Beautiful match between the two main candidates for the Scudetto. Allegri escapes, Chivu comes back dragged by Lautaro Martinez. But the real news is the beauty of the show shown by Serie A to the world…
We won’t be the Premier League with its diamonds and we won’t even have the unreachable peaks of Luis Enrique’s PSG, the three Spanish teams that are in a league of their own or even Bayern Munich. We won’t be any of this, but we have to thank Inter and Napoli who gave the world an eye-catching image of Serie A. It was a real show, that of San Siro, played brilliantly by Chivu and Allegri, a script that was never banal and full of things to note down for future reference.
It was a match worthy of a championship challenge, but the fact that it only arrived at the beginning of September matters little. Not even the heat affected the plan of Inter and Napoli who beat each other from start to finish. Inter won because they put everything, heart and technique, to recover from the incredible one-two with which the Neapolitans had hit them in the heart at the start of the second half thanks to Politano and Hojlund.
The signature is that of Lautaro Martinez, already as bad as in the heart of the season even if his condition is not yet optimal. Chivu got everything he could from TuLa (first goal also for Thuram), even if the Nerazzurri showed the best things at the start when they ferociously attacked their opponents: very high and immediate pressing and recovery of the ball, verticality to go to goal.
And Napoli? The ranking lies because the impression is that Allegri has a group full of values. Some sensational mistakes by Angiussa in front of goal helped Inter to write the final result, but Napoli still left San Siro having played on equal terms with the Italian champions for a long time, forced to squeeze out tons of psychological and physical energy to get to the bottom of the match.
Chivu’s victory is, numbers in hand, a mere statistical fact: there is still too much championship to play to imagine that it is something more than a simple stage. But there remains a widespread feeling of having transmitted to the whole world something that resembles the European football that we so envy. It was a spectacle.
