The knockouts accumulate, the defense doesn’t hold up and the Nerazzurri are eating everything up front: at this rate, the risk is to rewrite many negative records
When an episode is repeated several times, it is natural to start counting. One, two, three and so on… In football, as in life, one hopes that the fingers of the hand get uncomfortable due to the accumulation of positive events: in the long run, precedents are scarce and attention is turned to records. This is certainly not the case with Inter, who in the league seem to be trying hard to beat their past: a long and often glorious past, with physiological declines that no one wants to relive but which are now dangerously approaching. Despite the momentary standings, you photograph the Nerazzurri in third place behind only Napoli and Lazio.
Double digit
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So let’s start with the defeats, a cross that is now knocking with disconcerting redundancy on the doors of the Viale della Liberazione club. With yesterday’s match against Fiorentina, the Nerazzurri have now lost ten knockouts in this Serie A, certainly not a roadmap that suits Inter. Just before the break for the national teams and in the wake of the 0-1 draw at the hands of Juventus, the seasons with 9 knockouts in the first 27 days were counted. There were 15, but with the arrival in double figures the circle narrows even more: only 9 times in Inter’s 115 years of Inter’s career had the Nerazzurri fallen in 10 matches in the first 28 rounds of the championship (1942, 1943, 1947, 1948, 1955, 1986, 1994, 1999, and 2012). To understand the extent of this data, just add up the knockouts of the three previous seasons, between the double management by Antonio Conte and the first by Inzaghi: 4, 3 and 4 for a total of 11. The direction taken inspires fear.
Looking for the goal
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If then three defeats in a row in the league had not been seen in Inter Milan for 6 years, when poker came in the spring of 2017, the difficulty that Inzaghi’s team is showing in front of goal is surprising. Both against Juventus and against Fiorentina, Inter remained dry and in the trip to La Spezia only a useless – in retrospect – goal from a penalty had given hopes of scoring points on a pitch that was anything but prohibitive for a team in the quarter-finals of the Champions League final. If you get in the way of the Porto home game, you get three consecutive games without goals: you don’t have to rewind the tape much to relive such an abstinence, but the memories are bad. We are talking about the Liverpool-Sassuolo-Genoa-Milan quartet of the terrible February 2022. It never happened with Conte, the previous time dates back to 2017 by Luciano Spalletti.
In or out
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The latest wound concerns the alternation between home and away: two diametrically opposed worlds for several months and now in dangerous collision course. If Inzaghi and the club hoped to make the external performance adhere to that of Giuseppe Meazza, reality tells the opposite. Because until two days ago only one of the 8 defeats in the championship had accrued at San Siro – Roma’s comeback in October which served as a turning point – while now the sold out stadium has already seen its faded heroes fall twice. Three days ago it could be said that Inzaghi’s internal performance was worthy of the Scudetto, while now we have to accept the overtaking of the aliens from Naples. But outside your fort, everything changes. Assuming that Lecce do not clear Empoli on Monday by overtaking them in the partial standings, Inter are currently tenth in terms of away points: 17 in 13 matches. On Tuesday Juventus are headed for the Coppa Italia and then on Good Friday the match will be at Salernitana’s house: normally it would be a suitable appointment to regain morale and change inertia, but after all these slip-ups…
April 2 – 11:07
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