Luca Toni did not spare a thought for Pippo Inzaghi as he lined up to take his penalty at San Siro. If he did, then perhaps the Verona striker even imagined that he would be doing his old friend a favour by nudging him closer to the sack. “Since he took over the Milan bench,” Toni had said on the eve of Saturday’s match, “it seems like he has aged by 10 years.”
Playing football would appear to have the opposite effect on Toni, preserving in him a youthful quality few other 37-year-olds can match. After floating his spot-kick straight down the middle of Diego López’s goal, he ran toward Verona’s supporters pumping limbs in all directions with childlike abandon.
Toni would explain afterwards that this was an item crossed off his footballing bucket list: “I had told my team-mates that before I retired, I wanted to score one penalty with a little chip.” His pleasure was all the greater for having achieved said ambition at one of football’s most storied venues, even if the opposition were not exactly at the height of their powers.
Milan had arrived at this fixture sat joint 10th in the Serie A table, just six points ahead of Toni’s team. Although the visitors had never won a game at San Siro, they had earned the nickname ‘Fatal Verona’ by derailing the Rossoneri’s title bids with victories at their own Bentegodi stadium in the springs of 1973 and 1990. It was easy enough to imagine them proving similarly lethal to Inzaghi’s managerial career.
His nine months in charge had featured some highs, as well as lows, but the last two have been disastrous. Milan ended 2014 on an encouraging note after beating Napoli and drawing away to Roma – not to mention thumping Real Madrid in a Dubai friendly – but since then Inzaghi’s team have scraped together just eight points from their first eight games of the new calendar year.
Inzaghi was criticised not only for poor results but also his reaction to them. After a 0-0 draw away to Verona’s local rivals Chievo, he insisted that his glass was still half full, pointing out that “this was our second consecutive clean sheet”.
At the beginning of his tenure, such optimism was perceived as a positive characteristic, but now he was accused by the press of burdening his players with low expectations. It was a damning charge for a man whose coaching Masters thesis was titled, “A mentality for ‘being’ winners”.
In truth, Inzaghi’s struggles have had less to do with motivating his players and more to do with tactical confusion. All season he has struggled with the question of how to incorporate Jérémy Ménez – Milan’s standout attacking player in this campaign – into a system that can also works for the rest of the team.
Thus far nothing has worked better than the 4-3-3 with which Inzaghi began the season, with the Frenchman as a false nine. Said formation does not allow for the inclusion of a true striker alongside Ménez, which is something that the club’s owner, Silvio Berlusconi, remains eager to see – and especially after sanctioning the signing of Mattia Destro in January (initially on loan, but with a right to buy).
Inzaghi’s latest experiment has been a 4-3-1-2, and it was with that formation that his team lined up against Verona. Destro was dropped after disappointing performances against Chievo and Cesena, in which he touched the ball a combined 32 times. That his replacement, Giampaolo Pazzini, subsequently only managed 22 touches against Verona suggested that the system, more than the individuals, was at the root of the problem.
Attack is not the only area in which this team has been malfunctioning. Milan’s midfield has rarely played with cohesion, and it certainly was not going to on Saturday with Sulley Muntari filling in for Nigel de Jong at its heart. He was the one who needlessly bundled Artur Ionita over in the box to gift Toni his spot-kick just after the quarter-hour mark, and he did little to redeem himself thereafter.
Despite it all, Milan still came within a whisker of escaping with a victory. Ménez responded to Toni by converting a penalty of his own in the 41st minute. Verona midfielder Panagiotis Tachtsidis then bundled a Philippe Mexès effort over his own goal line shortly after the break, before Inzaghi reserved his greatest mistake for the dying stages.
With just over 10 minutes left to play, the Milan manager withdrew Pazzini in favour of centre-back Salvatore Bocchetti. Although Inzaghi would later claim this move was designed to make more room up front for Ménez on the counter, the effect was to make Milan sit back and invite their opponents onto them. Verona punished such passivity with a Nico López equaliser in the dying seconds of injury time.
Credit was due to the visitors, and especially their final scorer. López had pulled the same stunt against Inter at San Siro in November, coming off the bench to steal a point for his team with a goal in the 89th minute. There is something about the stadium that seems to bring the best out of the Uruguayan. He also scored Udinese’s winner away to Milan in the Coppa Italia quarter-finals last season – once again after entering as a substitute.
If history was repeating itself for López, then it was for Inzaghi, too. As recently as January he saw his team throw away a late lead against Torino after he withdrew Ménez in favour of Alex for the final 10 minutes of the game.
It is one thing for an inexperienced manager to make such an error, but far more damning not to learn from it. No sooner had the final whistle gone, than the speculation began that Inzaghi was to lose his job. There were reports of Berlusconi meeting with Milan’s vice-president, Adriano Galliani, at his Arcore residence to discuss the manager’s future on Sunday evening.
Some outlets have since disputed whether that summit ever actually took place. One way or another, Inzaghi was still in his post on Monday morning. It appears that he will be given at least until Monday’s game with Fiorentina to preserve his job – although given the Viola’s recent form, it is hard to imagine Milan rescuing anything at the Stadio Artemio Franchi.
Berlusconi will be reluctant to part ways with Inzaghi because he is fond of him personally, but also because Milan have already changed manager twice in the last 14 months. To carry through with the most obvious short-term alternative – promoting Cristian Brocchi from the youth team – would only be to repeat the course that Milan took when promoting Inzaghi in the first instance.
The owner might also be distracted by his own negotiations to sell a share of the club to a consortium led by the Thai businessman Bee Taechaubol. A preliminary deal is said to have been struck for the investors to take a 30% stake at the end of May, at a cost of €250m (£180m), although Milan are yet to make any official statement on the matter.
Changing managers in the midst of such a negotiation might seem imprudent, although equally we can surmise that poor results on the field do nothing to strengthen Berlusconi’s bargaining position. For now, we can only say that Verona were not fatal for Inzaghi – but they have dealt him yet another heavy blow.
Talking points
• Gianfranco Zola was fired by Cagliari on Monday, less than three months after taking over as the club’s manager. If the timing felt a little strange – if ownership was losing faith, then surely the previous week’s home defeat to Verona was far more damning than Saturday’s loss away to a Europe-chasing Sampdoria team – we cannot hide from the fact that Zola had picked up just one point from his last six games. Zdenek Zeman is expected to return as his replacement, although any notion of Il Boemo as the club’s saviour must be tempered by the fact that the team won just two of their 16 matches under his leadership at the start of this season.
• Lots of positives for Sampdoria in that win over Cagliari, and most obviously Samuel Eto’o’s first goal for the club, which he followed up by pinching a photographer’s camera and taking pictures of the crowd. Eto’o also stole the show with a random act of kindness on the field, stopping to do up the shoelaces of Cagliari goalkeeper Zeljko Brkic.
• Parma returned to the field for the first time in three weeks, their season – if not yet their long-term future – saved by the vote made by Serie A clubs to raise an emergency fund to see them through the remainder of the campaign. There was a surreal atmosphere at the Tardini as fans aimed insults at both the former team president, Tommaso Ghirardi, and the current one, Giampietro Manenti, who sat enjoying corporate hospitality in his box despite the fact that he is yet to pay his new employees’ salaries.
The players, for the most part, went about their jobs with admirable commitment (loanee Cristian Rodríguez did seem rather blasé about getting himself sent off, a day after stating that he hoped to join Gremio imminently) and were rewarded with a 0-0 draw against Atalanta.
Afterwards, Roberto Donadoni insisted they had played with the team’s non-footballing staff in mind. “If you think that Parma stepped out onto the pitch just because we accepted someone’s charity, you are wrong,” he said. “Behind our decision there are at least 200 people who with this charity can live and maybe pay their bills.”
• Only Cesena voted against the decision to support Parma. Their president Giorgio Lugaresi defended that decision after watching his own team draw with Palermo on Sunday. “I am for respecting the rules, which must be followed 100%, and not for giving a bad example as often happens in Italy, putting a patch on a dinghy that has 100 holes in it,” he told RadioRai. “We need courageous decisions, even if they are unpopular, and patience if the club involved is a glorious one like Parma. The rules apply to everyone.”
• Luca Toni was not the only player to convert a penalty with a cucchiaio this weekend. Mauro Icardi demonstrated once again his extraordinary self-assuredness as he chipped Napoli’s Mariano Andujar from the spot in the 87th minute to earn a 2-2 draw at Stadio San Paolo. All of this with a fan’s laser beam dancing in his eyes, as well.
Icardi’s goal was the reward for Inter’s attacking spirit and endeavour over the course of a match in which they were often outclassed. The Nerazzurri are still a long way short of the quality required to fulfil Roberto Mancini’s target of a Scudetto challenge in 2016, but equally the gap between them and neighbours Milan feels a lot wider at present than the single point we see in the standings.
• Napoli will be kicking themselves after blowing a two-goal lead against Inter. In doing so, they missed an opportunity to close to within two points of Roma, who were once again utterly devoid of ideas in their goalless stalemate with Chievo. It all sets things up nicely for one of Lazio or Fiorentina to apply real pressure on the top three by winning their head-to-head on Monday evening.
Results: Cesena 0-0 Palermo, Chievo 0-0 Roma, Empoli 1-1 Genoa, Milan 2-2 Verona, Napoli 2-2 Inter, Parma 0-0 Atalanta, Sampdoria 2-0 Cagliari, Udinese 3-2 Torino
