Gattuso revisits 2021 draw that cost Napoli the Champions League

Speaking at the Festival dello Sport in Trento, the former Napoli head coach said a draw with Verona would have meant second place instead of fifth. He also looked back at the 2006 World Cup won under Marcello Lippi.

by Gennaro SanninoSunday 4 October, 19:43 CET· 2 hours ago

Gattuso — Foto: goal.com

Gennaro Gattuso used a stage at the Festival dello Sport in Trento to reopen a wound Napoli have never really closed. He went back to 23 May 2021, the day a draw with Verona cost his Napoli side a place in the Champions League.

If we had drawn we would have finished second. We finished fifth — an incredible blow.

The facts of that night are hard to shake. Napoli went ahead in the 60th minute through Amir Rrahmani, still the club's number 13. Verona, managed by Ivan Jurić, equalised through Faraoni only nine minutes later. The 1-1 draw dropped Napoli to fifth place, and the fourth spot — the one that meant Champions League qualification — went to Juventus, who won away at Bologna.

A warning for Allegri

Five years on, the fact that Gattuso chose to return to that afternoon shows how much it still weighs on him, and not only on the club's accounts. It is the same target — the Champions League, no longer a stretch goal but a minimum requirement — that the club have now set for Allegri: fourth place. Read from here, Gattuso's words sound like a warning about the cost of a single point left on the pitch. In Napoli, on that front, nothing is forgiven.

From the most recent regret of his coaching career, Gattuso moved to the furthest one of his career as a player: the 2006 World Cup won with Marcello Lippi's Italy, in the middle of the Calciopoli scandal.

We started out with people throwing tomatoes at us because of the Calciopoli problems, but little by little we got to where we got. A historic win, and the man behind it was one man alone: Marcello Lippi, who did everything to build a group.

Two episodes opposite in outcome — a World Cup win, a missed qualification — but joined by the same thread: for Gattuso, football is decided in details nobody fully controls, a goal in the 69th minute or a group built piece by piece. Of the two, in Napoli, it is the first that remains etched most.