Inter: furious Chivu loses patience with his players in Bologna

Yesterday marked the sixth time Inter had fallen behind, the fourth in the league alone. They have always turned things around at home, but in the two Champions League matches, when the standard rose, a comeback was no longer a given. Cristian Chivu made his feelings known so forcefully that he lost his voice.

At half-time against Bologna, Chivu unleashed his fiercest dressing-room tirade since he began coaching Inter, eclipsing even the storm after last year's 4-3 Juve-Inter match. The walls of the Dall'Ara shook as he tore into everyone over the 40 minutes or so they had spent at the mercy of the waves. Inter woke up after his loudest outburst yet and played the second half with the authority of a top side.

With Chivu unable to speak, his assistant, Aleksandar Kolarov, took his place: "I wouldn't view even the first half so negatively; our approach wasn't all that wrong…," he admitted. "We made a mistake, but the team are applying themselves and know what they have to do: I would have taken a 3-1 win beforehand. Our players know how good they are, but there's an opponent too; we're not playing on our own. This time we raised the intensity in the second half and played great football; that's where the difference lies. The game is faster in Europe, and we always try to be aggressive there too. We're having some problems, but only in terms of results: there's still time to make up the points we've dropped along the way."