Napoli beat Inter and emerged from the crisis in a match that caused discussion due to the refereeing decisions. Conte finds success again and forgets the latest knockouts, Chivu and his team’s many mistakes
Napoli emerges from the crisis when it risked spiraling into its difficulties, Inter returns home without fully understanding how it was possible to lose a match that had long seemed tameable. No definitive effect on the standings, but the Maradona massacre produced the least predictable outcome considering how Conte and Chivu approached last season’s championship rematch. Napoli won and Inter lost, their third defeat of the championship even if this is very different from the previous ones against Udinese and Juventus.
How much the match mattered, however, is revealed by the tension that accompanied the protagonists on the pitch on an evening in which the choice of Mariani and his collaborators (more theirs than him), endorsed by the VAR, to break the balance by granting the home team a old-fashioned rigor; of those that the designator Rocchi has guaranteed for years that he no longer wants to see and that no one, between Maradona and Lissone, has managed to remove once the mess has been made on the pitch.
It’s a necessary premise to get to the stage of a match in which nerves often got the better of the protagonists’ heads. There was everything involved, including a long-distance rustic duel between Conte and Lautaro Martinez who evidently had scores to settle and who didn’t hold back in a crescendo of assorted vulgarities. Bad for both, bad for those who have worsened the general climate of the confrontation.
Because Napoli won the Maradona challenge
Napoli won by playing on their difficulties and it is a great merit because it was not a given a few days after the humiliating experience in Eindhoven. The signatures are those of McTominaythe only truly essential one in Conti’s lineup, and Anguissa: all the others were useful in supporting the match plan of the manager who benched the entire transfer market (De Bruyne and Milinkovic Savic excluded) inventing Neres as a “false new player”.
A risky choice that paid maximum dividends. Hojlund’s next return will make Conte move on, but by preferring a total adaptation to Lucca, paid 35 million euros, the coach sent a very strong message and that in the event of defeat it would not be without consequences. In any case, the avalanche was stopped and Napoli can build their restart on this success. It’s not just a statistical fact: the last half hour saw the Neapolitans finally express themselves at levels adequate to the value of the group.
Because Inter lost the Maradona challenge
Inter lost because they were unable to make sense of the superiority they displayed liberally in the first hour of the game. The penalty unfairly conceded cannot cover a performance that was qualitatively appreciable but which was lost in the details: the lack of coverage on McTominay, for example, or having left Anguissa running free until the conclusion as already happened against Udinese at the beginning of the season. And then a few too many inaccuracies in front of goal.
The moral is that Napoli is still standing and Inter needs to reflect on errors and omissions. There will be much and rightly much talk about the refereeing issue: we are only in October but the hope for Mariani and his teammates is that Maradona’s improvident whistle does not really weigh on the championship race.
