Buoyant Napoli face ultimate test in title push that dare not speak its name

Last Sunday, amid jubilant scenes at the Pier Luigi Penzo Stadium, Napoli scored a 100th-minute goal to seal a 2-0 win over Venezia, cutting Internazionale’s lead in Serie A to a single point. The following morning, tickets for their next game – a potential title showdown at home to Inter – went on general sale.

Almost immediately, Napoli’s ticket website began to gasp under the sheer volume of traffic. Disgruntled fans complained to the club after spending hours refreshing and rebooting the page, sitting in virtual queues of about 15,000. The stadium box office was a similar story, as restive queues stretched out of the club shop – although, this being Naples, the word “queue” demands a certain imaginative latitude on the reader’s part – and on to the street. The head of Napoli’s official ticket platform fiercely rejected suggestions of a technical problem, instead blaming fans for attempting to purchase tickets despite not possessing the required documentation.

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Anger out of elation; expectation stalked by disappointment and resentment; an orderly process slowly and inexorably crumbling into chaos: as it turned out, this felt like a pretty fitting buildup to Napoli’s biggest game of the season, a fixture that could make or break their campaign to win a first league championship in 32 years. This is, after all, a club with their own particular set of neuroses, foremost of which is a belief that nothing good ever came without a few complications.

“Vietato parlare di scudetto,” the club’s owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis, said last weekend. “It is forbidden to talk about the championship.” And when you have been burned as many times as Napoli,