Former Inter defender Fabio Galante feels that while Nerazzurri coach Simone Inzaghi made a mistake in going to his bench just thirty minutes into their Serie A loss to Udinese on Sunday, it’s an error that the coach will learn from.
Speaking to Turin-based newspaper Tuttosport, in an interview published in today’s print edition, Galante weighed in on the moment when Inzaghi decided to remove defender Alessandro Bastoni and Henrikh Mkhitaryan midway through a first half in which both players had been booked.
Inzaghi’s decision to take off both Bastoni and Mkhitaryan with barely half an hour played as become a kind of symbol for the disarray that the team as a whole were in during their loss to Udinese, and truthfully through much of the start to the season.
The coach didn’t hesitate to make a bold decision, but it was hardly an effective one and it seemed to show a fundamental lack of trust and faith in his own team.
Galante said that “As a footballer I would have been angry, because I would have thought, ‘Why don’t you take me off at half-time?’ Inzaghi, however, will learn from the incident, especially considering you can end up with two bookings in the first half all the time.”
“His choice was perhaps risky and hasty, but in hindsight Simone will have understood that too,” he suggested. “And let’s be honest, if Inter had won there would be no talk of those substitutions.”
“Coaches are the first to be questioned,” he noted, “as soon as they fail to win two matches. Already in the past year Inzaghi has suffered some criticism.”
“A club cannot change 25 players so, if they want to give a shock to the system, they might tend to change the coach, and that applies to anyone who does the job,” Galante added.
