Three takeaways from Serie A Matchday 12

Let’s get this out of the way right from the beginning: Week 12 in Serie A went almost exactly how one would’ve expected. All of the big teams won, and, in fact, no team in the top half of the table lost.

The only game featuring two teams truly fighting for the top spots was Napoli against Lazio, and both shared a point after two quick-fire goals.

So what did we learn on a week where everything on paper went exactly as planned?

Quite a bit...

AC Milan are for real

Vincenzo Montella’s new side have finished 8th, 10th, and 7th the previous three seasons. So when they opened the season with a 1-0 loss at home to Udinese – perhaps the worst Udinese team of the past 10-15 years – it seemed like this would be yet another season where the Rossoneri would barely factor in a race for a Europa League spot, nevermind the Scudetto.

Yet, their 2-1 victory away at Palermo demonstrated just how different this season is; yes, they needed a late goal to win after conceding an equalizer to the league’s second worst offensive side, but Gianluca Lapadula opened his season tally to become the eighth player to score for the side and show that they can win matches without Carlos Bacca.

In fact, the Columbian has scored exactly zero of the side’s seven goals over the past five games, from which they’ve secured twelve points. They’re third in the table and just one point behind Roma, after doing Luciano Spalletti’s men a massive favor two weeks ago by beating Juventus and keeping the title race close.

For the first time in years, they look like they belong back towards the top.

Napoli are struggling on both sides of the pitch

In their last five matches, Napoli have won just two and drawn another. During that time, they’ve scored more than one goal just twice, and even then, it was only two goals – against Crotone and Empoli.

Without Arkadiusz Milik, it is safe to say, their offense is struggling. To put it into perspective, over the last five matches, Roma have notched 13 goals, Juventus have 10, while Napoli have a mere seven.

The interesting point is that Napoli have only conceded one more goal than Roma and just four more than Juventus, but the true issue is how their goals have dried up this season. The first four weeks of the season saw them score two, four, three, and three goals; in the eight weeks since then, they’ve only scored more than one goal twice and fired blanks twice as well.

Without their leading frontman and a goalkeeper situation that looks shaky, sixth-placed Napoli need to reconfigure quickly before the gap to first widens further than the current nine-point gap.

Serie A teams aren’t terribly quick out of the gate

Besides Andrea Belotti and Adem Ljajic, who scored a quickfire brace to set Torino well on their way to victory over Cagliari, no team scored in the opening ten minutes this weekend. The 16 second half goals this weekend proved to be particularly vital particularly for the bigger teams, completely changing the shape of Chievo–Juventus (a first-half draw into a visitor’s win), Inter-Crotone (first half draw into a home win), Fiorentina-Sampdoria (home win into draw).

Even more intriguingly, no team that scored first lost this weekend: three drew, and the other seven won.

So what does it all mean for Roma?

For Roma, then, interpreting all this means taking Montella’s side quite seriously (and keeping an eye on their league meeting in a few weeks’ time! Roma’s plethora of attacking options mean that they typically outscore opponents far more than Napoli have been doing – Edin Dzeko and Mohamed Salah are two of the league’s top five scorers, and demonstrate how the burden of scoring is spread throughout the squad.

And as long as Roma score early and often, they should continue right along with that particular league trend.