Numbers Corner: Inter stats for the nerds among us

Inter are not playing well recently and Mancini is trying to find the squaring of the circle of this team, but with very poor results. I am not saying that we don't have a good roster or that we have a bad coach, but what is clear, watching the matches, is that Inter are still hunting for the right chemistry to be finally able to play at the expected level.

Here are the most important numbers of yesterday's match against Sassuolo, a 3-1 defeat for Inter.

Useless ball possession

Inter had the ball the 71% of the time but that wasn't enough to score more than one goal (and even that came because of a careless pass from Magnanelli to Consigli) to a team that allowed us to beat their keeper 7 times in our last game against them. Disappointing.

Too much shots from outside the area

We shot a good number of times, but who watched the game surely noticed we had too much difficulties breaking into Sassuolo's box. 15 times Inter tried to score, but only in 4 occasions our players shot on target and 53% of our total attempts (8 shots) came from outside the area. we may have some good shooters, but this hasn't translated to goals lately and the inability to get inside the opponent's box has cost us a lot of points lately.

Passing the ball horizontally won't lead us anywhere

Inter is a team with a lot of good passers - even our attackers are - but for some mysterious reason (maybe the chemistry I addressed before?) they played the ball mostly horizontally and backwards (68% of Inter's passes were in these directions, 353 total) instead of trying to find their teammates with forward passes (only 32%, 165 total).

Lots of crosses

This is surely a good thing Inter should keep doing in future matches. Sure, yesterday Inter was playing without Icardi, the most threatening player in these situations, but I wanted to highlight at least this to save something from a bad, bad loss that should teach something to our team. The Nerazzurri crossed the ball 36 times, 28 times inside the 18 yard line, but the accuracy was absolutely disappointing: only 14% of them were on target, and yes, the absence of Icardi for most of the game weighed on that.

I hope Inter will use this two game losing streak to channel their "anger" in the right way as they will face Napoli this Tuesday in the Coppa Italia quarterfinals and given that the 3rd place is looking more unlikely we must try to get to this competition's final to secure us a spot at least in the Europa League.

Thanks to Goal.com for the statistics.