Inzaghi: “One - way traffic for 70 minutes, but that’s football”

MILAN – After dominating the first half, Inter succumbed to an Olivier Giroud brace in the second half which overturned Ivan Perisic’s opener in the first half in a derby that left the Nerazzurri faithful feeling disappointed.

“That’s football,” explained Simone Inzaghi to DAZN after the contest. “We dominated long periods of the game, but we didn’t get the second goal and their equaliser really got to us. It hurts to lose the derby, but we need to remain clear-headed, as we did after losing to Lazio. It was one-way traffic for 70 minutes. There was probably a foul on Sanchez, so we were angry about that.

“The defeat has to teach us that as soon as we lost control of the ball and our focus, the match ended up being decided by fine margins. It’s a painful loss. It hurts, but top teams have to be good at analysing such games. If you played like that ten times, maybe you’d only lose once.

“We know how important the derby is. We lost in undeserved fashion, but that’s football. We have to take stock and understand what was missing. It’s a tough lesson to learn, but we’ll need to be even more ruthless and kill games off going forward. Based on how the game went, we shouldn’t have been ahead by just one goal in the 70th minute.”

The boss went on to explain the nature of his second-half substitutions: “[Ivan] Perisic asked to be taken off because he had a stiff calf. Lautaro [Martinez] had given everything and had only just got back from international duty with Argentina. [Hakan] Calhanoglu gave his all as well. I don’t think the match was decided by the changes.

“Their equaliser was a bit strange with [Alexis] Sanchez getting shoved quite forcefully by [Olivier] Giroud, but we should’ve already been two or three goals up by that point and if so, that incident wouldn’t have had a bearing on the result. We had a fantastic chance out there and based on the way we dominated, we deserved more.

“We have to react in the same way that we did after the Lazio game. We have to react now even if what happened on the pitch could’ve gone differently. We’ll need to be more ruthless and focused because we have some key games coming up,” concluded the boss.