A ball rolled into the box. It skipped up and jumped like tumbleweed in a frontier town. For more than six hours on Saturday, the ball bounced around the Bentegodi, Sinigaglia and Allianz Stadium. Not once did it hit the net.
It was like Serie A decided to run 28 Days Later instead of a round of football, a post-apocalyptic scenario in which a deadly virus wiped out all goals. There have been 17 0-0s in 11 Serie A gameweeks this season. Three back-to-back made Saturday feel like the 1960s.
In the 63rd minute of Como-Cagliari, Alvaro Morata asked to be substituted. His coach Cesc Fabregas claimed it was planned. Sideline reporters instead got the impression Morata could no longer take being pushed around and trash-talked by the intimidating Colombian, Yerry Mina. An alternative theory, posited tongue-in-cheek and hitherto by no one, is that this is not a strikers’ league. No mas.
It is worth looking at the scoring charts elsewhere. In the Premier League, Erling Haaland is already on 14 goals. In La Liga and the Bundesliga, Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane are keeping pace with 13 each. In Ligue 1, Joaquin Panichelli has been a revelation at Strasbourg. The Argentine has already scored nine times in his first 12 appearances in France. That’s more than double what the best strikers in Serie A have produced this season. What is going on?
The league’s current top scorer is a deep-lying playmaker who wears No 10 for Inter. Two of Hakan Calhanoglu’s five goals have been penalties as well. The rest, in fairness, are worldies. He has not reinvented himself as a No 9.
It is a strange, dissonant occurrence. The national team, for instance, has been struggling for goals from its strikers for a decade. But not this season. Moise Kean, Mateo Retegui, Giacomo Raspadori and Pio Esposito have combined for 12 goals in four qualifiers under Rino Gattuso.
Within a Serie A context, Retegui, the Capocannoniere last season, left Atalanta for Al Qadsiah in the Saudi Pro League. Raspadori moved from Napoli to Atletico Madrid. Fiorentina are bottom of the league and have pulled Kean down with them. Esposito is a teenager in the rotation at Inter.
Moise Kean’s goals have dried up as Fiorentina have struggled this season (Gabriele Maltinti/Getty Images)
If Calhanoglu is top scorer there (and beyond) it is because, unlike last year, Inter have so much depth in the centre-forward position that the prolonged absence of Marcus Thuram through injury has barely been spoken about. Which is probably why Inter should still rank as favourites for the Scudetto.
What about Roma?
“I wish the international break were longer,” Gian Piero Gasperini smiled. He wants to savour the moment. Sunday’s 2-0 win over Udinese was gratifying because it fleetingly sent Roma top until, later that evening, Inter pulled themselves onto the same cloud.
“I liked how we got so many bodies into the box,” Gasperini observed. “That wouldn’t have happened a few weeks ago.” It showed the players are gaining in confidence and implementing what’s demanded of them regardless of injuries wiping out Roma’s attack. Gasperini was without Paulo Dybala and Leon Bailey and the goalless Evan Ferguson. He also lost Artem Dovbyk before half-time.
It didn’t matter.
Roma have found enough goals elsewhere. Dybala injured himself missing a penalty against Milan last week. Captain Lorenzo Pellegrini made no mistake against Udinese. His turnaround continues. Pellegrini was out in the cold at the start of the season. His contract expires in the summer and the club wished to move him on. But the casualty list forced his reintegration and the Roman-born-and-bred Pellegrini might yet skipper Roma to their first league title since 2001.
Gasperini already deserves great credit for turning lost causes and figures of fun into main characters. Many didn’t think Mario Hermoso had a future at Roma. Zeki Celik, the scorer of the team’s second on Sunday, was often derided by the fans. For now, Roma have the best defence in Europe’s top five leagues, an indicator of a genuine title contender.
Claudio Ranieri’s work should not be forgotten either. He set this in motion a year ago. Roma have picked up more points than anyone this calendar year and were unlucky to leave games against Inter and Milan empty-handed. As points totals go, it looks like this year’s Scudetto will, once again, be won in the low 80s. Gasperini has never gone above 78 before. Might this be the year?
How Atalanta miss Gasp
Spare a thought for Ivan Juric. If he has a calendar or a diary, maybe it’s best to rip out November 10. It was the date Roma sacked him last year and, in a strange coincidence, Atalanta relieved him of his duties on the anniversary on Monday. Fired by Southampton in between, Atalanta’s sporting director Tony D’Amico must have thought Juric experienced a blip last season.
He worked with him at Hellas Verona, where Juric re-established his credentials as the purest Gasperini disciple. Give him a pre-season, and a deep squad, built by his mentor and surely Juric would make the last year look like an aberration. He was a continuity candidate but in the end the only continuity was another dismissal.
Atalanta were, along with Bayern Munich, the only unbeaten team in Europe’s top five leagues until 10 days ago. In contrast with Bayern, however, they were not winning every league game. Atalanta drew too many of them and when the draws turned into defeats, no one remembered the few in which they deserved more than a point.
Beaten 3-0 by Sassuolo on Sunday lunchtime, Atalanta never lost by that scoreline at the New Balance Arena in Gasperini’s time at the club. Thirteenth in the league is a regression to the pre-Gasperini era. Is the Cinderella story over? Has the clock struck midnight? Moving on from Gasp was always going to be tough. But this glittering carriage should not suddenly resemble a pumpkin again.
Atalanta’s owners have built one of the deepest squads in the league. Yes, Retegui was sold in the summer. But they kept Ademola Lookman, Ederson and everybody else. Giorgio Scalvini and Gianluca Scamacca returned from ACL injuries. They bought Kamaldeen Sulemana from Southampton for Juric. Honest Ahanor looks like the most promising centre-back in the league.
In the right hands, Atalanta can still be a top-four team. But they have a few problems too. Lookman wanted out in the summer and wasn’t happy to be denied a move to Inter. Retegui’s replacement Nikola Krstovic has a shot map like a Jackson Pollock painting. In a league where no team is running away, Atalanta should be able to catch up if another member of Gasp’s flock, Raffaele Palladino, proves a better fit.
Behold Bologna
One of the most heartwarming moments of the weekend in Serie A came at full-time on Sunday when Bologna’s players lifted goalkeeper Massimo Pessina on their shoulders. The 17-year-old kept a clean sheet, after coming on after eight minutes to make his debut, a 2-0 win over champions and then league leaders Napoli. He was in tears, unable to hold back the emotion.
Massimo Pessina, left, celebrates keeping a clean sheet against Napoli (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)
Pessina faced only one shot on target, such was Bologna’s domination at the Dall’Ara where, quite impressively, they are unbeaten against the top sides this calendar year. Last season’s Coppa Italia winners keep going from strength to strength. Only a point outside the top four, it could be even better for Bologna too. They were 2-0 up against Lecce in September and Fiorentina at the end of October. On both occasions, stoppage-time equalisers served as a cold shower.
This is still Bologna’s best start to a campaign in nearly 30 years. Napoli coach Antonio Conte took his hat off to them. Bologna were without their first-choice goalkeeper. They played in the Europa League on Thursday. Their coach Vincenzo Italiano, while back on the sideline, has recently been hospitalised with pneumonia.
Unbeaten in 10 in all competitions, fixtures had been kind lately until Napoli’s visit to The Red, The Fat and The Learned. But credit where it’s due, Bologna have normalised playing on multiple fronts. They’ve been without Ciro Immobile, who was injured on his debut and hasn’t played since.
The squad, built by former Atalanta miracle maker Giovanni Sartori, has held up to scrutiny. Italiano’s continued success remains a source of regret for fans of bottom-of-the-table Fiorentina, who should never have let him go.
Napoli in need of a ‘heart transplant’
When the New England Patriots were winning Super Bowls, Bill Belichick’s instruction to his players was simple: Do Your Job.
“In calcio,” Antonio Conte said at the weekend. “Doing your job is not enough. You need passion, enthusiasm, heart.” All the things Napoli were lacking in Bologna. Conte declared himself “worried, very worried” after another lacklustre display. It isn’t tactical in his estimation. It’s inside. Unfortunately, he lamented, “you can’t do heart transplants”.
Anotnio Conte felt his team played without heart this weekend (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)
Conte revealed he spoke to the senior players about this after the 6-2 defeat by PSV three weeks ago. The 56-year-old thought they’d put it behind them with the 3-1 win over Inter. He was wrong. The weekend’s defeat was Napoli’s fifth in all competitions since the start of the season. They suffered four all last year.
Injuries have ravaged the team. Romelu Lukaku hasn’t played a single minute. Kevin De Bruyne is out until the New Year. Napoli’s best centre-back, Amir Rrahmani, and their deep-lying playmaker Stanislav Lobotka, have only just returned from spells on the sidelines. But Conte has left the impression this goes deeper. “We’re not a team,” Conte complained. “And that’s disappointing because four months have passed.”
The new signings, too many for his liking, have, for now, made Napoli less than the sum of their parts. In Bologna, he started Eljif Elmas, a player in his second spell at Napoli, instead of the more electric David Neres and Noa Lang. Without De Bruyne, no one is spotting the runs of Rasmus Hojlund. Last year’s MVP and top scorer Scott McTominay has found the net only twice in the league this season. This season’s top scorer, another midfielder, Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa, departs for AFCON in January.
“I’m sorry to bring up old skeletons from the past but Napoli finished 10th after the third Scudetto (in 2023),” Conte said. It couldn’t happen again, could it? After all, Napoli are only two points off the top and Conte believes he has what it takes to revive the team. The players need to show some life.
“I don’t want to accompany the dead,” Conte said. Even if that was what following Serie A felt like, particularly on Saturday, as one 0-0 after another left anyone watching those games questioning their life choices.