Gattuso Brings Unbeaten Lazio Back to Naples — and Nobody Believes Them Yet

Lazio are top of Serie A, alone, for the first time in 16 years. Read that again, because the rest of Italy is still having trouble with it.

Ten games into the season, Gennaro Gattuso's side have won nine and drawn one. Nobody has beaten them. They have scored 24 and conceded eight, they have won six straight, and last Sunday they did the thing real contenders do — they went behind at home to Cagliari, to an M'Bala Nzola tap-in, and they pulled it back anyway. Gustav Isaksen curled in the equaliser. Andrea Pinamonti, off the bench, headed the winner seven minutes from time. Lazio 2, Cagliari 1, and sole possession of first place for the first time in 5,836 days.

It is, flatly, the best start to a season in the club's history. No Lazio team had ever won nine of its first ten. The last Lazio Scudetto was in 2000. And here is Gattuso, the man in charge of all of it, who told reporters his target is still 40 points and safety: "We still need 12 points to achieve the target we set at the start of the season. It is best that we don't look at the table right now, or it'll make us dizzy."

The market is dizzy on his behalf. This week, with Lazio three points clear at the top, Inter were still priced as heavy title favourites at 1.61 while the actual league leaders sat out at 10.99. Lazio's squad is valued ninth in Serie A — a fraction of Inter's or Juventus's. The table says one thing. Everybody's money says another. Sunday is where one of them blinks.

Because Sunday is not another home game against a side Lazio are supposed to beat. Sunday is the Maradona.

Gattuso knows that stadium from the other bench. He won the Coppa Italia there with Napoli in 2020. Now he walks back in with the leaders, a perfect away record — five played, five won, three goals conceded — and a strange hold over this fixture: Lazio have won their last four league visits to Naples.

Napoli, meanwhile, are a club holding its breath. Eighth in the table, 14 points from ten games, already nine points off the top four. Massimiliano Allegri's side lost 2-0 at Juventus last weekend, then went to Porto on Wednesday and took a 4-1 beating in the Champions League. Seven defeats in 14 games in all competitions. The injuries are stacking up in the worst places — Stanislav Lobotka, David Neres and Leonardo Spinazzola are all out — and with the international break arriving straight after this game, Italian reports are openly asking whether another bad result costs Allegri his job. Napoli need a reaction. Lazio are the worst possible opponent to need one against: rested, settled, and a full week removed from their last match while Napoli were getting run over in Portugal.

The comparison, plainly: Lazio arrive 1st with 28 points, unbeaten, the league's joint-tightest defence in this run and goals coming from everywhere — Isaksen and Tijjani Noslin have four apiece in the league run, Zaccagni has five assists, and the winner last week came from a substitute. Napoli arrive 8th with 14 points, four wins from ten, and a plus-four goal difference that tells the story of a season that never caught fire. Fourteen points separate them after ten rounds. A generation ago that sentence would have been written the other way round.

And Lazio do not even have to win to ruin everybody else's Sunday. Inter, three points back, host fourth-placed Como later that day — win, and if Lazio slip in Naples, Inter pull level at the top. Juventus go to Fiorentina in the night game with their own ground to make up. By Sunday night the top of Serie A could look completely different, or Lazio could be six points clear and impossible to laugh off any longer.

That is the real question Naples asks. Not whether Lazio are good — ten games settled that. Whether a team whose own manager talks about relegation points, whose own fans have spent the season protesting the owner, and whose title odds still read like a typo, can walk into the loudest away ground in Italy, against a wounded giant and a manager coaching for his future, and come out still unbeaten.

Gattuso, for his part, said it the way he has said it all season after the Cagliari win: "Without belief, we become a normal team."

Sunday, 12:30 in Naples — 03:30 PT — we find out how abnormal they really are.

Watch it: Napoli vs Lazio, Sunday Nov 8, 03:30 PT, Stadio Diego Armando Maradona. Follow the top of the table the same day: Inter vs Como, 09:00 PT; Fiorentina vs Juventus, 11:45 PT. More Serie A on the Serie A front.