The spellbinding Serie A leaders are starting to believe in a first title since Diego Maradona but they must hold their nerve

Serie A’s winter break arrived later than usual this season. The Italian top flight is set to resume on Sunday after a one-weekend pause, having played through Christmas and New Year. If it were up to the Napoli manager, Maurizio Sarri, they would not have stopped at all.

“I would prefer to keep going,” he confessed after watching his team beat Verona at the start of this month. And, really, who could blame him? A point clear of Juventus in first place, the Partenopei had been crowned one week earlier as Italy’s campione d’inverno – winter champions – an unofficial title granted to the team that leads the way at the season’s midway stage.

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Now was the time to press the advantage, to extend the momentum generated by four consecutive league wins. Ten of Italy’s last 11 winter champions have gone on to lift the scudetto. But the one exception was Napoli, two years ago, during Sarri’s first season in charge.

It was hardly a crushing disappointment back then. Napoli had exceeded expectations even to finish as runners-up – after slipping to fifth under Rafael Benítez the year before. This season, though, feels different. For the first time since Diego Maradona’s departure, one of Europe’s most football-obsessed cities has started to believe that a league title is there to be won.

Sarri famously defined the word scudetto as “una bestemmia” – a blasphemy or swearword – during that 2015-16 campaign. If he still feels that way, then his team is not listening. From Raúl Albiol through to Elseid Hysaj and the captain, Marek Hamsik, players have spoken openly in recent weeks about their desire to finish this season as champions. “Everyone is talking about the scudetto,” said the centre-back Kalidou Koulibaly in an interview with Radio Kiss Kiss. “Even the porter at my apartment building every time he sees me. We hope that we get to live it, instead of just hearing other people talk about it for once.”

Napoli have won just two scudetti in club history and the first, in 1986‑87, spawned street parties that ran for days and nights without pause. Cemetery walls were graffitied with the message: “You don’t know what you’re missing,” and John Foot notes in his book Calcio that a quarter of all boys born in some parishes were named after Maradona.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Napoli fans show their enduring love for Diego Maradona at the San Paolo. Photograph: Cesare Abbate/EPA

The Stadio San Paolo is not as full on Sundays as it used to be but Naples remains a city fixated on football. Just ask Albiol, who can barely leave his house without being asked for a shirt, or Dries Mertens, who gets critiqued on his celebration technique by the “almost 90-year-old lady” downstairs.

Players’ ability to stay focused amid such intense scrutiny may play the biggest part in determining whether Napoli can make it to the end. Nobody should doubt that they possess the quality to win a scudetto. That much can readily be observed in a side featuring the ever-more confident Koulibaly at the back, Allan’s ball‑winning fury in midfield and the spellbinding combinations of Mertens, Lorenzo Insigne and José Callejón up front.

Or you could look to the raw numbers. The 99 points that Napoli piled up over the course of the 2017 calendar year were six more than Juventus, their 96 goals the most of any Serie A team in six and a half decades. Hamsik just surpassed Maradona as the club’s all-time leading scorer.

There is a difference, though, between playing the best football and knowing how to win when the chips are down. Juventus illustrated as much at the San Paolo in December – scoring in the 13th minute and clinging on for a 1-0 win with less than a third of possession.

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That was a chastening occasion for Napoli, yet league titles rarely come down to head-to-head results. To break the Bianconeri’s run of six consecutive league titles, what Sarri’s team need above all is consistency. He has said all along that it will take more than 90 points to win the title. Even in second place, Juve are on pace for 95.

And if the past 12 months suggest Napoli are capable, they also demonstrate the precariousness of a thin squad. The lack of depth at key positions was apparent even before Faouzi Ghoulam blew out his knee during a Champions League defeat to Manchester City.

Ghoulam and Arkadiusz Milik – who sustained a second cruciate ligament tear of his own in September – have returned to training, though it will be a while yet before either is ready for competitive action. Beyond them, this team still needs more options in the wide positions up front, but they were turned down this month by their number one transfer target, the Bologna forward Simone Verdi.

With so many variables still up in the air, it is hard to predict with confidence how this season will end. Roma or Inter, after disastrous Decembers, might find a way back into the title conversation yet. What we can say is that Juventus have not faced a battle like this since Zlatan Ibrahimovic left Milan. Sarri was not alone in feeling impatient at the imposition of a January pause.