Maurizio Sarri insists Lazio ‘cannot be in extraordinary shape in these circumstances’ because so many of their reinforcements arrived late, but sees ‘progress’ in the defeat to Genoa.
It has been a disastrous start to the season for the Aquile, who fumbled a lead to lose 2-1 away to Lecce in the opening weekend, then were beaten 1-0 at home by the newly-promoted Grifone.
An early Mateo Retegui header proved enough at the Olimpico, as Lazio had numerous chances without finding the net, including Ciro Immobile’s lob coming off the woodwork.
They also had two penalty appeals in the first half, one from Immobile and the other Mattia Zaccagni.
“We certainly made progress from the Lecce game, even if only in terms of attitude. We were timorous at the start, irritable, then did better from the 20th minute on and just lacked the finish with our strikers still finding their form,” Sarri told Sky Sport Italia.
“There were steps forward, not enough, even though the result tonight feels rather unfair. It means we need more steps forward.”
The loss of Sergej Milinkovic-Savic is still keenly felt, as well as the arrival of other reinforcements very late in the summer, weakening a side that had finished second in Serie A last season.
“I am worried that our new arrivals all came in August, some were free agents and others frozen out from their squads, so had not trained for weeks. Clearly, we cannot be in extraordinary shape with those circumstances.
“However, if the attitude of the lads is the one I saw in the last 70 minutes, then we’ll get it sorted out soon enough.”
There were gaps between the defence and midfield at times, while Lazio also moved the ball around too slowly at the start, but Sarri insists the performance was on the whole not that bad.
“In the opening 20 minutes we lost the ball repeatedly playing out from the back and that leaves you exposed. It was better in terms of distribution, as we pinned Genoa back for 70 minutes and only allowed one real counter-attack that was four minutes from the end. The first 20 minutes were poor, that is true, and usually the quality of our strikers helps us to make the difference, but tonight the siege did not find a way through.”
Last season, when Lazio were pouring forward to chase a game, they would push Milinkovic-Savic into a more advanced role, whereas this time they threw on summer signing Taty Castellanos.
“Milinkovic made his choices, there’s no point continuing to think about that. We must find other solutions. I did not like what happened when we put on two centre-forwards in the final stages, because we lost our shape and just became chaotic.”
Stop making excuses & complaining, they won’t change the results.