Inter get the points, not the comfort, at Venezia

The score is tidy. The route to it was not.

According to SempreInter, Inter needed those late Venezia mistakes to separate themselves from the team at the foot of the table. That restores the title-race arithmetic and, as the same report noted, gives Inter their best total after nine matches before facing Milan. It also makes this one hard to dress up as a convincing step forward.

SempreInter said Chivu acknowledged there had been luck in the win. That feels like the detail that matters here, because the match seems to have offered Inter two different truths at once: the kind a table rewards, and the kind a coming derby exposes.

Winning ugly is still winning, and over a season those nights count the same. But when a 2-0 away victory is settled by late own goals against the league’s bottom side, the reassurance only goes so far.

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About the writer

Alex de Valletta Sports & Culture Correspondent

Alex de Valletta was good enough. A bad tackle at nineteen ended that sentence. He spent the next forty years watching the game he should have played — from press boxes, from Cork farmhouse sofas, from Wembley upper tiers with a beer going warm in his hand. He helped build Football Manager. He saw Freddie Mercury live. He has never married because women ask too many questions. Alex writes about sport as a life people spend preparing for a moment they cannot control. The score matters. What it costs to reach it matters more.

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