Internazionale Main Thread III

[Lombardiamia]

I'm with Briz all the way!!

[red]

[red]

If you want to look at the ref helping Juve, you'd be better highlighting something like Hamsik having to re-take his penalty last night.

While it was a technically correct decision from the ref to punish Napoli's encroachment, it's one of these decisions that the ref has to really want to make.

The vast majority of the time encroachment is ignored.

[Brigate Rossonere]

[juventino_italiano]

[zafferano]

[Lombardiamia]

[Messinterista]

Inter's Marco Branca admits interest in Chile star Eduardo Vargas

The director of the Serie A giants admitted that the South American international is an appealing target but was adamant his side have not yet launched any bid for the striker

Inter technical director Marco Branca says his side are keeping a close eye on Universidad de Chile forward Eduardo Vargas.

The 22-year-old is one of the most in-demand players in South America at the moment, with Premiershit duo Arsenal and Liverfekkin'wankscum, as well as Serie A rivals AC Milan, all vying for the striker.

With Diego Milito and Diego Forlan struggling for form this season, Inter have been tipped to bring in one more forward when the transfer market reopens in January.

"We know Eduardo very well, he is a very brave attacker and definitely interesting," Branca said to FcInterNews.it.

"Right now, we are working in the market, but I cannot say the names of the players we have on our agenda."

The Inter director denied, however, claims from Vargas' agent that the San Siro outfit had already lodged a bid for the Chilean.

"I can assure we have not yet formalised any offer to sign him," Branca noted.

Source: www.goal.com/en-gb/news/3276/serie-a/20 ... ar-eduardo

[juventino_italiano]

[RomaShield27]

http://msn.foxsports.com/foxsoccer/seri ... nos-120211

[Messinterista]

You know it's not your night when Zanetti of all people gets a red and Pazzini misses a penalty, what a miss...Highlight of the match was Cesar's penalty save. Other than that, another bad league result.

[Bagg10]

aaaaahhhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....

[Messinterista]

Ranieri: 'Risk didn't pay off'

Claudio Ranieri admits his tinkering proved fatal for Inter. “I took a risk to win the game, but instead Udinese took control.”

The Nerazzurri fell to a surprise 1-0 home defeat on a Mauricio Isla counter-attack, but also saw Antonio Di Natale and Giampaolo Pazzini miss penalties in the final minutes.

“Obviously we wanted another result. We pushed and tried to put Udinese under pressure, but they are so good at letting you tire yourself out and hitting you on the counter. Compliments to Udinese, we have to roll our sleeves up and work harder,” said the Coach.

Inter have now gone six consecutive San Siro games without any of their strikers on target.

“A striker lives for a goal and not getting it does slowly become a weight, but these are moments that every forward goes through. We’ve got to let them stay calm and clear-headed. They fought hard and the ball didn’t want to go in.

“I told Pazzini some people lost the Champions League with a slip like that, so it’s nothing to be too desperate about. I’m sure he won’t sleep for two or three nights, but he will get over it.

“I put two hard-pushing wide men to ensure they got better service in Wesley Sneijder’s absence, which is why I put Mauro Zarate on when Davide Faraoni got cramp. I was trying to win the game and took a risk with a diamond midfield, but instead Udinese took control. While we played with the 4-4-2, Udinese were kept fairly quiet.”

Ranieri had stated Inter could win the Scudetto this season, but concedes that’s a dream too far now.

“It’s certainly not the luckiest campaign in Inter’s history! We won’t get sucked into self-pity, though. It could’ve been the turning point of our campaign to give us the confidence we needed, but instead we have to work even harder.

“Now we just have to keep quiet, work and let the other teams have their season while we have ours. If we drift away from the Scudetto race, then there are other very prestigious ones still up for grabs. I think positive.”

Source: http://www.football-italia.net/node/13463

[RomaShield27]

Posted by Paolo Bandini under Serie A on Dec 06, 2011
http://blogs.thescore.com/footyblog/201 ... on-so-far/

Just when Inter fans thought their team might have turned a corner, they span out and hit another wall. Defeat at home to Udinese on Saturday ended a run of three wins and a draw in all competitions, which – allied to key contributions from young players such as Coutinho, Ricky Alvarez and Luc Castaignos – had prompted talk of a revival. Instead Claudio Ranieri finds himself surveying the club’s worst start to a domestic season since 1946.

Only twice in Inter’s history have they endured worse results through the opening 12 games of a campaign. Adjusting to three points for a win, Inter would have had nine points at the corresponding point in 1946-47; in 1930-31, they would have had 13. The reassuring news is that in neither of those seasons were they relegated: finishing 10th in the former and fifth in the latter. The bad news is that they need to finish in the top three if they are to play in next season’s Champions League.

It does not require great insight to know that is the minimum expectation of Massimo Moratti. The Inter owner has spoken repeatedly of the need to meet Uefa’s Financial Fair Play requirements as he has cut back on transfer spending in the last few years, but failing to reach the Champions League would leave a €30m plus hole in Inter’s finances. That would be a significant problem for a team who announced an €86.8m loss on their 2010-11 accounts, and whose total wage bill stands at over €200m per season.

But to move forward it is necessary to first understand what has gone wrong at Inter. How, after all, does a team go from winning the treble to producing its worst results in six and a half decades?

The managers
“I got the substitutions wrong, I take responsibility,” insisted Claudio Ranieri after the defeat to Udinese but while he has made more than one questionable tactical decision since his appointment in September, he could hardly be blamed for the club’s overall predicament. Although results under Ranierihave not been spectacular, he was at least able to secure passage to the knock-out stages of the Champions League with minimum fuss, while four wins and a draw from nine league games still represents an improvement on the start made under Gian Piero Gasperini.

The latter, indeed, had the unfortunate distinction of becoming the first manager in the club’s history to leave without winning a single game. Ridiculed over his preference for a three-man defence, Gasperini’s greatest failing was in fact not excessive tactical rigidity but rather the opposite. During just five games in charge the manager utilised at least four identifiable formations – creating such confusion that at one point Esteban Cambiasso was seen arguing with Andrea Ranocchiaduring a defeat to Novara over which system they were supposed to be playing in.

But given the brevity of his tenure it would be wrong, too, to assign excessive blame to Gasperini. Of the four managers employed by Inter in the last 18 months, only Leonardo has achieved the sorts of results expected at Inter – winning 20 and drawing four of his 31 games across all competitions – and even he was criticised for a heavy Milan derby defeat and meek Champions League exit against Schalke. Rafa Benítez won the Club World Cup, but when he left the club in December Inter were closer (in terms of points, at least) to the relegation zone than league leaders Milan.

Perhaps, in truth,the greatest failing of all four managers has been a shared one: not being José Mourinho. “I was prepared to kill and die for him,” said Wesley Sneijder at one point and Ibrahimovichas expressed the same sentiment in his autobiography, even if the Swede would not hang around for the Portuguese’s second season. None of the appointments since have commanded such loyalty from the dressing room.

The players
On paper it might appear that Inter’s playing staff should not be in too bad a shape: they have retained nine of the 11 startersfrom their Champions League final win over Bayern Munich two seasons ago and have supplemented that group with a mix of younger players – including Coutinho, Alvarez, Castaignos and Ranocchia – plus proven stars such as Diego Forlán and Giampaolo Pazzini. And yet, the true picture is a little more nuanced.

The team that beat Bayern included five players over 30 and three more who would reach that landmark within a year (and that’s ignoring Marco Materazzi, who came on as a substitute). Furthermore, Inter’s second youngest starter that day – Goran Pandev, then 26 – was among the two players who have since been sold on. When the Professional Football Players’ Observatory published their demographic study of football 18 months later, they found Inter to have the oldest squad of any top-flight team in Europe, with an average age of 29.6.

Although attempts have since been made to bring in younger players, the focus has been on developmental prospects rather than ones who can be inserted straight into the starting line-up. For all that Ranieri has attempted to give them a chance, the team he fielded in the most important game of his tenure – against Lille earlier this month – was the oldest in Champions League history. While the formula worked that day, players such as Lúcio, Walter Samuel and even Javier Zanetti are no longer playing at their former levels.

Age, though, is not the only issue. Eyebrows were raised over Rafael Benítez’s training methods as Inter suffered a spate of injuries during his time in charge, yet the club has continued to lose players at an unnerving rate since his departure.

Two of the team’s most influential players—Maicon and Wesley Sneijder—have been absent more often than not this season, as has Thiago Motta. Forlán, the team’s most high-profile summer addition, has been out since October with a hamstring complaint while Andrea Poli – a midfielder of great promise, signed from Sampdoria in the summer – arrived injured but has since suffered two relapses just when he looked ready for a first appearance.

On top of all that, questions persist as to whether the squad is simply not as good as presumed. Inter believed that between Forlán, Giampaolo Pazzini, Diego Milito and Mauro Zárate they had sufficient firepower to make up for the departure of Samuel Eto’o, but their struggles in front of goal this season suggest otherwise. Pazzini has gone 70 days without scoring, while Zárate has found the net only once, in the Champions League. Three goals are enough to make Milito the team’s leading scorer.

Eto’o, by contrast, proved that he could succeed even in a struggling team last season, scoring 17 goals in all competitions before Benítez’s departure. It is not hard to imagine that his presence alone would render Inter a considerably more effective outfit.

The owner
In the end, however, all of Inter’s problems can be traced back to the same source. As the club’s president, Moratti must take ultimate responsibility for the decisions at board level which have contributed to the present mess. There have been plenty. If we are to accept, for starters, that the club’s managers have played a role in the downturn then an even greater focus should fall on the men who have been responsible for such turnover at the position.

Too often the thought processes behind appointments have been hard to discern.Benítezmay have been a strong candidate in theory, yet in practice his fraught relationship with Mourinho should surely have given some pause for thought. The club could hardly plead ignorance, subsequently removing pictures of the Portuguese from their training base so as to avoid causing offence to the new appointment. More curious still was the hiring of Gasperini, who arrivedafter Inter were rejected by Fabio Capello, André Villas-Boas and Marcelo Bielsa – a group with no common thread whatsoever in terms of coaching style or tactics.

When they did stumble across the right man, Leonardo – whose points-per-game return was not so far behind Mourinho’s – Inter promptly let him go, but only after wasting half of the summer suggesting they would do no such thing. That gave them even less time to get the subsequent appointment right; inevitably, they didn’t.

But if Gasperini was probably never the right man for the job, Inter certainly did not make his life any easier by pursuing a transfer policy that totally ignored his preferred tactics. Gasperini admitted after the window had shut that he was expecting Sneijder to be sold – and was OK with that possibility, as the Dutchman did not fit neatly into his preferred 3-4-3 – but instead lost Eto’o, a player he had been building his team around.

In the striker’s stead arrived Forlán, a totally different kind of forward and not one who suited the manager’s systems, though that was not the biggest oversight that had been made. The directors responsible for the transfer had failed to spot that the forward had already played for Atlético Madrid in Europa League qualifiers against Stromsgodset and would hence be cup-tied for the Champions League group stages.

Benítez had experienced similar frustration a year earlier, when his suggestion that a treble-winning squad might still require some reinforcing was roundly ignored. Once he had departed, of course, the club did make moves, signing such players as Pazzini, Ranocchia and Yuto Nagatomo, but with Leonardo viewed as an interim appointment there was once again little sense that the players being signed conformed to any long-term vision for how the team would work.

Furthermore the strategy for meeting Financial Fair Play seemed to extend little further than targeting players with lower price tags. As the wage bill continued to grow, the club’s commercial income did not – continuing to trail behind the sums raised by both Juventus and Milan by a considerable distance. With TV income also set to drop following the signing of Serie A’s collective agreement, the only significant step to redress the balance has been the sale of Eto’o.

And so it is that Inter find themselves, less than two years on from their greatest ever triumph, not only pitching towards the bottom of the table but also with mounting financial concern. “Criticising Inter today is a bit like shooting at the Red Cross, or rather just a corpse,” writes Tiziana Cairati in today’s edition of La Repubblica. It may take more than another ill-conceived splurge in the transfer window to resurrect them.

[Messinterista]

Zanetti: 'Now for the draw'

Javier Zanetti admits he was “surprised” at the two Manchester clubs going out. “Now we hope for a good draw.”

Inter qualified top of their group to reach the Champions League last 16 regardless of tonight’s 2-1 home defeat to CSKA Moscow.

“CSKA believed to the end and they deserve credit as well as their qualification. The important thing for us was to finish top of the group, so now we hope for a good draw,” said the captain.

“I was a little surprised at seeing some important teams left out of the draw for the knockouts, but that doesn’t make the competition any easier. The teams that are left will give their all.”

Both Manchester United and Manchester City crashed out, while Italy are the only country with three sides left in the Champions League.

Inter could’ve won tonight’s game, but Diego Milito nodded a wonderful Zanetti cross on to the woodwork from point-blank range.

“It’s a shame for Diego, but these moments happen to a striker and even the easiest goals won’t go in. We must give him time and keep the faith, because he’s still very important for the team.”

In the draw for the knockouts, Inter are in Pot 1 along with other group winners Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Benfica, Real Madrid, Chelsea, Arsenal and Apoel Nicosia.

In Pot 2 are Milan, Napoli, Zenit, Marseille, Bayer Leverkusen, Olympique Lyonnais, CSKA Moscow and FC Basel.

Source: http://www.football-italia.net/node/13594
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I am not surprise about the loss today. We were already through and it was time to rest some of our key players. Whoever we get in the next round will make for a tough battle.

[Bagg10]

I'd much rather have briz explain it, edzo.

[Totally FRANK]

Looks like some FFP data...Some translation would be appreciated

http://www.fcinter1908.it/?action=read&idnotizia=40178

[Lombardiamia]

[Messinterista]

[Messinterista]

Sneijder 'needs extra' treatment

Wesley Sneijder was expected to be back against Fiorentina tomorrow, but Inter confirmed tests showed he “needs an additional period” of treatment.

The Dutchman is not in the squad to face the Viola on Saturday evening, although he had been in full training sessions for the last few days.

“Sneijder is still not ready for a full return to the team,” read a statement on the club website.

“This is what was revealed by this morning's training session and the medical tests to which the midfielder was subjected this afternoon on the part of the Inter medical staff.

“For the complete recovery of the injury to the rectus femoris muscle of his right leg, which he sustained on November 11 at the end of the warm-up before Inter v Cagliari, Sneijder still needs an additional period of specific exercises.”

It is not clear how much longer Sneijder will be sidelined for.

Source: http://www.football-italia.net/node/13646