Italian journalist Fabrizio Biasin believes that Inter lacked a player who could open up the match by beating a defender one-on-one in their goalless Serie A draw with Sampdoria yesterday evening.
Writing in his column for Sportitalia.com, the journalist suggested that the Nerazurri lack any player who has real quality on the dribble, and that matches like yesterday evening’s are a struggle for them to really break down.
Inter had no lack of possession against Sampdoria, with around two thirds of the ball, but the sense particularly in the second half was that they were passing it around the Blucerchiati rather than through.
The Ligurian team were organized into a compact defensive shape, and so it was rarely the case that an Inter player would have found himself free from any defensive attention.
Accordingly, the capacity to use dribbling to take a defender out of the equation and create a real dangerous situation would have been useful indeed, but no Inter player seemed to have the capacity to do this on the night.
“A month ago, the Nerazzurri were last in the Serie A statistics for dribbling,” Biasin notes, “I don’t think the numbers have changed much.”
“When coming up against a team who put up a defensive wall, then, you need a player who can get past his man, otherwise you have to hope that every pass comes off perfectly.”
“Inter aren’t perfect and, at the moment, they don’t have that player capable of creating numerical superiority on the dribble,” he adds.
