Udinese – Inter Preview-ette

By: Johonna | November 7th, 2008

What: Inter v Udinese
When: Sunday, November 9, 3:00pm local time (6am Pacific, 9am Eastern).
Where: San Siro, Milan
Referee: Emidio Morganti
How to Watch: “live” on Fox Soccer or streaming.

Udinese is a hard team to beat – especially for Inter. Even in our breakout 2006/2007 season when we beat just about everyone, we only managed ties with Udinese. In all competitions, you have to back to 2006 to find an Inter victory. Of course, you have to go back another 2 years to find an Udinese victory, so it is not all bad.

To add to our historical difficulty with Udinese, we come in to this game a little… well… shaky. We were dangerously error-prone against Anorthosis — as Mou said: “We scored three in our goal and three in their goal.” Horrors. Then, although we managed to scrape a win away to Reggina, we conceded two goals and missed more opportunities than I care to admit. So, here we languish at (gulp) third place, equal but for goal differential with Udinese. In terms of the table, we must win. I must assume that Milan will beat Lecce Sunday night, and to keep pace, we must win.

Last year (see photo above), this fixture was our opening match of the season. We were sloppy and JC was sent off for handling the ball outside his area. An then, there was the own-goal. All and all, not our best showing. Here, see for yourself:

Moving on

It is too early for Mou to announce his call-up list so it is difficult to choose the lineup. We have definite questions at the back and our midfield is a little tired. With all our injuries, Mou has even been changing up the formation so we cannot even go there.

There are a few safe bets: JC in goal, Maicon and Maxwell at the right and left, Cambiasso in the midfield, and Ibra, Quaresma and probably Balotelli up front.

Questions: Cordoba and who in defense? Adriano, yes or no? Zanetti, Vieira, and/or Stankovic?

Hopefully Mou can pull something together for Sunday afternoon, because Udinese are just the team to take full advantage of any defensive errors. As Channel 4 point out:

The Zebrette have been on fine form without their first-choice defensive partnership though. That has been largely down to their impressive attack and you have to go back all the way to Week 3 to find a game where they scored less than two goals in a game.

Great.

It is not like we cannot win this game. If the squad can find their feet and their confidence, we can win. We have done it before and there is no reason why we cannot do it again.

Ragazzi, dobbiamo vincere quindi ci sarà vincere la Domenica.

FORZA INTER

{on a side note, I am going out of town again so you are all on your own for this game}

No keeper today. I give you Marco instead.