Let's hope you are right, but nothing I've seen from his Inter side this year suggests we step up, rather than down, when the going gets tough
I'll say this much - we've heard so much chatter about them taking the Champions League "seriously", right? That this is in no small part an explanation for their defensive record so far with 1 GA in eight games (though, if xG is an indication, they've had a healthy dose of luck too). They're more "dialed in" for those games. I feel like focus has to play a huge explanation for how they hold Arsenal and Man City scoreless across 180 minutes and nearly hold Leverkusen scoreless in their park too (with half the squad rotated) but then we see them cough up two goals to Juventus in the final 20 minutes and three goals to Milan in the final 30 minutes in domestic play here.
I dunno, this is purely my own conjecture, but it feels like a combination of factors at play here. I'll try to write this in an organized way but no promises.
1. We had such a dominant league campaign last year, yet our CL run was comparatively disappointing. It's not that we disgraced ourselves - we had the most evenly-balanced tie in the R16, and a 2-2 aggregate decided on penalties only confirms that it was evenly-balanced - but a 90+ point league campaign paired with an immediate KO round exit in the CL is disappointing all the same.
2. This disappointing CL run came on the heels of nearly winning the competition in 2023. Even if we largely got to the final thanks to a fortunate path, we had no control over that, it was our job to win those games and we did. Going from the final to a R16 exit feels like a huge step back even if Atleti was a much better opponent than any of our three opponents in the KO stage the year before.
3. Winning the league by 18 points probably helped make us feel more invincible than we were. And you know what? Among the other four CL teams from last year's Serie A, we're + 1 on Atalanta, +8 on Juventus, +13 on Milan, and +14 on Bologna right now. Among all those teams, we're about as far ahead of them (pace-wise) this year as we finished a year ago, with the exception of Atalanta. It's been the team who finished about 40 points behind us last year, the team with no European commitments to speak of, who have thrown the spanner in the works. We can't help the fact that Napoli will finish the season with a much lighter schedule than we played, and we'd rather have had CL games (and the associated revenue that comes with it) than not. We have to deal with it, but it's still fair to acknowledge this has given Napoli something of an advantage over us in terms of Serie A, and not just that we have the extra games to play, but that Napoli also often have a rest advantage when they play other teams who finished in European spots as well and have less time to prepare/train for meetings than Napoli does.
I think we also know pretty well by now that when you have a game in hand but it's an away game in hand, that it's really not an advantage at all. In retrospect, it really doesn't shock me that our flattest game of the entire season was that game on Thursday. Fiorentina were in better form when we originally went there in December, but so were we. It would've been more to our benefit to have played the game then and there. Having to make an extra travel, lose yet another midweek...these guys are professionals, this isn't an excuse for poor performance, this is just my reasoning for how it happened.
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As I've written a few times by now, I have no problem at all saying Napoli are the favorites as things currently stand. Three point lead, the head-to-head is at their stadium (where we've only won twice in the last 20 years or so, and at a minimum we need to avoid defeat there as things currently stand), and the lighter/easier remaining schedule. I've written a few times that, if Napoli are in front by MD32, then it's probably done since I don't see Napoli dropping points from those games. But I also wrote 13 months ago that I felt Juventus had the inside track on us as well for the Scudetto, I wrote it on this forum, and then I turned out to be massively wrong. Juventus were also masters of grinding out those 1-0 wins, until they finally couldn't keep up that defensive rigidity anymore. Last week was Napoli's first game all season where they failed to win a game where they held a 2nd half lead. I've seen it happen before where, once this happens one time, it becomes liable to happen a second and third time not too long thereafter.
I don't think there's any guarantee we're going to find last year's groove, we might be too worn down, lacking enough focus, figured out too much tactically, any combination of factors. That we haven't really resembled the juggernaut of last year is troubling in its own right. But as I will say again, that we're still completely in the race despite that? It just suggests to me that there's a sleeping monster here, hopefully someone can wake them up in time.
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