Against Fiorentina he won his seventh final out of 8 played in his career.
Simone Inzaghi wins his fourth cup in two years as Inter coach: the second consecutive Italian Cup, after the one won last year against Juventus, and after the two consecutive Italian Super Cups won in 2022 and 2023. The Inter coach has now entered a golden bubble in to whom he is honored everywhere as the “King of Cups”, a reputation strengthened by the unexpected qualification for the Champions League final on 10 June. Simone Inzaghi has never won the championship, but with this Coppa Italia he has won his seventh final out of 8 played in his professional career and this makes him the most successful coach in the last decade of Italian football after Massimiliano Allegri.
At the beginning of the season, in a difficult moment for Inter, Inzaghi had said that “Where I work, revenues increase, losses are halved and trophies arrive”, and it is difficult to blame him given the growth that Lazio has had under his management, his first coaching experience. A Lazio that between 2016 and 2019 won 3 trophies, in fact the second most successful team in Italy in the years of maximum domination by Max Allegri’s Juventus. In 2021 Inzaghi sat on the bench of the Inter champion of Italy, and since then the magic that surrounded Lazio in the Italian cups has moved to Inter, who have won all the Italian Cups and the Super Cups of these two years.
Yesterday after the match against Fiorentina Inzaghi was asked how he manages to win all the finals, and he replied by emphasizing how his players “remained calm, lucid” even after the disadvantage suffered after 2′. We often talk very lightly about a team’s ability to keep calm and not disunite in the negative moments of a game: it seems like one of those somewhat stereotyped topics that professionals bring up in post-game interviews, a topos which means everything and it means nothing. In yesterday’s final, however, the key to Inter’s victory was reallybeyond the clichés, the ability to maintain concentration and to continue to believe in his match plan despite the goal conceded almost immediately.
Inter played the game that Fiorentina feared: making the superior rank of their players count, winning thanks to their better ability to turn the game around with their talent. In this sense, Inter is a rather chameleonic team: a team of system it’s a of individuals at the same time. He can win a game thanks to the imposition of a clear and codified tactical context, in which no player emerges on the collective; and the one after turning it around thanks to an impromptu intuition from Barella or Lautaro. He also knows how to mix these two registers: to create the conditions, through the meticulous planning of the action, so that the somewhat chaotic creativity of his finishers can express itself to its maximum potential. Yesterday’s match was like this. After the disadvantage Inter kept calm and instead of abandoning himself to frenzy and improvisation he took back the inertia of the game with rationality, relying on the old certainties of his tactical system. To the fluid rotations of his positional structure, to the faith in building from below, to the desire to attract pressure from Fiorentina into his own area and then play behind them. Once she took over the reins of the game with the strength of her well-tested tactical strategy, she struck with individual flair. That of lautaro martinez especially, who’s having his best scoring season since he’s been in Italy; who scored his 100th and 101st goals with the Inter shirt with yesterday’s brace. At the end of the first half Inter had already overturned the result, and that was enough for them to administer the match in the second half.
Lautaro perhaps best embodies the dual nature of Inter: he knows how to dissolve his quality in the system and then suddenly rise above it with an unexpected flash. He can be associative and chaotic, disciplined and brilliant. Throughout the first half he participated in the complex stitching of Inter’s action with a very important connection work. Let’s take for example this action at 5′. Inter conceded the goal to make it 0-1 two minutes earlier, and have still never looked into the opposing area. On setting up from behind, Fiorentina put up a man-on-man pressing, which Handanovic and the defenders encouraged by exchanging the ball in the area and inviting the Fiorentina players into the small area. In the meantime, the notorious rotations of the Inter structure have begun: Acerbi gets up on the midfielder line, Brozovic and Calhanoglu take turns lowering themselves on the defender line. Then Bastoni takes a long shot to take advantage of the space that was freed up under pressure from Fiorentina, towards Lautaro, who is good at holding position against Martinez Quarta and putting down a difficult ball. Lautaro turns and leans on Acerbi, who has space to lead almost to midfield and the good technique to prime Barella’s run.
Upon his arrival in Italy, many misunderstandings arose around Lautaro. His stature and number 10 shirt had convinced many that they were facing a hitch Argentinian all technique and creativity. But things were different. Lautaro has always been a first striker, one who also gives his best in large spaces where he can unleash all his energy. In recent years, however, he has managed to enrich his game getting better at back-to-door work, in these balls that he receives with the man on him and that he has to clean up and give back to his teammates. Let’s take another action from yesterday, the one on 12′. From the defense Bastoni finds a nice vertical track for Lautaro, who controls oriented with his left foot opening the field – always careful to defend the ball from Martinez Quarta who is attacking him – then he has the lucidity to serve a deep through ball on Dumfries’ run.
This is how Inter recovered the inertia of the match in the first half, with these actions built with lucidity from below. And to think that Nico Gonzalez’s goal was born from a situation of this type: a verticalization of Acerbi towards Lautaro, who this time had not been good at controlling his back to goal and had been anticipated by Dodò who had then started the transition of the Florentine. A circumstance that could have destroyed Inter’s certainties, but it didn’t happen that way. After the goal, the Nerazzurri insisted on that same plot, they had faith in their plan to mess up Fiorentina with ball possession from behind and to quickly pocket in free space, vertically towards Lautaro. It’s this one confidence in the strength of one’s game the “calm” that Simone Inzaghi acknowledged to his players at the end of the game.
Once the tactical context is tilted in your favor, Inter scored with the ruthlessness of their champions. Al 28’ he punished with cynicism the infantile illusions, naive of Fiorentina, which during an attack carried out with many men broke into two sections and was unable to absorb the subsequent transition of Inter. In the 36th minute a ball launched into the area without too many expectations by Barella met an equally ingenious flash – an acrobatic right-footed shot – by Lautaro who set the result at 2-1 which he would then hold out until the end. On the other hand, the difference between Inter’s victory and Fiorentina’s defeat came mainly from the difference ability to make profitable episodes. From the precision of Lautaro on the one hand, from the imprecision of Jovic on the other, who between the 78’ and in the 81st minute he had two big chances to score face to face with Handanovic.
The very competitive teams in decisive matches are those that can count on the most talented players themselves, i.e. more capable of solving matches with the pure imposition of their talent. Simone Inzaghi also mentioned this aspect at the end of the game as one of the keys to his success: «I’m lucky enough to have excellent players who don’t give up in certain matches. A large part of the merit is that I have a very concentrated team, that certain matches don’t miss them». Yet the way in which this “cup spirit” was transfused from Lazio to Inter at the same time as Inzaghi’s change of bench is indicative of how much the main architect of these successes is Inzaghi himself.
His ability to instill calm in the team and skilfully manage the decisive moments of certain matches almost contradicts the reputation Inzaghi has built up in Serie A. It is true, in his Lazio days his team were very sharp in head-to-head matches in the league, but in the two championships played with Inter Inzaghi didn’t always stand out for his excellent management of individual moments. Sometimes his choices have not been an expression of calm but of neurosis: he fixes it to replace booked players, the sometimes unclear choices in the changes during the match in progress. How does the same manager turn into a wizard in cups? A specialist, that is, of those matches in which it is absolutely necessary not to make mistakes in the management of the smallest details?
It is a question to which there is no rational answer. However, Inzaghi seems to have done it progress in squad management. This season the Inter squad has been upset by many unforeseen events – the bad form of the returning Lukaku, Brozovic’s injury, the drop in De Vrij and then Dumfries after the World Cup, the sale of Skriniar, Gosens’ difficulties , the sudden need to put Handanovic aside – yet in the face of all these negative episodes Inzaghi found constructive solutions and consolidated the identity of a new Inter precisely around these difficulties. The 11 type of this season finale is very different from what Inzaghi probably had in mind at the beginning of the season: Onana has become the undisputed starting goalkeeper, Darmian has rediscovered an excellent arm in defense, Dimarco has become the owner of the side left throughout the season, Calhanoglu played most of his games as a playmaker, Dzeko took over from Lukaku as starter. All unpredictable choices at the beginning of the year, and which have become Inzaghi’s choices. Choices around which Inter squared and which have defined a hierarchy inside the rose.
Inzaghi ended up taking advantage of this system which had suddenly become closed to possibilities; Inzaghi has decided to rely on this new nucleus of Inter like a sailor lets himself be guided by the polar star in the sea at night, and in this way he has reduced the chances of slipping into the too chaotic choices of the past.