“I didn’t like the two-stroke approach.” So Simone Inzaghi commented on the derby defeat of his team Inter. Which actually, last night against Milan, started badly and ended even worse. Apart from a brief phase of the game, in the second part of the first half – after Dimarco’s goal, to be clear – the Nerazzurri were almost always inferior to the Rossoneri, in almost all the fundamentals of the game, apart from ball possession which however did not lead far.
Not just the approach. There is a moment, however, from which the light went out at Inter. And it is difficult not to identify it with the exit from the pitch of Hakan Calhanoglu. Turkish, as well as the rest Henrikh Mkhitaryandid not play his best derby. From the 63rd minute onwards, however, the feeling is that Inter lacked almost everything.
Some data. The first is related to the Nerazzurri’s production. Calhanoglu and Mkhitaryan, between them, played 78 balls over the course of an hour. The substitute made the data collapse, especially due to Davide Frattesi’s “fault”: just 7 touches of the ball, with 5 attempted passes. Among the various results, there is that Inter was unable to propose themselves in the opponent’s half: of the thirteen total shots by Inzaghi’s team, ten arrived before the 63rd minute and two in the desperate final push – only sketched out – that followed Gabbia’s goal. In concrete terms, with the match tied, in that phase of the game Inter only appeared in Maignan’s area once, with Lautaro.
Even clearer is the dynamic of xGoal, which does not always tell the truth but tells a lot about the progress of a match. Inter closed at 0.73 and Milan at 1.70. From the 63rd minute onwards, however, the Nerazzurri recorded only 0.18 xG. While the Rossoneri grew exponentially: compared to 0.3 xG in the first sixty minutes, from that moment on Fonseca’s team recorded 1.4. What does this mean? That they tried to win, unlike Inter, and in the end they did it.