacciatore was sent off and gave away a penalty. Sinisa Mihajlovic had bet Zdenek Zeman a dinner on the result, but said afterwards that he would be paying, “because this draw feels like a loss”.
• A sixth defeat of the season already for Parma, who sit bottom in Serie A after Sunday’s 1-0 defeat at Atalanta. A section of their travelling support demanded an audience with players at the end, conveying in no uncertain terms their displeasure at another limp display.
• Eugenio Corini became the first Serie A manager to lose his job this season, when he was sacked by Chievo in the wake of their 3-0 loss to Roma. He has been replaced by Rolando Maran, an appointment which led some eagle-eyed observers to note that the Flying Donkeys have now had four consecutive bald managers.
• Brit-watch: Ashley Cole was back in the Roma team for that win over Chievo, although not much was required of him in an entirely one-sided fixture. It will be interesting to see if he retains his place for the game against Bayern Munich on Tuesday. Micah Richards, meanwhile, was an unused substitute for Fiorentina.
• And Roma are back to within a point of Juventus at the top, after the champions were held to a 1-1 draw away to Sassuolo. That result was a credit to the Neroverdi, who attacked their opponents in way that few teams have dared to do, although it also highlighted how reliant Juve have been at times this season on the goals of Carlos Tevez up front, and how much tougher life gets for them when he does not find the net. Fernando Llorente’s failure to score so far in 2014-15 is becoming a cause for concern.
Results: Atalanta 1-0 Parma, Cagliari 2-2 Sampdoria, Fiorentina 0-2 Lazio, Inter 2-2 Napoli, Palermo 2-1 Cesena, Roma 3-0 Chievo, Sassuolo 1-1 Juventus, Torino 1-0 Udinese, Verona 1-3 Milan.
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Juventus | 7 | 11 | 19 |
| 2 | Roma | 7 | 10 | 18 |
| 3 | Sampdoria | 7 | 5 | 15 |
| 4 | AC Milan | 7 | 6 | 14 |
| 5 | Udinese | 7 | 3 | 13 |
| 6 | Lazio | 7 | 6 | 12 |
| 7 | Napoli | 7 | 1 | 11 |
| 8 | Verona | 7 | -1 | 11 |
| 9 | Fiorentina | 7 | 0 | 9 |
| 10 | Inter Milan | 7 | 3 | 9 |
| 11 | Genoa | 6 | 0 | 8 |
| 12 | Torino | 7 | -2 | 8 |
| 13 | Atalanta | 7 | -5 | 7 |
| 14 | Empoli | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 15 | Palermo | 7 | -7 | 6 |
| 16 | Cesena | 7 | -6 | 6 |
| 17 | Cagliari | 7 | -2 | 5 |
| 18 | Chievo | 7 | -7 | 4 |
| 19 | Sassuolo | 7 | -9 | 4 |
| 20 | Parma | 7 | -8 | 3 |
