Already as the words were being spoken, Cristian Chivu started to bristle. “Scontri diretti” translates to “head-to-head clashes”. The term is commonly deployed in a football context as a shorthand for those high-stakes games between teams who are expected to finish close together in the table – much like “six-pointers” in the English game.
Chivu’s Inter finished 11 points clear atop Serie A last season, his first as their head coach, but caught criticism along the way for an early Champions League exit and underperformance in some scontri diretti. Inter lost four out of six games against Napoli, Milan and Juventus. Their only win, at home to the Bianconeri, came after Alessandro Bastoni deceived a referee to get Pierre Kalulu sent off.
But did the media mis-sell the importance of these fixtures? Nobody could doubt they were big occasions. Napoli were defending champions at the time, Inter share one of world football’s most iconic stadiums, San Siro, with Milan, and their rivalry with Juventus has earned its nickname as the Derby d’Italia.
Of those clubs, however, only Napoli truly challenged Inter for the title. Even then, not that fiercely. Milan and Juventus finished fifth and sixth respectively. Inter won all their games against Roma and Como, who took third and fourth. Suffice to say, Chivu has not forgotten these details.
“Oh, I have missed this!” he cut in when a journalist broached the topic at a press conference leading up to Saturday’s home game against Napoli. “What are the scontri diretti? Which ones are they? The games against teams who finish in the top four? Or the ones all about tradition? Milan and Juve last season, where should we put them? They finished a long way behind. Are they not scontri diretti any more?”
He would later insist that this had not been a jab at any club, and that he personally considered every game a scontro diretto, even if facing the team in last place. Still, what a timely moment to remind everyone of Juventus and Milan’s recently diminished status, with those clubs facing off in Turin on Sunday night.
Seasons are not defined in early September, but these were fascinating early tests of all four teams’ progress. The newspaper Il Corriere dello Sport billed Inter-Napoli on its front page as “The New Classico”, a rivalry that has grown increasingly fascinating as the two clubs have dominated Serie A in the 2020s. They have won five of the past six Scudetti between them and even shared a head coach, Antonio Conte, during this decade.
Now Napoli are led by Massimiliano Allegri, formerly of Milan and Juventus; a man whose stale tactics in a home defeat by Como saw him portrayed as a dinosaur, but who steered his new team into a two-goal lead at Inter on Saturday.
The first half was goalless but not without incident. Within six minutes of kick-off, both keepers were forced into full-length stops. Federico Dimarco hit the post for Inter before the interval.
It was after the break, though, that magnificent chaos took hold. Inter appealed for a handball penalty, then Matteo Politano opened the scoring at the other end – driving home at the second attempt to punish some panicked defending. Rasmus Højlund made it 2-0 to the visitors in the 53rd minute. Lautaro Martínez pulled one back for Inter in the 56th.
Riveting, rapturous madness. Inter with the defiance of champions, and Napoli sending on Kevin De Bruyne and David Neres to chase a third goal instead of sitting on their lead. Marcus Thuram struck woodwork for the Nerazzurri then equalised in the 82nd minute. A dagger for Allegri, who had resisted his more cautious instincts right up to the 80th, when he finally sent on Benoît Badiashile as a third central defender.
And still that was not the end of it. Napoli blew two more golden opportunities to win. Neres made all the wrong choices after De Bruyne put him through. Frank Anguissa missed an open goal from two yards.
Then, as the 90th minute elapsed, Inter’s new signing Curtis Jones – the Englishman making his first home appearance off the bench after joining from Liverpool – swung a ball into the box. After a scramble, it broke to Lautaro, who jabbed home before scaling the partition that separates fans from the pitch behind the goal. Inter victorious in the scontro diretto, 3-2.
Sunday night’s game did not deliver the same level of entertainment. There has not been a single goalless draw so far in this Serie A season but with more than an hour played at the Allianz Stadium, it appeared that Juventus-Milan would be the first. Four of their past five Serie A meetings had ended goalless, and for all the talk of new chapters on both sides, this game felt like more of the same.
A hard reality check, for both sets of fans, after seeing their teams start the campaign with two wins. Juventus and Milan each spent more than €160m on transfers this summer, but few of their arrivals shone. Randal Kolo Muani and Gonçalo Ramos, salvaged at vast expense from Paris Saint-Germain’s pile of spare parts, started up front for either side, and managed one shot between them, which was off target.
Juventus at least had willing runners in Francisco Conceição, Nico González and Kerim Alajbegovic. The former tested Mike Maignan early and struck a post later on. Milan’s head coach, Ruben Amorim, dropped two of his best attacking performers so far this season, giving €50m signing Diego Moreira his first start ahead of Samuel Chukwueze at right wing-back and pairing Adrien Rabiot with Alexis Saelemaekers behind the attack at the expense of Alphadjo Cisse.
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Milan were almost completely without threat. They finished the game on 0.10 expected goals. About half of that came from a shot by Cisse, assisted by Chukwueze, after both players entered as second-half substitutes. Somehow, it wound up in the net.
Quick Guide
Serie A results
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Serie A results
Genoa 1-4 Como, Fiorentina 1-2 Torino, Inter 3-2 Napoli, Roma 2-1 Atalanta, Frosinone 3-2 Venezia, Parma 1-1 Monza, Bologna 2-2 Sassuolo, Juventus 1-1 Milan
Monday: Cagliari v Lecce, Udinese v Lazio
A testament to teenager Cisse’s audacity and precision. He stepped away from Manuel Locatelli and nutmegged Pierre Kalulu to find the corner from an inauspicious angle. It was a second goal in three games for the breakout talent, who played on loan last season with Catanzaro in Serie B.
Milan were on course for a scandalous smash and grab, but Juventus threw everything they had on from the bench. In the end it was not the newly acquired Nick Woltemade, but instead a repurposed centre-back, Federico Gatti, who got on the end of Teun Koopmeiners’s cross to rescue a 1-1 draw.
It is not the first time he has dug Juventus out of a hole. After scoring a 93rd-minute equaliser against Roma this March, Gatti noted that he used to play in midfield when he was younger. He joked at the time that he could bag “15-20 goals a season” if they let him play up front. Instead, Juventus tried unsuccessfully to sell him over the summer. “I’m sorry you’re surprised,” he told an interviewer who remarked on his being the goalscoring hero once again. “My past says this is who I am, I have a force inside me that never dies.”
He had earned the right to chide his doubters. Still, there was something in the contrast between his wobbly steward-assisted climb on to an advertising hoarding with that image of Lautaro bounding over the hoardings to scale the partition at San Siro one night before.
The season is barely begun, and the Nerazzurri showed plenty of their own vulnerabilities this weekend. But these two early scontri diretti – if we may call them that – reinforced the impression that both Juventus and Milan have a way to travel before they can dream of title challenges yet.
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