Gian Piero Gasperini could not stop himself from smiling. His Roma side had just surrendered a two-goal lead at home to Inter, but as he crossed the Stadio Olimpico pitch to greet the man who had led the visitors’ comeback, his lips formed into a grin. Asked what he had said to Lautaro Martínez, Gasperini laughed. “He always scores against me,” he explained. “I told him to stop it! He does it to everyone, though. He’s a great champion, everyone thinks very highly of him, even if he makes all of us suffer.”
Martínez had scored both Inter goals in a 2-2 draw, cancelling out a first-half double from Manu Koné. It was two points dropped for Gasperini’s Giallorossi, yet also a point gained against one of their most likely rivals for the title. After winning their opening four games, Roma had stood toe to toe with the champions and landed confident punches, even if they could not find a knockout blow.
In this second season under Gasperini, Roma look more than ever like a team in his image: taking the game to their opponents high up the pitch, engaging man-to-man and seeking opportunity from individual duels. The risks were evident even in the moments leading up to Koné’s sixth-minute opener, with possession swapping rapidly and Roma centre-back Leonardo Balerdi staying alert to intercept a through-ball from Yann Bisseck towards Martínez. Roma’s rewards were reaped when Paulo Dybala’s cross was headed down by Nahuel Molina for Koné to sweep home.
Koné is an unlikely scoring threat, having found the net twice in each of his two seasons at Roma, but he matched that tally by the 37th minute, arriving at the edge of the six-yard box to convert another Dybala delivery, this time after a touch from Gianluca Mancini. The goal was initially disallowed before a VAR review confirmed neither player had been offside.
Roma had been the better team but had also ridden their luck. Not long before Koné’s second, Martínez missed an open goal from point-blank range and Alessandro Bastoni hit the post from a narrow angle. Those Inter warnings went unheeded. Less than a minute into the second half, Martínez released Marcus Thuram down the left and the Argentinian sprinted through the middle to receive the return, finishing brilliantly into the bottom corner in between three defenders.
If Roma are establishing their identity in year two under Gasperini, then perhaps the same is true for Inter under Cristian Chivu. This was the fourth game in a row that Inter had fallen 2-0 behind, and the third of those in which they avoided defeat. The champions have recovered such deficits to beat Napoli and Udinese this month and might have done the same away to Real Madrid in the Champions League if it were not for some brilliant goalkeeping by Thibaut Courtois.
Here, Mile Svilar kept Inter at bay for long spells. Roma’s goalkeeper made a stunning reflex stop to keep out Thuram’s header at a corner, and Martínez nodded the rebound on to the bar before finally equalising in the 79th minute. Inter had created more than enough chances to deserve the draw, yet things could have gone differently still: in the 68th minute, with the score at 2-1, Donyell Malen brought down a Dybala corner and swivelled to fire a rocket into the face of Inter’s keeper Josep Martínez.
Roma have the opposite problem, repeatedly starting well only to allow opponents back into games. All three times they have failed to keep a clean sheet this season, against Inter, Atalanta and Fenerbahce, they have conceded within three minutes of the second-half restart. Gasperini had already acknowledged the trend after Roma’s Champions League draw with the Turkish side, joking that “two coincidences are a proof” — although, as he will know, Agatha Christie’s original required three. That threshold has now been reached. “We need to keep our focus on our own business,” he said when asked whether his team was ready to compete for the Scudetto. “We need to take this awareness that, in the right conditions, we can be a really good, dangerous team.”
The unanswered question is whether Roma have the depth to sustain a challenge to Inter, whose strength in that area was on display again. Chivu could bring Petar Sucic off the bench to replace a struggling Curtis Jones, as well as Carlos Augusto for Federico Dimarco. He kept Martínez and Thuram on until the 90th minute, in recognition of how well they were playing, but Francesco Pio Esposito and Ange-Yoan Bonny are extraordinarily strong late replacements.
Malen may not have scored in this game, but he already has six goals in this Serie A season, two more than Martínez, continuing the prolific form he has shown since joining from Aston Villa in January. Dybala has four recorded assists, a tally that does not include either goal against Inter despite both being the result of his delivery. Gasperini’s three-pronged attack of those two alongside Matías Soulé, or the 19-year-old Rodrigo Mora, is fast becoming one of the most menacing in Serie A, while the recovery speed of Balerdi, signed from Marseille, looks a huge asset to a team playing with such a high defensive line.
Roma need to see more from their most expensive summer signing, Santiago Castro, as an alternative in their own attack, but after five games Gasperini’s glass is more than half full. “We played Inter when they are in peak condition,” he added. “Maybe, over the course of a season, it won’t always be that way.”
According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, Martínez is unbeaten in 17 games against teams coached by Gasperini, winning 12 and drawing five while racking up 11 goals — “una sentenza”, as they say in Italy, an inescapable sentence. He remains only one part of a bigger picture, though. This September meeting between defending champions and would-be contenders left more intriguing questions than definitive answers, and the table reflects how tight the top of Serie A has become: Roma sit first on 13 points after five games with a goal difference of 11, ahead of Inter on 13, Lazio on 13, Cagliari on 12 and Milan on 11.