APPIANO GENTILE – Last season's Inter v Genoa was Andrea Stramaccioni's first match in charge of the Inter first team. A smile appeared on the coach's face as he thought back to that game, now that he's going into the same fixture for the second time: "It feels like something that happened four or five years ago... It was an incredible game from an emotional point of view for me but now we must focus on the present and on winning tomorrow."
One of the many questions put to the Nerazzurri coach during his long press conference was how he deals with criticism: "There's an ounce of truth in every criticism, I'm the youngest coach in Serie A and I'm trying to learn and improve. The opinions of the people who follow Inter every day are what I'm most interested in. Then of course I have my own mind and I make my own decisions. I don't think I'm anything amazing, I'm trying to learn from each game and better myself. There have been times when we've got a good result and I wasn't happy with our performance and vice versa; what I don't like is when people judge you only on the result and don't look at the performance. We came home from Rome with zero points but with a greater awareness of what we can do."
Stramaccioni was also quizzed on Esteban Cambiasso's fitness: "He started training with the rest of the team again yesterday and today he took part in our pre-match training session. I'll leave it till late before deciding whether to put him in the starting line-up or not."
On comparisons with Juventus: "They deserve to be top for the consistency they have shown. Our biggest regret is that we've dropped a few too many points along the way. But I've always tried to avoid comparing ourselves with the league leaders, I'd rather concentrate on getting our own run going now. We're trying to be consistent in our performances. We must try to beat Genoa so that we can go into 2013 in second place and then aim to have an excellent second half to the season. Let's just talk about Inter."
The coach was also asked about something he said after the Lazio match ("We're not good enough to overcome the unfortunate episodes") and what it would take to change that: "I don't know it would take for us to be better than the episodes. What I mean is that in a match against a direct rival, when a number of episodes go against you - through bad luck, because the ref missed it and that can happen - Inter weren't good enough to overcome all of that."
