Frosinone beat Sassuolo 4-2 at the Stadio Benito Stirpe on Friday evening, and the result belongs almost entirely to one man: Frosinone forward Antonio Raimondo, who scored three times between the 26th and 57th minutes to turn a match that had briefly slipped level into a comfortable home victory.
The opening exchanges suggested something more contested. Frosinone midfielder Giacomo Calò gave the hosts the lead in the 9th minute, only for Sassuolo midfielder Domenico Berardi — assisted by Darryl Bakola — to level in the 15th. A VAR cancellation of a Frosinone goal by Giorgi Kvernadze in the 17th minute kept the score at 1-1 and, for a moment, gave Sassuolo reason to believe the game was turning their way. It was not. Raimondo scored in the 26th minute to put Frosinone back ahead, then added a second in the 30th to double the lead. Sassuolo midfielder Kristian Thorstvedt pulled one back in the 37th to make it 3-2 at the break, but the contest's decisive passage had already been written: two goals in four minutes from Raimondo had taken the game away from Alberto Aquilani's side before half-time.
The match was effectively sealed in the 57th minute, when Raimondo completed his hat-trick to restore the two-goal cushion at 4-2. Sassuolo's response was immediate in terms of personnel — Thorstvedt was withdrawn for Kieron Bowie just a minute later — but the structural problem was already irreversible. Three further Sassuolo substitutions followed before the 70th minute, a volume of change that spoke to the scale of the task Aquilani faced. None of it altered the scoreline.
Raimondo was the axis around which this result rotated. Three goals across the second half of the first period and the opening of the second gave Frosinone a lead that Sassuolo's attacking moments — real as they were — could never quite threaten. The hat-trick in the 57th minute was the decisive goal, arriving at a moment when Sassuolo had just spent twenty minutes trying to find a way back into the match. That Raimondo was withdrawn only in the 90th minute, replaced by Daniel Bîrligea, underlines how central he remained to Massimiliano Alvini's plans throughout.
Sassuolo's regret is the eleven-minute window between the 26th and 37th minutes. Having equalised at 1-1 and seen a Frosinone goal disallowed, they conceded twice in rapid succession before Thorstvedt's reply made the half-time scoreline look closer than the game's momentum warranted. Berardi's equaliser was the high point of their evening; after that, the visitors never led and never truly controlled the match. Arriving at the Stirpe with one win from their last five across all competitions, Sassuolo carried a fragility that Frosinone — sharper and more direct in the decisive moments — exposed without mercy.
The result sharpens Frosinone's recent trajectory in a meaningful way. Alvini's side came into this fixture having taken four points from their last three Serie A matches, a sequence that included a 3-0 defeat away at Napoli. Across the last five matches in all competitions they had collected eight points — solid but not emphatic. Including this win, those five-match figures move to ten points, with three wins and one draw: a considerably more convincing picture. Sassuolo's direction runs the other way. Including this defeat, they have taken five points from their last five across all competitions, and their last three now read: no wins, one draw, two defeats, one point.
A hat-trick from Antonio Raimondo in thirty-one minutes of football is what this match will be remembered for — and the fact that it came after Frosinone had been pegged back to 1-1 makes it the more telling.