Italy’s league leaders meet the champions this evening, and although we are only seven match days into the season, that’s a statement to pause over. Autumns in Serie A tend to come around with the title-holders and table-toppers as one and the same, with Juventus defending their scudetto from the front.
Not so this October, where Internazionale, the sole owners of a 100 per cent record, can stretch their lead to five points if they defeat Juve in San Siro.
That would do more than raise an eyebrow. It would stoke belief that when both clubs decided to appoint a new head coach in the summer, Inter made the wiser choice than the supposed master-strategists of Juve, and that, in taking on Antonio Conte, the challengers picked the man who knows as well as anyone how to find out the champions' weaker spots.
This Derby D’Italia cannot escape being the derby of its managers, of two distinct expressions of what Italian football prides itself on. There’s Conte, who up until 2014 guided Juventus to the first three of their eight scudetti on the trot, still easily caricatured as breast-beating, fiery-eyed warrior. And there’s Maurizio Sarri, the former banker, ten years Conte’s senior, but with four league titles fewer than Conte has amassed, an outsider admired for his tactical nous and his dogmas and now trusted by Juventus.
Conte and Sarri have never met in circumstances like this. But they have passed one another frequently through various revolving doors, and not always with a polite "how do you do?".
First stop, Arezzo in Tuscany, close to where Sarri grew up and first combined a career in finance – he had not been a successful professional player – with part-time coaching. By 2006 he had become respected enough as tactician to have given up the world of investments and currency markets. That year, in his first adventure in Serie B, he achieved mid-table safety with Pescara.
The directors at Serie B’s Arezzo noted Sarri's success, but, looking for a new manager, they plumped for a young Conte, who had retired as an industrious, international midfielder two summers earlier and seemed made for management, having absorbed the teachings of great coaches at Juventus. But Arezzo was a tricky launchpad. Conte lasted nine league games.
Sarri was called in as his replacement, and, as Arezzo players have been recalling this week, the culture shift was notable. The passion of Conte gave way to the scholarship of Sarri. Where Conte the boss referenced his playing career as a motivational tool – mainly to tell Arezzo’s footballers that, with drive, even a limited player like he could thrive alongside Zidanes and Del Pieros – Sarri had no such touchstones. But he brought to the job of surviving in Serie B great attention to detail, particularly in analysing opponents.
As it turned out, neither method worked for Arezzo in 2006-07. Sarri was sacked after 18 league games and, having learned of his dismissal listening to the radio while on the team bus, discovered to his greater surprised the identity of his replacement: Conte, who had been called back. And who spoke critically, on his return, of fitness levels under Sarri having dropped. Arezzo still got relegated; both managers got the blame.
A decade later, Conte, by now a serially successful Juventus manager, took over Chelsea and, defying forecasts, claimed the Premier League in his first year abroad. After a troubled second season, he was ready to leave, and Chelsea to appoint a man with firm ideas but a less combustible demeanour as his replacement. So to Arezzo, Act Two: Conte out, Sarri in.
Sarri at Chelsea was a mixed success, but he achieved something neither he nor Conte had ever done before – a European trophy, the Europa League. Juventus, ambitious to add Champions League prestige to Serie A domination, respect that and it helped them chose Sarri, cast out by Chelsea last May, as their new boss.
Conte and Sarri's first direct confrontation in top division is being played out, so far, to a low-key soundtrack of reminders of their shared past. But Conte has been eager to point out to Sarri that if Juve do not win Serie A, it will not look good on the balance sheet. “Just look at the finances,” Conte says of Juventus’s budget, far superior to any other Italian club.
On Sunday, nobody will be looking at the finances. But the cameras around San Siro will keep a close track of the ex-banker in one dugout, and the animated ex-Juve man in the other, for which one has the best plan – and for any flying sparks.
