Napoli were supposed to be a team lost without the leadership of Maurizio Sarri but the 3-2 win suggests there could be a different tale to tell this season

Maurizio Sarri can have few regrets over his decision to swap Serie A for the Premier League. Three games into the season, his Chelsea have piled up nine points and eight goals. Before this weekend’s victory over Newcastle, he suggested that the football in England was also less predictable. “In Serie A,” he said, “at 2-0 after 20 minutes the match is finished.”

It was always a peculiar comment, for a man whose Napoli team earned 28 points from losing positions last season. A day later, his former charges took it upon themselves to demonstrate how wrong he was: bouncing back from just such a deficit to beat Milan at the Stadio San Paolo. On Sunday, Torino reinforced the point as they rescued a point under identical circumstances at Inter.



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In fairness, Napoli were only one down by the 20th minute. But the comeback ought to have been even less likely at 2-0 in the 49th. After a beautifully taken opener from Giacomo Bonaventura, Davide Calabria had extended the visitors’ advantage with a cool finish.

The narrative in that moment was of a Napoli team lost without Sarri’s leadership. But it did not last very long. Piotr Zielinski pulled a goal back with a left-footed finish from the edge of the box, then equalised from similar distance off his right. In the 80th minute, Amadou Diawara picked out Allan’s run down the right channel, and the Brazilian squared for Dries Mertens to slot home the winner.

You could not call it undeserved. Napoli finished with three times more shots as Milan (24 to eight) and four times as many on target (eight to two).

The team with which they began this game owed much to Sarri’s ideas. Napoli started in a familiar 4-3-3, with Zielinski and Allan either side of Marek Hamsik – the latter facing the unenviable task of filling Jorginho’s shoes.

On another day, it might have worked. Napoli created chances in this shape, yet were also vulnerable to the counter. With the front three pressing high, but the rest of the team sitting deeper than Sarri would have tolerated, they left spaces for their opponents to exploit.

It took a tactical change from Carlo Ancelotti to turn the tide. Milan swapped to a 4-2-3-1, with Zielinski as a No 10 instructed to get closer to Lucas Biglia, who up until that point had been dictating Milan’s build-up play from the base of midfield. It was the Poland international who launched the move that led to his first goal, dispossessing Biglia as he attempted to bring the ball out.

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The introduction of Dries Mertens for Hamsik represented a further evolution, Napoli now playing in something more like a 4-4-2 with the substitute as a second striker. Biglia had been subbed off by Milan in the meantime, but his replacement, Tiemeoué Bakayoko, was swamped as the Belgian dropped in to continue disrupting Milan’s attempts to play the ball out from deep.

There was nuance, too. Ancelotti explained afterwards that he had encouraged Mertens to drift left when Napoli had the ball, bridging a gap between Arkadiusz Milik at centre-forward and Lorenzo Insigne on the wing. It was from the left that the Belgian got his goal, and his combination with the Italian down that flank almost led to a fourth as well.

It is still early for sweeping judgments, but Napoli have already shown character by coming through tough tests against Milan and Lazio – against whom they also fell behind. Ancelotti has reminded us of his tactical acumen, yet the strength of his personality has been to the fore as well.

Where Sarri could be surly, his replacement has brought optimism and warmth. In response to predictions Napoli might struggle to make the top four this season, Ancelotti insisted they were good enough to challenge for the title. Reminded that even a club-record 91 points were not enough to catch Juventus, he countered that the gap was only four.

Some sceptics had asked what he was even doing here, a three-times Champions League winner at a club which has won Serie A only twice. For Ancelotti, the answer was obvious: to experience the emotion of nights like Saturday. As he put it at full-time: “I didn’t even have to pay for a ticket.”

There is a sincerity to Ancelotti that makes this sound like more than a platitude. One of his first acts was to start taking lessons in Neapolitan dialect from the club’s shopkeeper. The atmosphere at the San Paolo could have become toxic, in a game which began with Ultras on strike in protest at the leadership of president Aurelio De Laurentiis. But the manager’s enthusiasm is catching.

It is a stark contrast with Inter, the team who were supposed to supplant Napoli as this season’s “anti-Juve”. After a dismal defeat to Sassuolo on the opening weekend, the Nerazzurri looked much better in the opening 45 minutes of their game against Torino, switching to a 3-4-2-1 which prized the attacking intent of Kwadwo Asamoah and Sime Vrsaljko in the wing-back roles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carlo Ancelotti issues instructions to his Napoli players. Photograph: Alessandro Garofalo/EPA

Goals from Ivan Perisic and Stefan De Vrij appeared to pave the way for a comfortable victory. Instead, Inter invited Torino back into the match: Samir Handanovic going for a stroll and leaving an unguarded net for Andrea Belotti to score into. Soualiho Meité showed some nifty footwork on the equaliser, but Inter’s sloppiness was glaring.

By full-time, Torino looked the more likely winners, even if Lautaro Martínez did almost tee Mauro Icardi up at the other end. Only Luciano Spalletti will know why he left it until the 90th minute to introduce his new signing from the bench.

“If we play like this then we won’t be the anti-anybody,” lamented the manager at full-time, though the headline writers at Gazzetta dello Sport disagreed. The pink paper’s front page observed that “Inter are the Anti-Inter”.

Sarri had it wrong about Serie A games being finished at 2-0. Fans of the Nerazzurri might reluctantly agree, however, that certain Italian football narratives seem to play out on repeat.

Talking points

• Davide Astori’s shirt still hangs in the home changing room at the Stadio Artemio Franchi, where Fiorentina opened their season with a 6-1 rout of Chievo. Not a bad start for the youngest squad in Serie A, for whom the 23-year-old Giovanni Simeone completed the rout as his father, Diego, watched from the stands.

• Genoa and Sampdoria were playing their first games following postponements in the wake of the Morandi bridge collapse. Genoa fans stayed silent for the first 43 minutes of their team’s win over Empoli – breaking only for brief applause of the two goals – as a means to commemorate the 43 lives lost.

• On a weekend with several very well-taken goals, Mirco Antenucci’s volleyed winner for Spal against Parma still stood out as an absolute gem.

• What’s that? You read all this way and can’t believe there’s still not yet a word about Cristiano Ronaldo? That’s because I wrote about him, and Juventus’s win over Lazio, on Saturday.