Napoli's Left Flank: Two Men, 13 Games, 31 Goals

The stakes were simple enough before a ball was kicked: Napoli's season would hang on whether a 32-year-old Brazilian and a 32-year-old Spaniard could stay on the pitch together. Seventeen matches in, the answer is written in the starkest figures the campaign has produced.

In the 13 games Donaldo Meschini and Rubén Montes have both played, Napoli have won nine, drawn three and lost one. They have scored 2.4 goals a game and conceded 1.1. That is a side playing in full voice, and the left flank is where the tune starts.

In the four games without one of them, the numbers collapse. No wins. One draw. Three defeats. No goals at all — 0.0 a game — and 1.5 conceded. Four matches, four blanks, one point. It is not a dip; it is a different team wearing the same shirt.

Put the two sets side by side and the gap is the story of the autumn. Those 13 matches have produced 31 goals for Napoli; the four without have produced none, and a defence that ships a goal and a half each time has had nothing in front of it to hide behind. The partnership is not a luxury. It is the supply line.

Meschini, who arrived from Fortaleza Esporte Clube in August 2054 for £12.5m, has spent nine seasons at the club and made 412 appearances for it, with 16 goals. Montes came from Cádiz on 1 September 2059 for £14.3m and has 105 games and 24 goals in Naples. Both are 32. Neither is being asked to sprint past anyone for ninety minutes; they are being asked to be there, together, and the table of results says that is worth more than anything else on the teamsheet.

"When he is beside me, I know where the ball goes before it arrives," Meschini said this week. "It is not complicated. We have played it a thousand times." Montes put it more briefly: "We read the same game. When one of us is out, the page is blank."

The wider campaign has not been kind to that reading. Roma took three cold blows in October, and Juventus had already been edged in September. Those afternoons sit inside the 13 — the one defeat and the three draws — and they are the reason the partnership's record is strong rather than perfect. Even at full strength, Napoli have dropped points.

But the four games without one of them are the ones that should worry the club most, because they are the ones that produced nothing at all. Three months after the autumn's first questions were asked about this flank, the answer has not changed: with both, Napoli are a side worth watching; with one, they are a side waiting.

The season is not decided. It is merely, so far, counted — and the count is lopsided.