Salernitana spoil Napoli’s title party and teach noisy neighbours a lesson

Y ou would think the prefect of a city as superstitious as Naples might have worried a little more about tempting fate. To place a loaf of bread upside down on the dinner table is to invite bad luck on yourself in southern Italy, yet Claudio Palomba had no qualms requesting that the footballing calendar be flipped on its head so the home team could win Serie A at a more convenient time.

Napoli were originally scheduled to host Salernitana on Saturday. Seventeen points clear at the top of the table, with seven games left to play, they knew a win could secure the Scudetto if second-placed Lazio failed to beat Internazionale at San Siro the following day.

That was until Palomba intervened, applying pressure on the league and Italy’s interior minister to have Napoli’s game pushed back to Sunday afternoon. He cited public safety concerns, arguing that the celebration of the team’s first title in 33 years would be much easier to manage if it were centred around their home stadium instead of dispersed throughout the city.

The league acceded, confirming only on Thursday that Napoli’s game had been pushed back to Sunday at 3pm – shortly after Inter-Lazio was due to finish. In an interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport on Friday, the Salernitana president, Daniele Iervolino, suggested his own team’s objections had been ignored.

“I’m really disappointed. The certainty of the calendar is fundamental to the integrity of an industry like ours,” Iervolino said. “This is a very serious precedent because it’s rewarding those who put on the most pressure … this decision penalises us from several different points of view, such as the reduced time we will have to prepare for our next game, against Fiorentina. Our needs were not