Allegri won't survive to Easter, pundit says

Good evening, Napoli supporters, this is Napoli Tonight for Tuesday 15 September.

Not the panettone, but the Easter egg. That's pundit Dario Perugia's blunt verdict on how long Massimiliano Allegri lasts as Napoli head coach, asked about Sunday's one-nil win over Bologna. It's an Italian way of marking a manager's shelf life by the calendar: missing the panettone, Italy's Christmas cake, means gone by December, missing the Easter egg pushes it into spring. Stanislav Lobotka's goal in the sixty-sixth minute ended a run of three straight defeats, but it didn't move Napoli off tenth place, still on six points from four games. Allegri replaced Antonio Conte on the third of July on a contract running to twenty twenty-nine. Six points is a thin return for a coach signed on those terms, but writing him off in mid-September, before a ball is kicked at Fiorentina, is its own kind of theatre.

The table around Napoli shifted at the top and bottom, not in the middle. Roma won away at Torino to stay level with Inter on twelve points, and Como beat Parma to reach ten, level with Lazio. Napoli remain tenth on six, six behind the top two and four behind Como and Lazio.

Two pieces of squad news worth flagging. Scott McTominay, recovering in England after heart surgery in Manchester on the ninth of September, won't return to Castel Volturno, the training ground, until after the Fiorentina game, and then needs roughly two weeks of work before he's cleared to play. And Stanislav Lobotka's contract talks have stalled: his deal runs to the thirtieth of June twenty twenty-seven with no extension agreed, though Napoli hold a unilateral option, the same one already used on Anguissa, to push it to twenty twenty-eight.

Napoli travel to the Franchi to face Fiorentina on Sunday 20 September, kick-off twelve-thirty CET.

That's Napoli Tonight for tonight. Every story, in full, at arenarete dot com slash napoli slash e n. Back tomorrow evening at eight o'clock CET.