Allegri stays calm after Napoli's seventh defeat: 'A bad moment, but the team played well for 70 minutes'

Napoli lost at the Do Dragao to Francesco Farioli's Porto, a result that gave Massimiliano Allegri his seventh defeat in fourteen matches this season, according to Corriere dello Sport. Despite an injury emergency, the visitors stayed in the game for about an hour before paying dearly for errors on set pieces and a lack of energy in the final third. The Champions League league-phase table now places Napoli twenty-seventh with only three points after four rounds. Next up in the league is a much-anticipated meeting with Gattuso's Lazio before the international break.

Speaking to Amazon Prime Video after the match, Allegri said Napoli conceded on two set pieces and credited Porto for being very good. On the first, he explained, there was a positional switch; on the second they decided to mark man-to-man the player who had scored, but Porto were clever to change. He called these the details that make the difference. Allegri said there had been games in which he could have been angrier, but for 70 minutes the team played a good match with a great expenditure of physical energy. He noted they had already been beaten through the middle two or three times, then conceded from one of their own clearances on a contested ball: they went straight forward when they should have looked for the man. He said he was disappointed and bitter about the moment because it is a bad one, but that he had nothing at all to say to the players that evening given their dedication and desire, because it was not easy to play there. They must analyse what went wrong and keep working.

With injuries and fluctuating results, Allegri has few certainties. He said the team played a good game physically and technically, and that in the second half the crossbar came from a through ball because they had stayed a little long. Playing every three days, he could not make changes at the 70th minute, and they conceded a goal that could have been avoided, partly through tiredness from 70 minutes in the open. In that moment, he said, you do not realise it; in other situations he could have been angry, but not that evening. Asked about light at the end of the tunnel, he said they have three days to prepare for Lazio, then the break, after which they will recover the injured players. There is only continuing to work; football has these moments and they must be faced with a great desire to bounce back. He ruled out a training retreat, noting they have been away for six days and must return tomorrow, train Friday, and play a very important league game on Sunday. The performance, he said, was certainly better than Sunday's.