Napoli title bid all but over after loss to Lazio
Napoli's slim hopes of defending its Serie A league title all but ended with a 2-0 home defeat by Lazio which left it 12 points adrift of leader Inter Milan with five games left to play.
Inter, which beat Cagliari 3-0 on Saturday (AEST), is on 78 points, with Napoli on 66. AC Milan is three points behind ahead of its game at Hellas Verona while Lazio is ninth in the standings on 47 points.
The visitors took a sixth-minute lead through Matteo Cancellieri and Lazio could afford to spurn a penalty chance, with Vanja Milinkovic-Savic saving Mattia Zaccagni's spot-kick, before Toma Basic doubled its advantage 12 minutes after the break.
Lazio, managed by former Napoli coach Maurizio Sarri, never looked like allowing a sluggish home side back into the game and came away victorious from Stadio Diego Armando Maradona for the fourth successive season.
At the turn of the year, Serie A was enjoying a mouth-watering title race, with four points separating the top five sides.
As Inter forged full steam ahead, however, its rivals fell away and Antonio Conte's Napoli appeared to have little fight left as the Scudetto slipped out of reach, with last weekend's draw at Parma a blow from which it failed to recover.
"Today we were really flat, there was no mental energy," Napoli's Leonardo Spinazzola said.
"It wasn't physical fatigue, personally I think it was a reaction to last Sunday. We've spent the whole year pushing and chasing, and at Parma the flame went out."
Napoli was up against it early on when Cancellieri steered home a shot from the edge of the six-yard area after Kenneth Taylor's cutback from the byline.
The home side piled forward but without creating any clear-cut chances, and Stanislav Lobotka's foul on Tijjani Noslin gave Lazio a chance to double its lead from the penalty spot.
After his spot-kick was saved, an off-balance Zaccagni blasted the rebound over with Cancellieri better placed to strike.
Milinkovic-Savic pulled off saves from Cancellieri and Nuno Tavares to keep the hosts in the game as they trudged off to boos from the home fans at the break.
After a scrappy opening to the second half, Lazio grabbed a second goal. Tavares stormed down the left wing and after Cancellieri missed a simple tap-in at the back post, the ball fell to the unmarked Basic who made no mistake.
Napoli substitute Alisson Santos clipped the outside of the post but the defending champion went down with a whimper in a game in which it failed to register a single shot on target.
Conte labelled the defeat as a kick in the teeth, and with his side not yet be sure of a UEFA Champions League place, he knows his team must recover quickly ahead of its next league clash, against with Cremonese, which preludes a potentially pivotal contest against Como.
"We have taken a kick to the teeth today," he said.
"Now, we rest and, on Monday, we must make the most of this experience. If we don't, it would be serious. We need to understand why and put things right.
"This was not a good match from us, we put very little quality in midfield. Lazio waited for us and hit on the counter. We had [almost] 70 per cent possession and did not manage a single shot on target.
"We had studied the match, but we were not good enough. When this team lacks energy, quality drops. Perhaps, I was not good enough at sensing the malaise that developed."
