Napoli's remarkable surge towards Serie A title reaches another threshold

Luciano Spalletti will take each game as it comes. The coach of Napoli has been saying so all season, even as his club’s lead at the top of Serie A stretches to Vesuvian heights.

But, match by match, calculations can still be made privately, and when he looks at the Serie A table on Friday night, Spalletti may well see another small threshold has been passed on the way to the title.

If Napoli beat Sassuolo, who are 15th, they will take into the weekend an 18-point lead over second-placed Internazionale. Inter will have 16 games to catch-up. It would feel like a significant point in the equation of impossibility, challenged to cut more than a point per fixture from the vast gap.

The more improbable a real title-race becomes, the less you hear about Spalletti’s jittery record in them in a career that has just passed the milestone of 1,000 senior matches as a coach.

There are two league titles in that body of work, both with Zenit Saint Petersburg in Russia. There are four Serie A silver medals, spread across his two spells at Roma, and a bronze from last season with Napoli where, having set the pace in the autumn, they held top place at the end of February but then fell away.

He had been close with Roma too, in 2007-08 and 2016-17, and while it would be inaccurate to characterise him as a nervous finisher in a tight pursuit of a title on the basis of those precedents, there is an intensity to a typical Spalletti team that carries a heavier risk of late-season fatigue.

A 15 point lead must be the best sort of insurance against blips of form and it is certainly a welcome cushion ahead of the resumption of Champions League assignments.

Napoli's Italian coach Luciano Spalletti shouts instructions. AFP

Napoli next week travel