Given Inter Milan’s latest crisis and the fact that Southampton are a very good team, the Premier League club winning on Thursday wasn’t really a huge shock.
Still, Inter Milan are big business in Italy and the match has received a great deal of coverage, with Inter’s crisis being deepened, and the Italian media learning about the strength in depth in English football.
The famous old Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper had their first five pages dedicated to the match, including the front page.
Inside was a double page spread with the words right across the middle reading ‘Troppi peccati contro i Santi’, which translated to English means ‘Too many sins against the Saints’.
Gazzetta dello Sport concede that Southampton were the better team on the night, but only just.
Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic received the best Inter Milan rating, of 7 out of 10, largely due to yet another penalty save, but he couldn’t match Southampton’s Virgil Van Dijk, who got 7.5.
If these marks seems a little low, it’s just that the Italian media are far harsher, players regularly get in Gazzetta dello Sport’s European Team of the Week just by achieving a 7.
On Van Dijk the Italian newspaper said he was a ‘lesson to icardi on how a captain should behave’.
Corriere dello Sport newspaper have Southampton’s victory on their front page with the headline ‘Inter da rifare’, which means the club need to be redone, to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.
Despite that, Handanovic comes in for praise again, with Corriere dello Sport making the Inter goalkeeper their man of the match.
It’s explained that the defeat to Southampton showed just how much Inter need to sort a new manager out, bring him in, and actually let him get on with his job.
In theory that sounds great, in practice it’s usually very different indeed. Maybe they can take a lesson from Southampton.
