Paolo Di Canio’s Sky Sport contribution to the post-mortem is concise and technically specific — focused on a single moment, a single player, and the precise defensive mechanism that broke down for Lazio’s second goal.
The goal: Isaksen, Lazio’s wide player who Kovačević had identified before kick-off as “venomous, one who hurts you in different ways,” cuts inside and scores to double the lead in the second half. The question: how did the defensive unit allow him the space and time to do it?
Di Canio’s verdict, directed at Jhon Lucumí: “Lucumí had to make a decision there — defenders cannot stand there like ice hockey goalkeepers. He needed to take two steps forward. We are talking about distance. Bremer had an opponent to deal with; Lucumí had nobody. The mistake is his. But if Çelik did not have the certainty that someone was going to come and provide cover on the doubling, then at that point he should have stayed with the wide player — to give a signal to his teammates at the very least.”
The Tactical Failure — Distance and Decision
The ice hockey goalkeeper image is characteristically Di Canio: vivid, immediate, and precise. A goalkeeper in ice hockey stands in the crease and reacts to shots — passive, stationary, waiting for the ball to come to him. A central defender must be the opposite: proactive, aggressive, taking ground, imposing the duel before the attacker can build momentum. Lucumí, in Di Canio’s reading, did neither. He stood his ground in a no-man’s land — too far back to block the shot cleanly, too far forward to retreat if Isaksen moved past him — in exactly the manner that left Isaksen the option to take his touch and strike.
The secondary critique — directed at Çelik — is about systemic communication rather than individual technique. If Çelik was pressing Isaksen on the outside, he needed to know that Lucumí would come to cover the inside. When that cover did not arrive, the right-back faced an impossible choice: maintain pressure on the outside and leave the inside open, or drop off and give Isaksen space to cross. Either way, the absence of defensive certainty behind him was the root cause. Lucumí’s passivity — standing, waiting, not stepping — is where that absence began.
