This season only one goal for the Nerazzurri midfielder who has turned from a determining factor into a negative. Even against Bodo he betrayed
It was supposed to be a night made of the same stuff dreams are made of, but it was the exact, disturbing opposite: a nightmare colored yellow. Other Vikings hijacked the San Siro ship and waved the Norwegian flag: where have we seen this before? Among the stormy waves, the Nerazzurri went to the bottom, all very far from their best days and incapable of really harming this very orderly Bodo Glimt: there is nothing casual in their passage to the next round. Some have sunk more than others, prey to their own demons, even those you would never have imagined: that careless and kamikaze play by Manuel Akanji is a stain on one of the most positive players of the season, the Swiss player who came to bring wisdom to the Nerazzurri defence. It’s true that two goals would still have been needed to regain the right navigation, but the former City’s mistake was an electric saw on the match: cruel, ruthless like the bad luck that struck when Akanji himself hit the post in the subsequent disorganized attempt to come back. A few meters away, between midfield and attack, there are those who have not only stumbled on a play, but have been completely swallowed up by the match itself, the most important of the year for those who rode to the final a season ago: Nicolò Barella and Marcus Thuram contributed to eliminating Bayern and Barcelona a few months ago and instead now they are leaving the European nobility. They were supposed to be guides, they became ghosts.
how many disasters
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Lautaro watched disconsolately from the stands and the bad thing is that he will remain there for weeks to come: the armband he owned was wrapped around the arm of the deputy, frenetic and nervous to the point of hysteria like all of Inter. After a week of injury, Barella returned directly to Bodo, skating in the cold like his teammates, then had time to rest in Salento taking advantage of a providential disqualification. Finally at San Siro with the rank of captain he messed up from start to finish, both when the 70,000 at the Meazza were full of hope and when everyone had already understood that the inexorable would come. “I don’t think Bodo put us in great difficulty. We conceded a goal following an individual error, it can happen. It happened to Manuel, other times it happened to me. We had to break the deadlock and we didn’t succeed, congratulations to them”, said Barella.
involution
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Then he referred to the gift received here from Liverpool which complicated the journey and also admitted the season’s priorities: “This is football… You don’t finish in the top 8 because of a penalty in the 90th minute and you have to play two more games and the trip to Bodo. The objective is the scudetto from the beginning of the year, not just now that we are at +10”. This sad night from Barella comes, however, at the top of a season not comparable to the best ones, with only one goal recorded in the almanacs. Here it is, Nicolò’s great involution. Testified by cold numbers. He arrived at Inter in the summer of 2019 and once he took the measure with the Nerazzurri shirt it took him little to become a protagonist: 3 goals and 13 assists in all competitions the following year, 4 and always 13 in the following one, 9 goals and 10 winning passes in the golden year of the second star. And then what happened? More running, yes, but less incisiveness, fewer scratches, fewer goals and fewer assists. Last year he finished with just 3 goals in a season swamped by an infinite number of matches, this year only one. So here is Chivu’s new mission, after the one completed with Dimarco: to stop Barella’s descent and push him to return upwards.
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