Venue: Stadio San Paolo, NaplesDate: Wednesday 3 October 2018Kick-off: 8.00 p.m. (BT Sport 3)Referee: Viktor Kassai (HUN)Assistants: György Ring (HUN)Vencel Tóth (HUN)Fourth official: Peter Berettyán (HUN)Additional assistants:Tamás Bognar (HUN)Sandor Szabo (HUN)Form (last six — all competitions):Liverpool:WWWWLDLeicester City (a) [W 2-1]; Tottenham Hotspur (a) [W 2-1]; PSG (h) [W 3-2];Southampton (h) [W 3-0]; Chelsea (h) [L 1-2]; Chelsea (a) [D 1-1]Napoli:LWDWWLSampdoria (a) [L 0-3]; Fiorentina (h) [W 1-0]; Red Star Belgrade (a) [D 0-0];Torino (a) [W 3-1]; Parma (h) [W 3-0]; Juventus (a) [L 1-3] Goalscorers 2018/19Liverpool (19):Mané (4), Sturridge (4), Firmino (3), Salah (3), Milner (2), Matip, Wijnaldum, O.G. (1 each)Napoli (13):Insigne (5), Milik (3), Mertens (2), Zieliński (2), Verdi (1)IntroductionAnd so our attentions move from Maurizio Sarri’s current team to his former one. Liverpool’s opponent on Wednesday is a unique club, the biggest in Italy south of Rome and one which is currently enjoying an era that might otherwise count as the most consistently successful in its history (i.e. top-3 in six of the last eight Serie A seasons, runners-up in three of the last six, 2 Coppa Italia wins, 1 Supercoppa Italiana) were it not for the legendary run it enjoyed between 1984 and 1991. And while supporters of the club might well disagree, it’s difficult to escape the notion that the significant history of Napoli SSC began on 5 July 1984, the day 75,000 delirious fans paid into the Stadio San Paolo to watch an Argentine magician juggle a ball in the summer sun.SSC NapoliAs recently as this time last year, the following was still being written Naples and its football club:Once upon a time, before his physical abilities had declined past the point where they could disguise his limitations as a human being, Naples was home to the greatest footballer on the planet. In a way, it still is — it’s still home to Diego Maradona circa 1987, and that player would almost certainly be considered the best in the world in 2018, that is if he existed outside of the pictures, murals, banners and homilies that Neapolitans continue to keep in his honour.It’s little wonder that his ghost still inhabits the place — SSC Napoli, and maybe even the city of Naples itself, have never mattered as much as they did when the best player in the world was strutting around the San Paolo pitch wearing the number 10 shirt that has since been retired in his honour.His influence would perhaps reach its crescendo in July 1990 when he addressed the people of his adopted city prior to Argentina’s World Cup semi-final vs. Italy, about to be held in Naples: “I don’t like the fact that now everyone is asking Neapolitans to be Italian and to support their national team. Naples has always been marginalised by the rest of Italy. It is a city that suffers the most unfair racism…For 364 days out of the year, you are considered to be foreigners in your own country; today you must do what they want by supporting the national team. Instead, I am a Neapolitan for 365 days out of the year”. The home supporters ultimately backed Italy, hanging banners explaining “Naples loves you but Italy is our homeland”, but Maradona considered it a victory in itself that this was Argentina’s only game of Italia ’90 where they weren’t mercilessly jeered by the local support.It made him even more hated in the north of Italy, of course, perhaps because there was an element of truth in what he said. Naples was, and is, based in one of the poorest and most deprived regions in Europe, southern Italy, and the struggles of its football clubs over the years reflected wider economic disparities between the north and south of the country. That dynamic largely remains intact, with Turin giants Juventus having recently completed 7 wins in a row to start the season (including a 3-1 win over Napoli themselves last Saturday) as they chase an unprecedented 8th consecutive Serie A title.Prior to Maradona’s arrival in Naples for a world record fee of £6.9m in the summer of 1984, for example, southern Italy had only produced a single Serie A-winning team in the competition’s history (Cagliari in 1969/70), and even taking Rome into account, the entire country south of Florence had won a collective 4 scudetti out of a possible 54 since the inauguration of Serie A ahead of the 1929/30 season. Napoli was no exception — despite the presence of legendary players over the years, such as future World Cup-winning captain Dino Zoff, Dutchman Ruud Krol and naturalised Italians José Altafini and Omar Sivori, the club had only won two major honours in its history up to that point (the Coppa Italia in 1962 and 1976). The money, the power and the prestige were vested in the north, particularly in the cities of Milan and Turin.Jorge Mendes recently claimed that it’s “just ridiculous, a disgrace” that his client Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t win the 2018 UEFA Player of the Year after carrying “Madrid on his back to win another Champions League”, but Ronaldo has been surrounded by the world’s greatest players at two of its biggest and most stable clubs, first at Manchester United and then at Real Madrid, since 2003, a period of 15 years. Now he’s at the richest club in Italy, which is already sitting on a run of 7 straight Serie A titles and counting. Yeah, it must be hard carrying that kind of institutional wealth and power on your back, right enough.On the other hand, while Maradona’s decision to leave Barcelona for Naples was heavily influenced by his desire to escape the stultifying pressure of the Nou Camp, it also carried with it the implicit possibility, perhaps even the probability, that he would leave with very little in the way of medals to show for the prime years of his career. When Ronaldo joined Real Madrid in 2009, like any other “Galactico” he did so with the virtual guarantee of trophies. Maradona had no such guarantee.This was especially true given that his time at the club would coincide with a period of unprecedented equality in Serie A, during which the traditionally all-powerful Juventus would only manage a single league title. Across Maradona’s 7 seasons as a Napoli player, 6 different clubs won Serie A — the Preben Elkjaer-inspired Hellas Verona in 1984/85, the final chapter of Michel Platini’s Juventus in 1985/86, Maradona’s Napoli in 1986/87 and 1989/90, the Dutch-infused AC Milan of Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco Van Basten in 1987/88, the German-flavoured Inter of Lothar Matthaus, Jurgen Klinsmann and Andreas Brehme in 1988/89, and the Sampdoria of Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli in 1990/91. After Juventus’ domination of the 1970’s and early-1980’s, Napoli were the only club to win more than one league title from 1984 to 1991 (they also finished in the top-2 for 4 years in a row) in what was indisputably the best league in the world. They would also add a Coppa Italia as part of their first-ever double in 1987, the UEFA Cup in 1988/89 and a Supercoppa Italiana in 1990.None of this success was solely down to Maradona, of course, who was lucky enough to find himself surrounded by a magnificent supporting cast during his time in Naples (he said himself in 1987 that “Napoli’s greatest asset lies in the fact that they have gathered together some excellent players”). The first taste of football I remember getting was Mexico ’86, and my 6 year-old self came out of it infatuated with three men: Maradona, the aforementioned Elkjaer who had finished third behind the Argentine in the voting for player of the tournament, and Careca. Despite discovering the love of my football-supporting life (Liverpool) around the same time, the addition of the Brazilian in the summer of 1987 made certain that I would maintain an interest in Napoli too (this wasn’t an easy thing to do in that pre-Football Italia era, and I can still be found trawling Youtube to this day trying to piece together the best of what that team produced).Careca was a prolific livewire, a superb finisher, a scorer of every kind of goal (and, at 21, might have proven the difference for Brazil in 1982 had it not been for a thigh injury suffered weeks before the tournament — the much-maligned Serginho took his place in the team). He scored 7 World Cup goals in 9 games for Brazil and proved to be a perfect foil for Maradona. Elsewhere, his compatriot Alemao arrived from Atletico Madrid, where he had won La Liga Foreign Player of the Year in 1988, and provided a strong defensive shield behind his fellow South Americans. There was Ciro Ferrara, a local lad and a tough, uncompromising and stylish defender in the best Italian traditions. He would go on to win bucketloads of silverware as a cornerstone of Marcello Lippi’s Juventus later in his career. Andrea Carnevale and Fernando De Napoli were part of Italy’s 1990 World Cup squad that finished 3rd on home territory. And Napoli was also where Maradona’s heir-apparent, Gianfranco Zola, made his name, playing a crucial part in the club’s second scudetto win in 1990.But Maradona was the one who made it all tick, from the day those 75,000 people filled the San Paolo to welcome him to the club (according to historian David Goldblatt, one local newspaper even proclaimed that despite the lack of a “mayor, houses, schools, buses, employment and sanitation, none of this matters because we have Maradona”) right up to, and beyond, the fateful evening some 7 years later that saw him led, high as a kite, from a hotel room into the awaiting cameras of the world’s media and a 15-month ban from football. He never represented the club in any capacity ever again and yet, somehow, he’s still making a city tick 27 years later. You cannot talk about football in Naples without talking about the fallen idol who remains exalted. Maradona wasn’t simply a football player; as the author says in the earlier quote, he “was one of them”. And that probably says quite a bit about the city and its people. Slovakian Marek Hamšík, now in his 12th season at the club and Napoli’s record goalscorer and captain, is unlikely to similarly have murals dotted all over the city in his honour almost three decades after his final game, even if he does manage to deliver a scudetto before he retires.Perhaps the reason Maradona is still so revered in the city is that the club almost immediately reverted to anonymity, and worse, after he left — the Coppa Italia under Walter Mazzarri in 2012 was the next major trophy it won, a gap of 21 years. Napoli quickly found itself in financial difficulties shortly after Maradona’s suspension and soon began shedding its best players at a frightening rate — Zola, Ferrara, another local lad in Fabio Cannavaro, the brilliant Uruguayan Daniel Fonseca, and so on. Marcello Lippi arrived ahead of the 1993/94 season, and the job he did in leading the club to 6th and a UEFA Cup berth would land him the Juventus job the following year. That was as good as it got for some time — over the next 15 years the club would go bankrupt, lose its name, be relegated all the way to Serie C2, regain its name and, eventually, claw its way back to relevance.Aurelio De Laurentiis, recently heard accusing Liverpool and Roma of collusion at board level but who himself has seen fit to purchase Bari, much to the outrage of Napoli supporters, has literally rescued the club since he bought it in the mid-2000’s. Another Coppa Italia arrived under Rafael Benítez in 2014, and Napoli have consistently been Juventus’ main challengers in the last half-decade. In 2017-18, they even set a new club record for points in a Serie A season under the departed Maurizio Sarri (91). A new stadium complex could also be in the offing, with De Laurentiis having supposedly called the San Paolo a “cesspit”, although it’s unlikely to go down well with Napoli supporters if the rumours of signing a naming rights deal with McDonald’s are accurate.And that’s how Napoli have arrived at this point: a Champions League meeting against the 5-time winners, managed by the second of only three men to win the European Cup 3 times as a manager. The familiar figure of Carlo Ancelotti, losing manager in Istanbul, will be on the opposite bench again next Wednesday, some 4 years after equalling Bob Paisley’s 33 year-long distinction. He will undoubtedly prove a worthy adversary for Jürgen Klopp, whose Borussia Dortmund were narrowly elminated by Ancelotti’s Real Madrid in the quarter-finals of the competition in 2014. Team news:Napoli, of course, lost arguably their best player (Jorginho) and manager (Sarri) to Chelsea over the summer. The big (i.e. expensive) additions to the squad in the summer were Fabián Ruiz Peña from Real Betis (who has only made 2 starts so far) and Simone Verdi from Bologna (2 starts, 1 goal). Their big players remain Sadio Mané’s Senegalese compatriot and defensive lynchpin Kalidou Koulibaly, local lad (and top scorer so far this season with 5) Lorenzo Insigne, captain Hamšík, and the potentially lethal Dries Mertens, who has been used exceedingly sparingly so far for a player of his quality. Back at the start of September, the Belgian said the following: “It’s quite simple. I came back late from the World Cup, I spoke to the coach and he intends to play me more regularly in future. My role in the squad has not changed since the World Cup. We talked about the situation, Ancelotti likes the way I play and honestly I don’t think at this stage of the season that I am ready to play 90 minutes.” Nontheless, as October dawns he has only started 3 out of 8 and was withdrawn after an hour of Napoli’s defeat to Juventus with the score at 1-2.Hard-running Pole Piotr Zieliński, heavily linked to Liverpool during his Udinese days, is also a key player, and his brace against AC Milan earlier in the season was superb. If Napoli looked miles off the pace during Liverpool’s 5-0 pre-season win in Dublin (Milner, Wijnaldum, Salah, Sturridge and Moreno the scorers), they didn’t start the season in brilliant form either. They had to come from 0-1 and 0-2 down respectively to secure 2-1 and 3-2 wins over Lazio and AC Milan, a reminder that this is a team that’s never beaten until the final whistle — they earned 28 points from losing positions last season. So even if Liverpool arrive at a point on Wednesday where they feel like they have Napoli at their mercy, they’ll need to maintain 100% focus right until the end. From there, a crushing 0-3 defeat away to Sampdoria brought their first loss of the season before wins over Fiorentina, Torino and Parma consolidated their position as Juve’s main challangers once again. However, the 1-3 defeat on Saturday leaves them 6 points adrift already. This is a flexible team, a quality that Ancelotti has made good use of, swapping between 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 as required. The attack, which often plays without a traditional centre-forward, will move around, swap positions and generally make it difficult for Liverpool. Defensively, however, they can be generous — 10 goals conceded in 7 Serie A games so far, 11 goals condeded in 6 Champions League games last season — and a bit scattergun upfront. In one less game, they’ve notched more shots than Liverpool (150 vs. 143) but they’ve also put less on target than Klopp’s men (46 vs. 60) and lag far behind in terms of shot accuracy (30.7% on target vs. 42.1% for Liverpool).Ancelotti has also rotated his squad, with Koulibaly and Insigne the only ever-presents so far. Judging by his starting line-ups, the major question would appear to be whether Mertens or Milik starts upfront, but it seems unlikely that the Belgian won’t start in a game where a loss would likely leave the Italians requiring 4 points from back-to-back games against PSG, with a trip to Anfield also to come in December.Napoli (possible): Ospina; Hysaj, Albiol, Koulibaly, Rui; Allan, Hamšík, Zieliński; Callejón, Mertens, Insigne.LiverpoolAfter 7 straight wins to start the season, the first time the club has managed that in the Premier League era, Liverpool have recently hit a speed bump in the form of Chelsea and, more specifically, Eden Hazard.However, lest this current run of 2 games without a win morph into something resembling the classic “Nimbo Cumulos” sketch in the Fast Show circa mid-nineties, where a single cloud in an otherwise pristinely blue Spanish sky triggers panic and even an emergency news report (“Sensacio! Nimbocumulus a costa!”), it’s worth noting that a win on Wednesday will send Liverpool into back-to-back games against Group C’s fourth-seeded Red Star Belgrade with the attainable prospect of sitting atop the group on 12 points by the time they visit Paris at the end of November. Which is to say nothing of what victory over Manchester City next Sunday would do for the club’s Premier League status...but that’s another day’s work, and a different competition.In other words, this is all going very well. If the first-XI that started at Stamford Bridge (Alisson, Alexander-Arnold, Gomez, Van Dijk, Robertson, Henderson, Wijnaldum, Milner, Mané, Firmino, Salah) has, of late, become Jürgen Klopp’s preferred starting lineup, there are at least three other players (Keita, Shaqiri and Sturridge) whose contributions so far could easily see them start in Naples on Wednesday. Previous Liverpool title challenges in 2009 and 2014 floundered on substitute benches that were stocked with attacking reserves like David N’gog, Nabil El Zhar, Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto and Victor Moses. To have a player on the bench who can do what Sturridge did on Saturday, or what Shaqiri did against Southampton, is a new and signifcant development.Don’t be surprised, then, if there are changes to the team for Wednesday, particularly in the context of the test to come on Sunday. Salah looked sharp against Chelsea everywhere except in front of goal, but Mané and Firmino were largely unable to influence the game, the former forcing one superb save from Arrizabalaga. The introductions of Shaqiri, Keita and Sturridge saved the day and, with the latter having now scored in his last three appearances, I’m fully expecting a different starting line-up in Naples. Elsewhere, with Lovren now back in contention following injury, it may be that Van Dijk is rested if there are still concerns over his ribs.Liverpool (possible): Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Gomez, Van Dijk, Robertson; Henderson, Wijnaldum, Keita; Shaqiri, Sturridge, Salah.Competition HistoryNapoliNapoli have taken part in this competition 7 times prior to this season and have never made it further than the last-16.1987/88: After hoisting their first scudetto in May 1987, Napoli’s maiden campaign in the European Cup didn’t last long. Back in those days it was an open draw and the Italian champions were landed with perennial (at the time) Spanish champions Real Madrid in Round 1. They went down 3-1 on aggregate, “El Buitre” himself applying the killer blow just before half-time in the second leg in the San Paolo.1990/91: Napoli at least got a win under their belts this time, beating up on Hungarians Újpesti Dózsa 5-0 on aggregate before running into a tough Spartak Moscow team in Round 2 that would make it all the way to a semi-final defeat at the hands of Chris Waddle’s Marseille. Both legs were scoreless and the Soviets (as they still were) prevailed on penalties. Maradona really didn’t cover himself in glory in this competition — he supposedly refused to travel to Moscow initially for the second leg against Spartak (“sleeping off the effects of a night of sex and cocaine out on the town”, according to Irish journalist Paddy Agnew), eventually hiring himself a private jet and sitting out the first-half as punishment. A home brace against Újpesti Dózsa stand as his only European Cup goals. 2011/12: Napoli’s joint-best performance in the competition saw them go agonisingly close to eliminating eventual winners Chelsea, which would have saved us all a lot of grief to be honest. 3-1 up from the first leg on the back of goals by their lethal strikeforce of Lavezzi and Cavani, Walter Mazzarri’s team regrettably couldn’t get the job done at Stamford Bridge, going down 4-1 after extra time. So yeah…thanks for that, lads.2013/14: They were back again two seasons later, this time under Rafael Benítez, but an absolute bastard of a group saw them eliminated on goal difference behind Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund and Arsenal. With all three finishing on 12 points, Napoli became the first team not to progress to the knockout stages with that amount. On the plus side, they went on to qualify for the competition again the following year, the first time they had ever made it 2 years in a row. However…2014/15: …they didn’t even reach the group stages, conceding 3 second-half goals to Athletic Bilbao in the San Mamés after Hamšík had put them 2-1 ahead on aggregate in the second leg of the final play-off round. Ouch. 2016/17: Now under Maurizio Sarri, they topped a group that included Benfica, Beşiktaş and Dynamo Kiev. They then proceeded to run into the Real Madrid juggernaut in the last-16 and went down 2-6 on aggregate. Ouch. Again. But at least it wasn’t the worst beating of the knockout stages — that prize went to Arsenal for their 10-2 hammering by Bayern.2017/18: Their last involvement in the competition before this season saw them finish third in the group thanks to their shocking away form (lost all 3) and a 2-4 destruction at home to Manchester City. They conceded 11 goals in 6 games in the process — let’s hope they’re still as generous.LiverpoolThere’s no need to go into Liverpool’s record in this competition — I’d be here all night. Suffice it to say that the club has competed 22 times (including an uninterrupted run of 9 straight seasons between 1976/77 and 1984/85 back when the price of entry was winning a League title or the European Cup itself), and have been to the final 8 times (including last season), winning 5 along the way.Previous MeetingsThere have only been two competitive meetings between the clubs, both of which took place in the Europa League group stages in 2010:21 Oct 2010 Napoli 0-0 LiverpoolThis was Liverpool’s seventh match without a win in the early days (weren’t they all?) of the Roy Hodgson era, a run that included those infamous defeats to Northampton Town, Blackpool and Everton. The group stages of the Europa League provided the one bright spot of Roy’s reign, with Liverpool already on their way to an unbeaten Group K record by the time they visited Naples. Not a huge amount to note here, other than Jonjo Shelvey making his full debut in an experimental Liverpool XI that was missing Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard by choice. Given that the likes of Paul Konchesky and Christian Poulsen started the game, it probably qualifies as a minor miracle that Liverpool managed a clean sheet against the likes of Edinson Cavani and Ezequiel Lavezzi.4 Nov 2010 Liverpool 3-1 Napoli (Gerrard x3; Lavezzi)Unlike the Northampton game a couple of months earlier, Roy had some quality stored on the bench for this one: 0-1 behind and second-best in the first-half, he brought Steven Gerrard on at half-time and the captain proceeded to score a 14-minute hat-trick towards the end of the game. Other than that, and the fact that I was watching it in Paris, I have no other positive memories of the game. This was a poorly-assembled and limited squad of players which had been deteriorating over several transfer windows, and the 18 on duty that night tells its own tale: Reina, Johnson, Konchesky, Kyrgiakos, Carragher, Meireles, Spearing, Poulsen, Shelvey, Jovanovic, N’gog. Subs: Hansen, Wilson, Kelly, Skrtel, Gerrard, Lucas, Eccleston.Finally, there was one other noteworthy aspect of Liverpool’s previous visit to Naples in October 2010: the familiar tales of violence, of vespa-riding thugs armed with knives slashing anything that looked English, of roaming groups armed with baseball bats and various other implements. One Liverpool supporter remembers it like this:3 Liverpool supporters were stabbed on that occasion and 4 others hospitalised along with them. Due to the tragic events before the first-leg of the Champions League semi-final against Roma last April, the second leg passed off without incident despite fears that one of the Italy’s most notorious groups of Ultras would wreak havoc on the visiting supporters. The increased focus on crowd behaviour in the run-up to the game brought about by the assault on Sean Cox helped, and Merseyside police have supposedly gone out to Naples to discuss safety concerns ahead of the game. The usual warnings apply for those who are travelling to support the team: be smart, be safe.Allez, allez, allez.
I'm not vaccinated against covid and ... I don't wear masks.
I watched a YouTube video and decided that Paul Konchesky looked like a player.
A dead animal is a dead animal. And a piece of meat is a piece of meat.
4 I need to wee, cover me tepid
Cover you in wee?
Jake is Donald Trump...Explains so much...
11 Oh wow they almost scored. We give it away with sloppy passing, TAA way up the pitch, they work it to Insigne but his shot is juuuuust wide.
We are record-breaking sloppy at the moment..
16. Keita is down here... Not sure why, he’s had a very rusty start to the game though...Doesn’t look like he’s gong to carry on,
