Inter beat Monza 4-1 at San Siro on Saturday, and the margin was built in a nine-minute stretch after the interval in which Cristian Chivu's side scored three times without reply, turning a one-goal advantage into a rout that the scoreline barely needed to exaggerate.
The match opened cleanly enough. Inter midfielder Hakan Çalhanoğlu put the Nerazzurri ahead in the sixth minute, Andy Diouf supplying the assist, and for twenty minutes the home side looked in control. Monza's equalizer, when it came, was not without quality: Gustavo Varela levelled in the 29th minute, Mathis Mout the provider, and Ivan Juric's side had briefly made a contest of it. The final ten minutes of the first half grew fractious — Lautaro Martínez collected a yellow card in the 34th minute, Çalhanoğlu another in first-half stoppage time — and the teams went in level.
The second half was a different match. Piotr Zielinski restored Inter's lead in the 48th minute, and then Chivu made a double substitution in the 54th that changed the texture of the game entirely: Ange-Yoan Bonny replaced Lautaro Martínez, and Petar Sučić came on for the booked Çalhanoğlu. Within sixty seconds of those changes, Inter's Francesco Pio Esposito — assisted again by Diouf — made it 3-1. Eight minutes later, Esposito turned provider, and Inter defender Yann Bisseck arrived to finish and make it four. From the moment Zielinski scored in the 48th to Bisseck's goal in the 63rd, Inter had scored three times in fifteen minutes against a Monza side that had no answer.
The player who threaded through the afternoon most consistently was Inter's Andy Diouf. Two assists — the opener for Çalhanoğlu and the third goal for Esposito — placed him at the centre of Inter's attacking construction. His contribution was not incidental: both goals he created came at structurally important moments, the first establishing the tone inside six minutes, the second arriving immediately after the substitutions that might have disrupted Inter's rhythm. Diouf was withdrawn in the 75th minute for Luis Henrique, by which point the work was done.
Monza arrived at San Siro having spent the summer in Serie B, and the gap in competitive rhythm showed in the second half. Juric's side had beaten Avellino 3-0 in their most recent outing before this fixture, but that was a different level of opposition, and the step up was visible once Inter found their second-half tempo. Varela's equalizer gave Monza a foothold they could not hold: the three substitutions Juric made in the 70th minute — Omari Forson, Nicolas Galazzi, and Patrick Cutrone all introduced simultaneously — came after the game had already been decided. A yellow card for Lorenzo Lucchesi in the 84th minute, followed by his immediate withdrawal, added a note of disorder to a difficult afternoon.
Inter's form across their last five matches — a window that spans Serie A and Coppa Italia — reads W3 D2 L0, with thirteen goals scored and five conceded. The last three of those matches tell a slightly more cautious story: one win and two draws, with eight scored and five conceded. This result, then, represents a sharpening of the attacking edge rather than a continuation of recent caution, and the manner of the second-half scoring — three goals in fifteen minutes, two of them arriving after substitutions — suggests Chivu has depth in his squad capable of accelerating a match rather than merely managing it.
A month from now, this fixture will be remembered not for the scoreline but for what Diouf's two assists revealed: that Inter's attacking construction does not depend on any single player to initiate it.