Home discomforts and Fiorentina damage Napoli’s hopes of the Scudetto

Four years have passed since Napoli “lost a Scudetto in the hotel”. That was how Maurizio Sarri explained things after his then team was thrashed 3-0 by Fiorentina in April 2018, effectively ending their title bid. They had begun the weekend with hopes of going top of the table but suffered an emotional collapse after watching Juventus come from behind to beat Inter the night before.

The Bianconeri trailed that game as late as the 87th minute, despite playing with an extra man for more than an hour. They should have gone down to 10 themselves when Miralem Pjanic, already booked, leapt knee-first into Rafinha at the start of the second-half. Instead, an own goal from Milan Skriniar allowed them back into the match and Gonzalo Higuaín snatched a winner at the death.

To the Napoli players watching on televisions in Florence, it felt like a dagger to the heart. One week earlier, they had beaten Juventus in Turin, closing to within a point of first. Inter’s lead had dangled the prospect of an opportunity to overtake. For Higuaín, their former teammate, to snatch it away, felt especially cruel.

Mathematically, the title race was far from over. Napoli could maintain the one-point gap by beating Fiorentina, and Juventus’s remaining three games included a daunting trip to Roma. But in Sarri’s telling, the dream ended with Higuaín’s strike. He saw players “crying on the stairs” as he made his way up to bed.

There were echoes of that story this weekend as Napoli prepared to face Fiorentina. Just like in 2018, Napoli found themselves a single point from Serie A’s summit. An impressive, and essential, 3-1 win away to Atalanta in the previous round lent fresh fuel to the Scudetto dream.

Just like four years ago, they were forced to