Italian journalist Matteo Marani has commented on the pace and intensity of yesterday’s draw between Inter and Atalanta at the San Siro, which he compared to a Premier League match.
Writing in his column in today’s print edition of Turin-based newspaper Tuttosport, Marani described the match in terms of the intensity put forth by the two coach’s tactical ideas and suggested that it would be a template for the best that Serie A has to offer with some of its star players having left during the summer.
Inter lost two key players over the summer in the form of Romelu Lukaku and Achraf Hakimi, while the likes of Juventus’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Milan’s Gianluigi Donnarumma, and Udinese’s Rodrigo De Paul are also among the major players to have departed the Italian top flight.
Yesterday evening’s clash at the San Siro was nevertheless an entertaining, back-and-forth contest with no shortage of quality between the two sides, and Marani puts this down to the tactical cohesion to the teams given by their managers.
Marani described the encounter as like a “Premier League match that has come to Serie A in terms of rhythm, intensity, chances created, and the courage of the coaches.”
He believes that matches of this style represent the end of “the conservatism of the past, now reduced to representing a decisive minority of coaches, and which no longer has a hold with the vast majority of modern coaches.”
“When the ingredients are scarce you need ideas and imagination,” he writes of modern Serie A coaches. “With chefs ready to invent different recipes, the soups take on a great flavour. Yesterday’s clash in Milan reminded us that football – with its spectacle – is not yet a thing for accountants alone.”
