Inter's bench overturns Bologna as Palladino suffers first defeat
Marcus Thuram, Carlos Augusto and Ange-Yoan Bonny turned a half-time deficit into a 3-1 win at the Dall'Ara, with Inter's substitutes again proving decisive.
Inter came from behind to beat Bologna 3-1 at the Dall'Ara, handing Raffaele Palladino his first defeat since taking charge and extending a run of Serie A comebacks that has become a defining trait of this Nerazzurri side.
Tommaso Pobega put the hosts ahead inside ten minutes, finishing a counter-attack sparked by a Juan Miranda interception. Marcus Thuram levelled just before half-time with a flicked header from a Nicolò Barella cross, and Carlos Augusto and Ange-Yoan Bonny, both introduced from the bench, added second-half goals to settle it, as reported by Football Italia.
The result arrived days after Inter had been beaten 4-3 at home by Club Brugge in the Champions League, a result that also cost them Lautaro Martinez to a thigh injury expected to keep him out for a month. Benjamin Pavard, Curtis Jones and John Stones were already unavailable, according to Football Italia.
That Inter still found a way to win away from home, with their first-choice striker missing and a defence already thinned out, says something about the squad Cristian Chivu has assembled rather than any flaw in Bologna's approach. Palladino's team were the better side for long stretches and still lost.
Bologna's early control did not survive the second half
Bologna started on the front foot and deserved their lead. Pobega's opener followed a sequence of early chances, including a dangerous Pobega cross in the opening seconds and a Lukasz Skorupski save at the other end to deny Barella, and Niccolò Cambiaghi twice threatened before half-time, once forcing the side-netting and once seeing a corner rebound cannon off the crossbar via Pobega.
What undid Bologna was not a drop in intensity but Inter's refusal to stop creating. Josep Martinez was called into two sharp saves either side of half-time, denying Pio Esposito and Nadir Zortea, and the pressure that produced Thuram's equaliser never really eased. By the time Carlos Augusto scored in the 69th minute, Bologna had already survived a Petar Sucic chance that hit the post from an open goal.
The injuries to Riccardo Orsolini and Emil Holm, both ruled out for several weeks according to Football Italia, cost Palladino two players capable of relieving that pressure from wide areas. Without them, Bologna had no outlet once Inter settled into the game, and the longer it went on, the more it resembled a siege.
Inter's substitutes did the damage again
Every goal Inter scored after the equaliser involved a player who started the match on the bench. Andy Diouf and Piotr Zielinski combined to set up Carlos Augusto's finish, and the fourth-minute passage that produced Bonny's goal ran through Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Hakan Calhanoglu before Carlos Augusto squared for a simple tap-in.
That pattern matters beyond this one match. With Lautaro Martinez out for a month and the central defence already stretched, Inter's capacity to change a game from the bench, rather than relying solely on a settled starting XI, is becoming the mechanism that keeps results coming while the squad absorbs its injury list.
What the shot count says and does not say
Bologna held 65 percent of possession and had 17 shots to Inter's 11, according to the match statistics recorded by Football Italia, yet only eight of those attempts were on target compared with Inter's four. Territorial control did not translate into the chances that mattered most, while Inter's efficiency in the moments that counted, two goals from close range after sustained pressure, decided the contest.
Palladino's Bologna had taken four points from their previous two outings, a draw with Torino and a win at Lecce, before this defeat. Matteo Darmian, who joined the club as a free agent on October 8, faced his former side for the first time but could not prevent the pattern that has followed Inter through this stretch of the season: fall behind, keep creating, and let the bench finish the job.