Napoli, injury emergency: Anguissa also stops. Conte's countermeasures

Naples, February 26, 2025 – Once upon a time there was full abundance for Antonio Conte , who, unlike other coaches fighting for the top positions in the standings, could also enjoy a whole week of work to prepare for the matches, in addition to being able to take advantage of a physically fresher squad. In reality, these theories in football have never found unanimous approval, instead meeting the opposition of those who maintain that the more a team plays, the more value it acquires from a physical point of view and from that of confidence in its own qualities.

Almost like a warning, Juventus ' performance last year stands out practically from this point onwards in the season: from favourites for the Scudetto due to the absence of European competitions in the calendar, the Bianconeri almost didn't even get one of the five places up for grabs in the Champions League . Napoli themselves are starting to show signs of giving in after months of living at full speed. It starts with the performance, with an open streak of 4 games without a win ( 3 draws and 1 defeat ) and it arrives at the many muscular injuries that seem to demonstrate even better than the results the almost empty tank of many players who have so far pulled the proverbial cart. The latest entry into the pits is that of André-Frank Zambo Anguissa , one of the pillars of the former league leaders, as well as an almost unexpected bomber in a season that is still beyond any rosiest expectations.

Anguissa's injury and other precedents in pink

The Cameroonian's stop is the last 'souvenir' left in chronological order by the disastrous trip to Como : for the number 99 so far 5 goals and 3 assists in a year that has not seen Napoli the war machine up front as it had been in the recent past. What never changes, however, is the Neapolitan club's habit of not committing itself on the recovery times of injuries and in particular the one that occurred to Sinigaglia , revealed to be a distracting lesion of the soleus muscle of the right leg: the most plausible hypothesis speaks of a stay in the infirmary of at least 3 weeks , with the matches against Inter , Fiorentina and Venezia destined to be cancelled from Anguissa 's schedule, who therefore could return at the end of March, on the occasion of the match against Milan that will restart the championship after the break for the national teams . As always when there is a muscular problem involved, a tax that more or less every team pays at a certain point in the season, the debate is divided between simple fatality and more or less direct responsibility for the efforts accumulated by the player in question.

The problem for Napoli is that Anguissa 's is neither the first nor the only injury of this type that has occurred in recent times (and not only). The Azzurri player most affected by bad luck (assuming that it is what it is in these cases) is Pasquale Mazzocchi , who ended up in the infirmary twice, a record sadly shared with Mathias Olivera : among the victims of the soleus, the muscle apparently most fragile this year in the Castel Volturno area, there was also Matteo Politano . However, in the human body there are many other muscles besides the one located in the calf, as Alex Meret (long adductor of the left thigh), Stanislav Lobotka (semitendinosus muscle), Leonardo Spinazzola (right gluteus medius) and David Neres (distraction lesion of the semimembranosus of the left thigh) have gradually experienced.

Almost an entire team sidelined by muscle injuries to which we could add those players who have stopped from time to time due to simple fatigue: in any case, the warning sign of a deep problem that does not fit well with the efforts theoretically made by a team that plays only once a week. A clue in reality had been provided by the 'reviews' of the fans and the players themselves issued after the retreats in Dimaro and Castel di Sangro : exhausting training sessions and with workloads that were not exactly usual, for some almost unprecedented, which would have nevertheless contributed to making Napoli go all out (and perhaps even beyond their limits) before the decline of the last few weeks and in particular in those second halves that for a long time had instead been the strong point of the team that remained at the top of the standings for 18 consecutive rounds .

The 3-5-2 towards confirmation against Inter

The module issue that has become pregnant in recent days, with the permanence of the 3-5-2 or the return to 4-3-3 at stake , is being affected by the latest news coming from the infirmary, with Anguissa as the protagonist. The Cameroonian's stoppage in a certain sense makes Conte 's job easier, who in the last few hours was racking his brains over what to do to try to bring Napoli back to the splendor of a few weeks ago. At this point, however, on Saturday at 6 pm at the Maradona everything is pushing for the Azzurri to still line up with the 3-5-2 , a solution that perhaps would have been used anyway to play in a mirror with Inter , thus trying not to hand over control of the midfield to Simone Inzaghi . Philip Billing , one of the best at Sinigaglia for quantity and quality, especially in shooting, will still have a good chance as a starter. What the Dane showed off in a not exactly edifying context, especially in the second half, can serve as a message to Conte : perhaps, net of the farewell of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and the arrival of not exactly famous profiles, the January market has brought a few more resources. And who knows, maybe now, with the regular starters in reserve or even out of action, the time will come to finally draw from the bench, where among other things until recently Giacomo Raspadori himself was often accommodated , today instead become the savior of the country and the emblem of this revived 3-5-2 that however is not satisfying all palates nor providing the desired results of defensive coverage in a very complicated period.