Little more than 15 minutes had gone when Daniel Maldini cut in from the left. His first shot from the corner of the box looked optimistic, but the ball pinged back to him off a defender and then out to his teammate Paul Mendy, who held off his marker brilliantly and returned it for a close-range finish. It was a fourth consecutive Serie A game with a goal for the Italian forward and a fine way to mark his 25th birthday. Maldini slid to his knees and then rolled on to his back in celebration. The match finished 1-1.
Maldini arrives at such moments carrying a weight most players never have to consider. He is the son of the great Milan defender Paolo and the grandson of Cesare, who won a European Cup with Milan and whose son repeated the feat five more times. Critics have long dismissed him as “un raccomandato” — someone who owes his opportunities to knowing the right people, or in his case being part of the right family. He grew up in Milan’s academy and made his senior debut for the club as long ago as 2020, but never cut it at San Siro and has since bounced from Spezia to Empoli, Monza, Atalanta and Lazio without ever really finding his stride.
The weeks leading up to Sunday had been a rollercoaster. Maldini had his driving licence confiscated last month after crashing his car and failing a breathalyser test, in an incident reported to have left five people with minor injuries. Subsequent hospital tests for narcotics returned negative. He was then called up to the first Italy squad since Roberto Mancini’s reappointment as national team manager. His individual performances for the Azzurri were a mixed bag, but he lined up alongside his Cagliari teammate Alessandro Romano in the 3-1 home win over Turkey — the first time since 1972, more than half a century ago, that two of the club’s players have started a competitive game together for Italy.
Fabio Pisacane has been adamant about the forward’s potential from the start, highlighting the way he connects the lines of midfield and attack. The manager has not been shy about addressing shortcomings either, stressing that Maldini needs to be more consistent in his application. He is plainly not at the height of the previous two generations, and even the current scoring run has carried a degree of fortune — the goal against Udinese was facilitated by defending that Benny Hill might have considered a bit much. But there is a player in there, and Pisacane has been getting the best of him in a system that allows freedom to move between the wing and a more conventional No 10’s space.
It is a similar story throughout a team of individuals thriving in roles that suit them. Harry Winks’s unshowy work in front of the defence has given the 20-year-old Romano more freedom to get up and down the pitch; Romano’s decision to represent Italy after playing for Switzerland’s youth teams was hailed as a coup for Mancini. The 19-year-old Mendy is growing in confidence as a target man. Anyone picturing Cagliari as a collection of Premier League castoffs gathering for one last sun-soaked hurrah — with Winks, now 30 and formerly of Tottenham and Leicester, alongside Yerry Mina — would be getting the wrong impression: most of the regulars are 25 and younger.
Winks is in no doubt about the man in charge. “I’ve worked with many great coaches in my career,” he said recently. “Coach Pisacane is certainly at the very top level … Since I arrived here, he has already improved everyone, myself included. I really enjoy working with him; I think he can reach the very top of the sport.”
Goalkeeper Elia Caprile was magnificent against Juventus, helping Cagliari cling on to a point after the visitors came to life in the second half. He had already made saves from Edon Zhegrova before Randal Kolo Muani equalised from Kerim Alajbegovic’s cross, a close-range glance past him that left the keeper with little chance. Moments later Juventus hit the crossbar and Caprile held Nick Woltemade’s follow-up, then produced a brilliant stop from Muani’s point-blank volley, though the forward was in an offside position. Pisacane said afterwards that Juventus deserved at least as much as the draw.
Both managers were shown red cards after the final whistle for a post-game scuffle that was hard to parse. Pisacane and Luciano Spalletti clasped hands at first, but the Juventus manager had been shouting angry words from the start and appeared to react to the way Pisacane put a hand on his elbow, though none of the gestures looked violent in any obvious way. Spalletti later said he had been praising Pisacane for his player’s cleverness at time-wasting. Pisacane seemed bemused, and was overheard asking: “What did I do?”
What he has done, in fact, is take Cagliari to six wins and a draw from their last eight matches, dating back to last season, with only Roma having picked up more points in that stretch. It follows a strong finish to the previous campaign, when they won four of their final seven games — the first signs of a project coming together. Cagliari have finished in the upper half of Serie A only once in the last 30 years and have scarcely entered another title conversation since being crowned champions of Italy in 1970, but this season they began with four wins from five matches, their best start to a top-flight campaign in more than half a century, and sit fourth on 13 points after six games.
Pisacane’s own story is extraordinary. He earned the Guardian’s first-ever Player of the Year award in 2016, having lived with Guillain-Barré syndrome as a teenager, becoming paralysed and spending 20 days in a coma before recovering and climbing Italian football’s lower divisions to make his Serie A debut at 30. Along the way he made headlines for reporting an attempt by a Ravenna director to bribe him to throw a match in the third tier. None of that necessarily meant he would succeed as a manager, but he has returned to Cagliari as assistant coach in 2022, spent two years with the academy and taken charge of the first team in 2025, showing himself to be a canny tactician and adept at getting under the skin of his players.
The wider league picture offers its own curiosities. Serie A’s first goalless draw of the season arrived in its 54th match, ironically between two of its more prolific teams, as Como and Roma played out a stalemate. Things might have gone differently had the division’s leading scorer, Donyell Malen, not been sent off at the start of the second half. Roma started brighter and hit the post through Lorenzo Pellegrini, and Como dominated absolutely after the red card with 80% of possession, but could not make the pressure count. Lazio’s 3-1 win over Monza on Sunday kept them level with Inter at the top of the table — an astonishing feat at a time when their fans will not even come to home games.