Marín tells Napoli to regroup after San Siro collapse

The Spanish centre-back posted on Instagram hours after Napoli threw away a 2-0 lead at Inter, calling for the squad to stick together. He wrote it as the player who took an elbow from Lautaro Martinez in the same game.

by Gennaro SanninoSunday 6 September, 19:46 CET· 1 hour ago

Marín con la maglia del SSC Napoli — Foto: napolita.it

Rafa Marín took to Instagram hours after the final whistle at San Siro to say what Napoli had failed to do on the pitch: respond.

"We had the win in our hands and it slipped away again, painfully," the defender wrote, sparing no judgement on a match Napoli had under control.

The word "again" is not incidental. Napoli had already dropped points at home to Como, and on Saturday the pattern repeated in reverse: a lead built, then lost. Napoli led 2-0 through Matteo Politano in the 50th minute and Rasmus Höjlund in the 53rd, set up by Giovanni Di Lorenzo. Inter then turned the game around with Lautaro Martinez in the 56th minute, Marcus Thuram in the 82nd, and Martinez again in the 90th. In 34 minutes, from Inter's first goal to the final whistle, the match changed hands completely.

Marín was not just a defender trying to hold the line that night. He was also on the receiving end of an elbow from Lautaro Martinez late in the second half, an incident that went unpunished with a second yellow despite a VAR review. The call to regroup, this time, comes from a player who took a hit himself.

The rest of his message looked forward, in the language of a dressing room rather than a press release.

Adesso bisogna rialzarsi. Si va avanti. Questo è il Napoli. Siamo uno, e insieme ne usciremo.

Those words carry the weight of the table they were written against: 12th place, 3 points from three games, one win and two defeats, 5 goals scored and 5 conceded. The unity Marín calls for on social media is exactly what went missing in the closing stages at San Siro, when Napoli stopped controlling a game they had in hand. A dressing room can feel united, but the real test comes on the pitch, not on Instagram.

The first chance to prove it comes on Wednesday 9 September, 21:00 CET (20:00 UK, 15:00 ET) at the Maradona: Napoli's Champions League debut against Arsenal, head coach Massimiliano Allegri's first European game since taking over from Antonio Conte. It is a different competition, with its own table and its own rules, but the question hanging over Napoli is the same one Marín raised: whether "we are one" stays a slogan or becomes a team that no longer falls apart when a lead needs defending.