It’s great to beat the Smurfs in Italy. Then you go into the Champions League and ‘talk to God’

Just like my love for a well-poured lager, football knows no half-measures, as we all know, and the biggest mistake one can make when analysing a result is to draw general – or rather, overly general – conclusions. To illustrate, Bodø/Glimt’s victory over Borussia Dortmund does not prove that Norwegian football is superior to German football, nor does Paris Saint-Germain’s 4–2 win over Manchester City imply that Qatar is stronger than the United Arab Emirates. Each match stands on its own merits, though of course there are exceptions: the four defeats in four matches suffered by Italian sides in the Champions League reflect a mediocre standard of football that, at best, can only hope to win the award for the season’s most honourable defeat.

With the exception of Como – whose only Italian connection is the name of the stadium where they play – Napoli, Inter and Roma have conceded eleven goals between them and picked up zero points. Allegri’s project now seems more of a failure than a date on which you claim to be teetotal; Inter are proving that it’s one thing to act like bullies in Italy, playing against the ‘Smurfs’, and quite another to make an impact in Europe (the very same newspapers that were hailing them as invincible after the 3–0 win over the ‘Corazzata’ Parma are now churning out gossip columns about Tresoldi’s refined Italian and his Milanese loyalty – a man they’d barely even heard of until Tuesday afternoon, he is not exactly Pio Esposito, after all); Roma are edging dangerously close to that very ‘Romanista’ phase where “it would have taken just this much and it would have been a triumph, but instead we lost – even though we deserved to win” (another month or so and the ‘Palazzo’ conspiracy theory will kick off).

The ridiculous squabble between Mourinho and Gasperini over which of the two teams on the pitch was more lifeless is yet another communications victory for a manager who is, objectively speaking, past his best but who is still capable of conjuring up textbook polemical and emotional smokescreens capable of confusing the media and opponents, who ultimately cannot explain how it is possible that Real Madrid won 4–3. It was thanks to God, who spoke to him whilst he was on the bench, said Endrick – “yet we spoke to God too throughout the whole match”, thought the Roma fans, who had never been more like Musetti than in the 95th minute on Wednesday evening.

The only hope for Italian teams in the Champions League might be to emulate what occurred in the Chinese league, where a few days ago two goals were scored simultaneously, in the same net but with two different balls: having reviewed the footage online, I must confess that, given the agility and superb technique of the players on the pitch, I am not entirely certain whether it was actually the Chinese league or the Robot World Cup. Thankfully, Aston Villa thrashed Fenerahce 6–0, although one should not get too carried away about the six goals Liverpool scored against LASK – not so much because they conceded three themselves, but because there is a limit even to how much one can praise such hopeless opponents. Arsenal are cruising along without a hitch, whilst Manchester United are doing everything they can to cement their status as the ugliest, most useless and heartless team of the year. They’ll get there.