Napoli, Conte's choice and De Laurentiis' dire prophecy: with Lazio it's a flop

Naples, 9 December 2024 - On the sidelines of the defeat suffered in Coppa Italia Thursday evening, Antonio Conte he had handled it more diplomatically, talking about carefully considered choices made to take the pulse of the overall quality of the squad, to please everyone, giving minutes and avoiding splitting the group and, above all, to manage the forces of the so-called first-choice players in view of a still long season: all this while rejecting the accusations of having lost on purpose to free themselves from a competition often experienced more as a nuisance than as an additional opportunity to enrich the club's trophy cabinet. After all, the same Tale just a few hours before the match, in the pre-match press conference, he had complained for the umpteenth time about his Napoli the absence of extra tournaments the Serie A, in his opinion good for raising the team's competitiveness level and training even better. The day after the hat-trick scored at theOlympic which had cost the Azzurri the fourth elimination in a row in the round of 16, with a cool head, and therefore without the alibi of hot comments, Aurelio De Laurentiis he had spoken bluntly of a 'training' to be experienced as such, and therefore not as the loss of the only objective of the season apart from the championship, also supporting the decision of his coach to field all the second lines possible to spare the big names: with the promise that on Sunday, in the second close head-to-head between the two rivals, things would go differently.  

Napoli-A vs Napoli-B

In fact, the owner, one who among other things during his twenty-year management has not spared himself in terms of celebrations when the Coppa Italia was brought home, it was not far from reality: the result, in favor of the Lazio, has passed since 3-1 a 1-0. The roster fielded by Tale: from the second (and third) lines to the starters. This is probably the step that very few have realised: between the Naples-B, that of Thursday evening, and the Naples-A deployed in the Sunday's late game, the differences in performance were small. Indeed. Just think of the questionable management of the changes that practically led most of the crowd to call for moves from the bench that instead would have arrived only in the 76th minute: even later, again according to the majority of those present at Fuorigrotta, the replacement between Romelu Lukaku, once again among the worst, and Giovanni Simeone, who only came on in the 92nd minute, despite the statistics that often show him to be lethal against the Lazio. In fact, the cholito had also found the back of the net on Thursday, in what had been defined as a 'training session'. In the 'real match', in reality, the big players would have produced very little more: to be precise, a few shots from medium-long distance and an outside post chipped by Amir Rrahmani on a corner kick. On the other side, the upright had saved Alex Meret on the sensational bolide of Fisayo Dele Bashiru: the same Friulian goalkeeper, during the first half, had been superlative on the curling shot of Gustav Isaksen, for a duel that would be repeated in the second half but with a very different outcome. The result is soon said: the Napoli, both in the less elegant guise deployed in Coppa Italia whether wearing the luxury one of the championship, loses against the Lazio, who respectively took the quarter-finals and a prestigious success that risks reshuffling the cards at the top of the rankings well beyond what the cold numbers say, which in turn are marred by the many asterisks that will likely remain standing until late February.

Losing helps you lose

Precisely for this reason, and also for a calendar that sees the first half of the season with several matches still scheduled, the situation is still very partial and would have been so even in the case of a victory for Napoli. And yet, beyond what a ranking that now sees in theAtalanta the new leader, the lesson taught by Lazio to the Azzurri is clear and double. The first: the Coppa Italia must be honored in tactical choices, in performance on the field and also on the dialectical level. The second: if winning helps to win, losing helps to lose, as has already emerged in similar precedents from the parts of Fuorigrotta when the shelving of the national competition had not brought with it benefits, only in the immediate or even long term, in the championship. Of course, the taboo of the round of 16 is long-standing and also rather varied in its composition, with four consecutive re-proposals to which the Napoli he showed up with different seasonal ambitions. Speaking only of the last two precedents, in the year of the championship the Azzurri went out against Cremonese then relegated at the end of the year just as at the end of last season the same fate would have befallen Frosinone, corsair 4-0 al Maradona: two peaks of two Napoli very different, united by the unfortunate fate that befell them Coppa Italia, incredibly snubbed even by Tale, whose surrender took on even more apocalyptic overtones after the words of De Laurentiis. Words that, who knows, in the distance perhaps will have loaded the Lazio e Marco Baroni, the 'normal one' who has twice put in check the much more mediatic opponent of the moment. Beyond any possible conspiracy theories, almost like a punishment inflicted by the gods of football, in the space of 72 hours the blues lose the Coppa Italia and the top of the ranking. And the same Tale, perhaps for the first time since his arrival on the bench of the Napoli, sees his credibility undermined by questionable choices on and off the pitch. Then there is De Laurentiis, never like this year has he been so far from the main spotlight: the owner returns to take centre stage to label the match as a 'training session' Coppa Italia of his Napoli, albeit in version B, fearing the certainty that in the championship things would have gone differently. Posterity and the field will have to decide.

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