MILAN – He leaves the Meazza a happy man tonight, a winner. But before doing so, Andrea Stramaccioni looked back on his team's triumph as he chatted to Sky Sport Italia: "I think we won this game by chipping away at the opposition's confidence. We bossed possession, we were aggressive and we showed the right mentality with three players up top who were a menace every time they got on the ball."
Yet as pleased as he was with his side's display, the coach was aware that there's always room for improvement: "When you're playing a direct rival as we were tonight, you have to put your chances away; it's just too dangerous to leave the game open and risk dropping points."
So have Inter really hit on the right formation now? Stramaccioni grinned: "I can assure you that I've always believed in this team, even when we were struggling. I'm not talking so much about the Roma game but the three points we dropped against Siena. Still, at least it helped us to reach rock bottom and rise again from there - we understood that we had to work in a different way. I think I could probably say that tonight's match was the first one in which we've really played like Inter. We were strong and solid as a group against the best team around at the moment."
Is it perhaps easier to set Inter out as a team without Sneijder? The coach explained: "In a way it is, in the sense that Wesley has some very specific talents that need to be exploited within the context of a group. But I don't think it's right to only talk about Sneijder."
So are we likely to see a different Inter every Sunday, based
on the opposition? "If I had put Mudingayi on Pizarro then we could
say that I adapted our game to them. Instead I tried to take advantage of a weakness of theirs. When you have so many strings to your bow it's right that you should use the qualities of each individual. We've played loads of games already because we had to go through the Europa League qualifiers, and inevitably I also need to consider Thursday's trip to Baku and then the derby next Sunday."
