Napoli boss Luciano Spalletti wasn’t completely satisfied with his team's performance in the 2-0 Serie A win against Bologna on Monday.
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Napoli boss Luciano Spalletti wasn’t completely satisfied with his team’s performance in the 2-0 Serie A win against Bologna on Monday. The Italian tactician felt that his team “must fight and do the job well”. Hirving Lozano scored a brace as Napoli returned to winning ways after losing to Fiorentina in the Coppa Italia round of 16 fixture on Thursday. Napoli played very well but allowed the Bologna attackers to have a decent number of attempts on goal despite having only 38% of ball possession.
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Spalletti was furious during his post-match press conference as his side gave away the ball possession on a number of occasions in the final 15 minutes and risked conceding more than once.
“I am upset when we don’t do well what we are supposed to do,” Spalletti told DAZN
“Our duty is to play football. We are not a team that can defend for an extended period of time, we are not a physical team. We struggle in these situations, so we must keep the ball possession and avoid defending because that’s something we are not able to do.
Napoli were very good goining forward as Lozano broke the deadlock in the 20th minute after being set up by Elif Elmas from the left flank. The visitors doubled the lead two minutes after the break courtesy of a brilliantly worked breakaway move.
Fabian Ruiz was released down the left and the Spanish playmaker played the ball across the goal for Lozano, who took one touch to beat Bologna goalkeeper Lukasz Skorupski before slotting home into an empty net.
However, Spalleti’s side weren’t organized enough while defending and Bologna managed to open them up in the final stages of the game. Mattias Savanberg’s late free-kick hit the crossbar.
After taking the two goal lead, Napoli tried to sit back and defend and Spalletti wasn’t happy with that as he felt that his team wasn’t build for that role. As a result they were pushed to the back foot, however, because of the sloppiness from the Bologna attackers, Napoli managed to secure a clean sheet and three points.
“Sometimes we are too sloppy for the role that we have in the league and the city that we represent,” the coach continued.
“We must fight and do our job well. We’ll be happy when we’ll make our fans happy. Being footballers is not enough, we must make people happy otherwise, we are ordinary people.
“We have thrown too many points away this season. We must reach a top-four finish. We have the quality and the team to do that, like all the other seven clubs.
“Sometimes we lose our quality, we should have made the most of all the space they left for us in the final minutes of the game. We didn’t and we suffered their pressing at the end of the match.”
