Champions Inter deny would-be title rivals Roma as Martínez haunts Gasperini | Nicky Bandini

Gian Piero Gasperini could not keep himself from smiling. His Roma team had just squandered a two-goal lead at home to Inter but as he crossed the Stadio Olimpico pitch to greet the man who had led the visitors’ comeback, his lips formed into a grin.

“He always scores against me”, explained a laughing Gasperini when he was asked what he had said to Lautaro Martínez a short while after. “I told him to stop it! He does it to everyone, though. He’s a great champion, everyone thinks very highly of him, even if he makes all of us suffer.”

The game had finished 2-2, Martínez’s second-half goals cancelling out a pair from Manu Koné. Two points dropped for Gasperini’s Giallorossi, yet also one made in the standings and one to their rivals, to their fans, to themselves. After winning their opening four games, they had stood toe to toe with the champions and landed confident punches, even if they could not find a knockout blow.

At the start of this second season under Gasperini, Roma look more than ever like a team in his image: taking the game to their opponents high up the pitch, engaging man-to-man and seeking opportunity from individual duels.

The risks were evident even in the moments leading up to Koné’s sixth-minute opener, with possession swapping rapidly and the Roma centre-back Leonardo Balerdi staying alert to intercept a through-ball from Yann Bisseck for Martínez. Roma’s rewards were reaped when Paulo Dybala’s cross was headed down by Nahuel Molina for Koné to sweep home.

Koné is an unlikely scoring threat. He has found the net twice in each of his two seasons at Roma but matched that by the 37th minute of this game, arriving at the edge of the six-yard box to convert again from another Dybala delivery, this time after a touch from Gianluca Mancini. The goal was initially disallowed before a VAR review confirmed neither player had been offside.

Roma had been the better team but also ridden their luck. Not long before Koné’s second, Martínez missed an open goal from point-blank range and Alessandro Bastoni hit the post from a narrow angle. These Inter warnings went unheeded. Less than a minute into the second half, Martínez released Marcus Thuram down the left and the Argentinian sprinted through the middle to receive the return, finishing brilliantly into the bottom corner in between three defenders.

If Roma are establishing their identity in year two under Gasperini, then perhaps the same is true for Inter under Cristian Chivu. They are, to belabour our previous boxing metaphor, Serie A’s Rocky Balboa, a team who can walk – sometimes quite naively – into a flurry of punches, weather all of them and swing back twice as hard.

This was the fourth game in a row that Inter had fallen 2-0 behind and the third of those in which they avoided a defeat. The champions overcame such deficits to beat Napoli and Udinese this month and might have done the same away to Real Madrid in the Champions League if it weren’t for some brilliant goalkeeping by Thibaut Courtois.

Here, Mile Svilar kept Inter at bay. Roma’s goalkeeper made a stunning reflex stop to keep out Thuram’s header at a corner, before Martínez nodded the rebound on to the bar, when Inter’s talisman finally equalised in the 79th minute.

Inter had created more than enough chances to deserve the draw. Yet things could have gone differently still. In the 68th minute, with the score still 2-1, Donyell Malen brought down a Dybala corner and swivelled to fire a rocket into the face of Inter’s keeper Josep Martínez.

It was a thrilling spectacle for the neutral, and a game which both sides might walk away from feeling both encouragement and frustration. Away from home, against one of their most likely challengers for the title, Inter had reminded us once again of their resilience and depth. Owning the best attacker in the league helps a great deal.

Still, it cannot really be a sustainable plan to keep spotting your opponents a two-goal head-start. One Inter player after another was asked why they keep opening games so badly, and all came back with some variation on: “I have no idea.” Chivu started his post-game interview on Dazn by saying: “I’m going to talk about the second half, because the things I had to say about the first will stay between me and the team.”

Roma have the opposite problem, repeatedly starting well only to allow opponents into games. All three times they have failed to keep a clean sheet this season – against Inter, Atalanta and Fenerbahce – they have conceded within three minutes of the second-half restart.

Gasperini had already acknowledged the trend after Roma’s Champions League draw with the Turkish side, nodding to Agatha Christie with his joking assessment that “two coincidences are a proof”. In her original, of course, three is the number required to meet that threshold. A number which has now been reached.

“We need to keep our focus on our own business,” he said when asked whether his team was ready to compete for the Scudetto. “We need to take this awareness that, in the right conditions, we can be a really good, dangerous, team.”

That they most certainly are. Malen might not have scored, but he has six goals already in this Serie A season – two more than Martínez – continuing the prolific form since joining from Aston Villa in January. Dybala has four recorded assists and that does not include either goal against Inter, despite both being the result of his delivery.

Gasperini’s three-pronged attack of those two with Matías Soulé, or the 19-year-old Rodrigo Mora, is fast becoming one of the most menacing in Serie A. Meanwhile the recovery speed of Balerdi, signed from Marseille, looks a huge asset to a team playing with such a high defensive line.

The unanswered question is whether this team has the depth to sustain a challenge to Inter – whose strength in that area was on display again. Chivu could bring Petar Sucic off the bench to replace a struggling Curtis Jones, as well as Carlos Augusto for Federico Dimarco. He kept Martínez and Thuram on until the 90th minute, in recognition of how well they were playing, but Francesco Pio Esposito and Ange-Yoan Bonny are extraordinarily strong late replacements.

Roma need to see more from their most expensive summer signing, Santiago Castro, as an alternative in their own attack, but after five games Gasperini’s glass is more than half full. “We played Inter when they are in peak condition,” he added. “Maybe, over the course of a season, it won’t always be that way.”

And perhaps there will even come a day when Martínez doesn’t score against him. Then again, perhaps not. According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, the Argentinian is unbeaten in 17 games against teams coached by Gasperini, winning 12 and drawing five, while racking up 11 goals.

“Una sentenza”, as they say in Italy – an inescapable sentence. But Martínez is only one part of the bigger picture. This September clash between defending champions and would-be contenders left us with more intriguing questions than definitive answers.