Roma and Inter meet at the Olimpico with the chance to stand alone at the top of Serie A, but Ottavio Bianchi sees the fixture as an early mountain rather than the finish line. The former coach of both clubs believes the season has already shown how quickly its course can change.
“The championship has only just begun and there have already been dismissals and setbacks,” Bianchi said. “That tells you it is uphill, as usual.” His comparison is with the Giro d’Italia: a race built in stages, where a fast opening matters but endurance decides who has real weight.
Quick facts
- Roma and Inter are level at the summit before their Olimpico meeting.
- The winner can become Serie A’s first outright leader of the season.
- Roma have impressed under Gian Piero Gasperini, with Donyell Malen and Paulo Dybala in strong form.
- Inter have scored freely but have also conceded heavily in the early rounds.
- Bianchi named Lulli and Diouf as early positive surprises, while urging patience over the next 20 matches.
Bianchi, who coached Roma at the start of the 1990s and Inter later in that decade, said major matches do not require elaborate emotional preparation. In his view, it is the apparently routine fixture that often drains a side mentally and demands greater sacrifice.
He described both teams as being in excellent condition. Roma, he said, have started “not well, but extremely well”, while Inter have been doing their job and collecting the results required to remain first.
Inter’s open early numbers do not particularly trouble him. The Nerazzurri have found goals but allowed plenty too, yet Bianchi noted that Cristian Chivu has not publicly appeared concerned. Any real concern, he suggested, belongs inside the dressing room, where a coach is entitled to keep a degree of concealment.
For Bianchi, the table remains the essential measure. Results are supporting Chivu, and occupying first place in any manner gives a club a significant advantage over those chasing from behind.
Roma’s progress is no accident
Roma’s start has not surprised Bianchi. He pointed first to Gasperini’s experience and standing, then to the benefit of a second campaign with the same coach after last season’s return to the Champions League.
Malen’s adaptation has also caught the eye. Bianchi said the forward has looked as if he has always belonged at Roma, while Dybala is operating in excellent condition. Taken together, he considers the Giallorossi’s position confirmation rather than a sudden revelation.
That does not mean the capital is an uncomplicated place in which to pursue trophies. Bianchi, who knows the city from inside the club, described Roma as a distinctive world that is difficult to understand fully even after living it.
He believes the intensity of the rivalry with Lazio can consume energy that might otherwise be directed towards wider objectives. In his view, the Inter-Milan rivalry does not create quite the same atmosphere in Milan.
Still, Bianchi feels Gasperini can think ambitiously. He regards the coach, squad and club as high-level, and said Roma can aim for the highest targets, even while acknowledging football’s usual reluctance to declare ambitions too openly.
The team before the duel of forwards
The match has been framed around Malen and Inter captain Lautaro Martinez, but Bianchi refused to reduce it to a contest between two attackers. His coaching instinct remains to look at the collective that gives leading players the conditions to arrive in dangerous areas with energy.
“Nobody wins alone,” he said. He recalled an old coaching lesson: the group enhances the individual, and the individual’s qualities in turn lift the group.
Bianchi faced this fixture several times in his career, including Roma’s two-legged UEFA Cup final defeat to Inter in 1991. Yet he said there is no past Roma-Inter match he would choose to replay; once a game ended, his attention immediately moved to preparing the next one.
That is also how he approaches Sunday’s contest now: by enjoying the next chapter rather than revisiting an old one.
Long-term questions remain open
Bianchi believes Chivu could build a successful and durable cycle at Inter, although he stressed that Italian football makes lengthy projects harder than in other countries. He said the league has changed from the era when nearly all the world’s best players came to Italy, apart from Pelé, and is no longer in the same leading position it once held.
Among the early individual stories, Bianchi singled out Lulli for Roma because few expected such continuity, and Diouf for Inter. But he placed a firm condition on both assessments: revisit them after another 20 games.
Two, three or four strong performances are within reach of many players, he argued. Maintaining that level until the end is the true test, and both players would benefit from keeping their feet on the ground.
For the same reason, Bianchi rejects the idea that Roma-Inter can already be called a Scudetto decider after four matches. Napoli, he noted, are among the sides capable of rejoining the contest, while the wider lesson of Serie A is that a season can turn suddenly.
The Olimpico will therefore offer an important early verdict, not a final one. One team may leave as the league’s sole leader, but the long road Bianchi describes will still have many stages left to climb.
