Italian journalist Alessandro Barbano believes that Inter have given themselves a great lift in their Serie A campaign with their 1-0 win over Liverpool in the Champions League.
Writing in his column in today’s print edition of Rome-based newspaper Corriere dello Sport, Barbano emphasized how the Nerazzurri’s confidence will have only grown from the result even though it was not enough to avoid exiting the Champions League.
Serie A and the Champions League are separate competitions and so a victory in the latter can have no tangible effects on the finals results in the former.
However, the mental side of the game could prove to be important as the Nerazzurri head into the run-in of their Serie A campaign, and in this sense they can only feel more confident after handing Liverpool their first home defeat in over a year.
This weekend the Nerazzurri must face a tough Torino team, and things hardly get easier with Fiorentina next and then Juventus away after the international break, but they will go into this sequence of matches with renewed belief in their capabilities.
“It’s a useless victory for the Champions League,” Barbano writes, “but masive for the Scudetto. Inzaghi must have been so convinced of this that, after Lautaro’s goal and Sanchez’s red card, he gave up on throwing the team forward to go for it.”
“He instead made three like-for-like substitutions to keep the tactical balance and protect a result that has enormous symbolic value for the locker room,” Barbano goes on.
“He did well,” he writes of the coach, “confirming himself as the most rational of the Serie A coaches.”
