Lazio left the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona on Sunday still unbeaten, still top of Serie A and guaranteed to stay there through the November international break. Gennaro Gattuso still walked into a silent room. "Today I went into the dressing room and it was a morgue," the Lazio coach told DAZN after the 1-1 draw with Napoli. Then he said the part that explains this season: "I like that the team is disappointed today."
That reaction is the real measure of the result. Lazio arrived with nine wins and a draw from their first 10 league games, six straight league victories and a 14-point lead over Massimiliano Allegri's Napoli. They leave with 29 points from 11 matches and the first away game of the league season they did not win. A team that thinks of a point in Naples as a setback is a team that has stopped thinking of itself as an outsider.
The first half was Lazio's
Gattuso's side were the better team for most of the opening 45 minutes. Gustav Isaksen curled just wide inside the first minute and twice tested Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, and Tijjani Noslin nearly caught the Napoli goalkeeper out with a looping effort before Lazio scored on the break in the 28th minute. Noslin slipped the through ball and Davide Frattesi, arriving late and unmarked, finished first time.
Gattuso's description of Frattesi was affectionate and pointed. "Frattesi is a hard-head, he goes crazy," he said. "He feels out of the game, he wants to touch the ball. In Europe there are few invaders like him." His complaint was that the midfielder still wants to come short for possession when his best weapon is the run without it: "He should do more of them."
Lazio also lost center back Josip Sutalo to injury in the 33rd minute, with Leite coming on, and Gattuso admitted afterward that his side could have been further ahead at the break. "In the first half we could have scored more goals," he said.
A half-time change, then an own goal
The swing came three minutes into the second half, and it came from a player Lazio had just sent on. Alfonso Pedraza replaced Nuno Tavares at the interval, and in the 48th minute he turned a Napoli cross into his own net under pressure from Scott McTominay and Rasmus Hojlund after McTominay had won the ball in midfield.
For the next stretch Napoli were the team on top, and Gattuso did not pretend otherwise. "In the second half, in the first part, they crushed us a bit, but that was fair," he said. "We were in the trenches. We could have lost or won."
Mandas kept the lead in the table intact
That Lazio did not lose is largely down to Christos Mandas. The Greek goalkeeper, named Flashscore's player of the match, stopped McTominay early in the second half and then denied Kevin De Bruyne when the Belgian was through one-on-one; De Bruyne's follow-up was cleared off the line. He had also kept out Noa Lang in the first half and made a key save from Hojlund, according to Italian outlet Lalaziosiamonoi.
Mandas sounded like his coach. "We could have done more, but the important thing was not losing," he told DAZN. "It means we are hungry. A point is not enough."
What the draw changes, and what it doesn't
For Napoli, the point ended a run of four straight home defeats to Lazio in this fixture, according to Flashscore, but it did little for their season. Allegri's side remain 14 points behind the leaders and eight points off the top four, with only two wins in their last eight games across all competitions.
For Lazio, the table is better than anyone outside Formello expected in August. Gattuso refused to look at it. "We shouldn't look at the standings," he said, adding that his players now get three days off before returning Thursday. "These kinds of thoughts have to be made in the last six or seven games. Right now we have to put hay in the barn."
He may not want the comparison, but the numbers already invite it. Lazio's last Scudetto came in 2000, and Italian daily Il Sussidiario noted that Sven-Göran Eriksson's title team had six wins, three draws and a loss after 10 rounds that season, the same record as Tommaso Maestrelli's 1973-74 champions. Gattuso's team had nine wins and a draw at the same point. A silent dressing room after a draw in Naples is not a sign of a team in trouble. It is the sound of one that now expects to win everywhere.
