The spellbinding Serie A leaders are starting to believe in a first title since Diego Maradona but they must hold their nerveSerie A’s winter break arrived later than usual this season. The Italian top flight is set to resume on Sunday after a one-weekend pause, having played through Christmas and New Year. If it were up to the Napoli manager, Maurizio Sarri, they would not have stopped at all.“I would prefer to keep going,” he confessed after watching his team beat Verona at the start of this month. And, really, who could blame him? A point clear of Juventus in first place, the Partenopei had been crowned one week earlier as Italy’s campione d’inverno – winter champions – an unofficial...
Zinedine Zidane’s side have dropped more points than in the whole of last season and are 19 points behind Barcelona after Villarreal won at the Bernabéu – at their 19th attemptSergio Busquets probably felt like hiding behind his hands. “The ghosts appeared,” he said. It was a cold, dark night and everywhere he looked they were there. If he looked left, especially. Blue and white figures flew past. Over the other side, on the touchline, Ernesto Valverde pulled his jacket up tight and peered through the pouring rain. “You must have thought: ‘again’,” he was asked afterwards, when it was finally over – the match, the curse, probably the title, too. “Exactly,” he said. Everyone did. The day before, Barcelona’s...
Dortmund wanted to return from the winter break with a clean slate but Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s exclusion ruined thatA new year, a new Borussia Dortmund. That was the plan after a fractious, difficult and sometimes traumatic 2017, which took in the stress of parting company with two head coaches and – more seriously – the horror of the attack on the team bus in April before the Champions League quarter-final with Monaco. Following the exit of the influential head scout Sven Mislintat to Arsenal, still affected by being marginalised under former coach number one Thomas Tuchel, the failure of former coach number two, Peter Bosz, is still being unpicked by his replacement Peter Stöger.Looking at the team sheet for Sunday’s resumption...
After collecting a point from their opening 18 matches, have Benevento turned their luck around courtesy of the resurgence of a journeyman striker?Sampdoria were seeing witches on Saturday. So was everyone else in Italy, to be fair. This was the weekend when La Befana made her annual visit, dropping off gifts for good children and lumps of coal for the naughty. Whether this kindly old lady, riding a broomstick that she uses to sweep each house before she leaves, should technically be considered a witch is the subject of scholarly debate but she is widely depicted as one. It is not La Befana, though, who appears on Benevento’s crest. Their witch is a manifestation of the city’s pagan traditions, dating...
The Partenopei lead Juve by a point in Italy, where 10 of the last 11 Serie A winners were ‘winter champions’, but memories of that exception remainIt was fitting that Marek Hamsik should grab the winner on Friday night: a record-breaking player adding a final exclamation mark to his team’s record-breaking year. He had overtaken Diego Maradona as Napoli’s all-time leading scorer in Serie A with a strike against Sampdoria just before Christmas. Now he had sunk Crotone with a cool left-foot finish at the Stadio Ezio Scida.This was one of those nights when Napoli should have had a hatful, raining in 23 shots on Alex Cordaz’s goal. As it was, one would suffice to secure their 18th away win...