Napoli 3 Reggina 0: Ode to German Denis

By: Neil | October 30th, 2008

It is very easy to overlook a game like this when you’re about to play AC Milan the following weekend. But Napoli showed a maturity that was too often missing last year against the smaller teams. We did the job early, and went on cruise control for the rest of the game. Although German Denis bagged a hat trick, the whole team played well and our offence is starting to involve all of our attacking players instead of being a one or two man show.

Denis is now Napoli’s leading scorer with 5 goals in 9 games (Bologna, Genoa, Reggina 3) and he’s starting to look like the classic finisher that has been missing from the Napoli attack in the last two years. The only down side with this kind of player, once termed a “fox in the box” by Arsene Wenger, is that they don’t offer much else besides finishing. In Italy they’re called “paintbrush” strikers, but most of them do a little more than apply the finishing touch. In any case, if classic finishers for whatever reason aren’t scoring, they don’t contribute much. That is probably why everyone thought Denis was struggling when he first joined Napoli. But for me he illustrates the saying that form is temporary, but class is permanent. It took him a while to find his form, but now that he’s started scoring regularly look for him to pile up the goals. At the beginning of the season, he set himself a target of 10 goals. Already Denis is half way there even though the season is only 1/4 of the way done, and he hasn’t started every game.

Here is a link for the match highlights:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaCwpXMWnU

Game notes: Cannavaro returned from injury and took his place as captain. Santacroce had a muscle problem and was nearly rested for the Milan game, but Reja didn’t want to take any chances by leaving him on the bench. He was taken out after 68 minutes. Apparently Barcelona are going to make a massive bid for Santacroce, but if De Laurentiis turned down piles of money for Hamsik and Lavezzi then Santacroce is going nowhere as well.

I’m going to do a proper preview for the Milan game on Saturday, but the Italian press is already claiming that if Napoli can win this game then we’ll be legitimate Scudetto competitors. I’m not so sure, but what’s the harm in trying? In the big leagues – England, Italy, and Spain – the teams that get the 3rd and 4th Champions League spot usually have title ambitions, so maybe we’ll have to play for a Scudetto in order to end up in the Champions League. So far the team hasn’t showed any major weaknesses, and without midweek European games to distract us, hopefully we can display the same amount of sharpness in April and May that we have now.