Napoli Wounded but Still in Serie A Race

It’s the hope, they say, that kills you. Napoli would never have imagined at the start of last weekend that they would enter the final match of this round of Serie A fixtures, at home to AC Milan, with the opportunity to retake leadership of the table just a week after losing it.

Sinisa Mihajlovic’s men are far from pushovers these days, with the point gleaned in Monday night’s 1-1 draw at San Paolo having extended their current unbeaten run to 10 in all competitions—a sequence during which they humbled Inter in the derby and also beat third-placed Fiorentina.

They defended with both soul and sense against a hungry Napoli—spurred on by a noisy San Paolo—and didn’t steal their point, even if they spent much of the game under pressure (and even if Napoli midfielder Jorginho claimed his team “massacred” the visitors in a post-game interview with Sky Sport Italia, via Football Italia).

Yet Maurizio Sarri and his players would not have been human if they had woken up on Tuesday morning without nursing at least a pang of disappointment. After Roberto Donadoni’s Bologna broke champions Juventus’ extraordinary 15-match winning run by holding them to a goalless draw on Friday night, this was a golden chance for Napoli to leapfrog the Bianconeri at the top of the table nine days after Simone Zaza’s deflected late strike took the top spot from them in heartbreaking fashion.

As obdurate as Milan were, Napoli had the chances to take the win that would have done just that. Substitute Dries Mertens hit the post and fellow replacement Omar El Kaddouri poked a close-range effort straight at Gianluigi Donnarumma in stoppage time. It was close, but that’s not enough in the context of a stellar season.

Standards have risen exponentially under Sarri. The Partenopei were gripping but chaotic viewing last year, rattling in 70 goals in their 38 Serie A matches (only Juve and Lazio scored more) but shipping an alarming 54. It felt as if everything was coming apart at the seams under Rafa Benitez from the moment in August 2014 that Athletic Bilbao ousted them in the UEFA Champions League play-offs.

It was a huge black cloud that loomed over Napoli’s season, with an unhappy season for a largely unsettled squad culminating in a poor fifth-placed finish. When Benitez upped sticks to return to Real Madrid, where he had undertaken his football education, he was not widely mourned.

The extraordinary element looking back is that Sarri was very much the budget option when it came to succession. A then-56-year-old coming off a first-ever top-flight campaign with modest Empoli (albeit a successful one), he was far from the biggest name mentioned in connection with the job. Employing Luciano Spalletti or Cesare Prandelli would have burned a far more significant hole in president Aurelio De Laurentiis' pocket.

Massimo Pinca/Associated Press

A table of the annual earnings of Serie A coaches published by Corriere dello Sport (h/t Forza Italian Football) in November didn’t even have Sarri in the top half, earning a reported €700,000 per year; less than a quarter of Roberto Mancini’s salary at Inter, but also less than Sassuolo’s Eusebio Di Francesco, Giuseppe Iachini at Palermo and Torino boss Giampiero Ventura.

It’s an even more jarring statistic when one takes the coaches’ pay table back 12 months from there, when La Gazzetta dello Sport (via Football Italia) reported that Sarri’s predecessor Benitez was taking home an annual whack of €3.5 million. At the time, Sarri was the lowest-earning coach in the division, on €300,000 at Empoli, so he’s in a preferable position now, one can argue.

His star will surely continue to rise. De Laurentiis is keen to extend Sarri's present deal in the near future, and as reported here by Calciomercato.com, it seems that Sarri is hardly asking for parity with previous incumbents Benitez and Walter Mazzarri. Instead, he reportedly wants a longer contract, together with a relatively modest pay bump, in order to give him an opportunity to build solid foundations for the future.

Regardless of the here and now, appointing Sarri appeared at the time as a step back from De Laurentiis’ boldest moments, a reining-in of resources and expectations after missing the Champions League. Sarri would certainly not demand more player recruitment as had been the case with Benitez.

There have been subtle changes to the squad, and the handful of signings have largely been significant ones. Allan has been a tiger in midfield since joining from Udinese. Jose Reina, fetched back from Bayern Munich, has been a calming influence between the sticks, while Elseid Hysaj, arriving with Sarri from Empoli, has been a smash hit at right-back.

The real confirmation of the new coach’s work, however, has been that his midfield muse from the Stadio Carlo Castellani, Mirko Valdifiori, has hardly had a sniff in his new surrounds. Jorginho, who had struggled to recapture his Verona form since arriving in 2014, has looked far more comfortable in Sarri's 4-3-3. The Napoli manager's best trick has been how much more he has managed to extract from the existing talent at the club than the previous coaching team did, imposing similarly expressive principles as the ones that reigned at Empoli (and that few thought would fly at a bigger club).

Jorginho’s not the only one. Marek Hamsik has become important again, flourishing on the left of the midfield three, having got lost under Benitez in a de facto No. 10 role that he was ill-suited to.

Local boy Lorenzo Insigne, the scorer against Milan, has unlocked his full potential, enjoying a career-best season at 24 years old as the team’s leading assist-provider and second-top scorer.

Most importantly of all, Gonzalo Higuain has the bit between his teeth again. He was in a constant sulk last season, raging with frustration against the world and his team’s shortcomings. In this campaign, he has channelled that anger and energy and has already cruised past his goal total of last season—he hit 18 in Serie A in 14-15, and has 24 to date this term.

These past 10 days might have brought back some old frustrations, with the defeats at Juve and Villarreal (in the UEFA Europa League) leading into the missed opportunity against Milan. Yet after a pretty deflating week, Napoli are still fighting, just a point from Serie A’s summit and with every chance of overturning a single-goal deficit against the Spanish high-fliers.

The San Paolo faithful would have barely believed their present perch to be possible at the start of the campaign. Sarri’s work to date gives them, and their team, every right to believe in magic going into the season’s final strait.