The opening weekend of Serie A saw an incredible thirty-five goals and featured some wonderfully open attacking football, quite at odds with the tactical and methodical reputation of Italy's top flight. Even the first match, a marquee match-up between two of last seasons best teams saw Milan and Lazio meet in a much less cagey encounter than most would expect.
However, the league has not undergone a miraculous transformation, but there is much different to this years landscape than perhaps any in recent memory and no two teams encapsulate that more so than Inter and Roma. The two clubs have been at the forefront of Calcio over the last five years, regularly going head-to-head for the Scudetto and the Italian Cup as the capital side became the only real threat to the post-Calciopoli dominance of the Nerazzurri.
It is a rivalry that will be renewed on Saturday night as they meet at San Siro in a fixture that was in danger of becoming tiresome in the last few years, so often have these two met. Yet there have been so many changes at each club it is hard to predict - outside of Javier Zanetti's hair being immaculate and Francesco Totti being, well, Francesco Totti - what to expect, especially with Inter's Gian Piero Gasperini making some frankly baffling personnel decisions thus far.
One position has, over the past week, garnered as much attention as any other however, and it is onto the men in goal where the spotlight has become focused. On the face of it the match should see an unquestionable and reliable 'keeper at either end, but both Julio Cesar and Maarten Stekelenburg have made some uncharacteristic mistakes already this season.
For the Roma man it is much less of an issue. Moving from a different league, into a team containing so many summer signings, at a club which has completely transformed itself in just three months all combines to give the Dutch international plenty of reason to not yet look 100% comfortable in his new surroundings. For his Brazilian counterpart however, it appears to be part of a much more worrying trend as his errors, apologies and subsequent walks home are becoming an all too frequent occurrence for regular watchers at Giuseppe Meazza.
Last season Cesar played in 45 games and made 126 saves, while his opposite number made 51 appearances and pulled off a remarkable 194 saves. That gave him an average of 3.8 saves per game ratio, compared to the modest 2.8 ratio of the Inter man. Interestingly Stekelenburg conceded 58 goals (1.05 per game) while Cesar was beaten 47 times (a remarkably similar 1.04 pg)
Stekelenburg kept an incredible 21 clean sheets last term while Cesar managed 18, which perhaps, given the different competitions (and Inter's struggles) was even more impressive. Both men helped their teams to trophies with Inter winning the Italian Cup, SuperCup and World Club Cup while Ajax won the Dutch League with their goalkeeper voted player of the year despite him even managing to drop the Eredivisie trophy during the victory parade.
While both are undoubtedly among the best in their position, each is in need of a good performance and a clean sheet to boost their confidence, yet the displays from Roma and Inter on the opening day, conceding six goals between them, make that look already highly unlikely.
Julio Cesar will not look back fondly on their previous meeting, losing the World Cup Quarter Final last summer and making some terrible mistakes in the process. Yet in South Africa it was Inter man Wesley Sneijder's two goals that saw off Brazil and Maarten Stekelenburg will hope to do much better this time around.
