Simone Inzaghi feels Lazio fought back to beat Fiorentina with ‘character and hunger’ to keep their Scudetto dreams alive in difficult circumstances.
It was a bad start to the game for the hosts just days after their 3-2 defeat to Atalanta, as Franck Ribery waltzed through defenders to put the Viola in front.
However, a soft penalty converted by Ciro Immobile and the late Luis Alberto strike turned it around, keeping Lazio within four points of leaders Juventus.
Simone Inzaghi feels Lazio fought back to beat Fiorentina with ‘character and hunger’ to keep their Scudetto dreams alive in difficult circumstances.
It was a bad start to the game for the hosts just days after their 3-2 defeat to Atalanta, as Franck Ribery waltzed through defenders to put the Viola in front.
However, a soft penalty converted by Ciro Immobile and the late Luis Alberto strike turned it around, keeping Lazio within four points of leaders Juventus.
“It’s a victory earned with character and hunger. We have a limited squad at the moment with several injuries and I have to say thank you to Correa, Radu and Marusic, because they wouldn’t have been played today even as substitutes if it wasn’t an emergency.
“Fiorentina are a very good team, they are well-organised, so I congratulate my players, as it wasn’t easy,” Inzaghi told DAZN.
“Before the lockdown, we had one game a week, I could pick and choose my squad. Now we’ve got one every three days, we’re missing Lucas Leiva, Senad Lulic, Luiz Felipe, there are others I was advised not to play because they were at risk of injury. Without character, we wouldn’t have won this match.”
Inzaghi was sent off from the touchline in stoppages, just after Dusan Vlahovic’s red card for an elbow on Patric.
“It’s really disappointing, as I hadn’t been sent off for almost three years. I had tried to help out and calm the situation, the referee said I was not in any way rude, it’s just that I wandered outside my technical area. I think he could’ve just given me a yellow card and then I would’ve been with my lads next week in Turin.”
Lazio were 2-0 up against Atalanta only to lose 3-2, so did they take a different approach to the game?
“We knew it would be a real slog and there were players on the bench we might not be able to use, so we tried to keep the tempo relatively slow in the first half-hour.”