Gonzalo Higuain back to his best, and back for Argentina

Gonzalo Higuain is lighting up Serie A again, is the league’s top goalscorer and has earned a recall to the Argentina squad for the World Cup qualifier against Brazil. We look at his return to form this season.

If Argentina coach Gerardo Martino has been watching Italian football in the last week, he will probably be breathing a big sigh of relief just now. When he announced his squad earlier this week for Argentina’s crunch World Cup qualifier on November 12 against eternal rivals Brazil, he sprang a (minor) surprise by recalling Napoli’s talented striker Gonzalo Higuain.

In the last week, the in-form Higuain has scored vital and spectacular goals in successive wins against Chievo last Sunday and against Palermo on Wednesday night. Right now, 27-year-old Higuain is not only top of the Serie A goalscoring chart on eight goals, but he is also arguably the hottest one man strike force in Italian football.

With Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero both injured, you might argue that Martino had little option but to recall Higuain. Yet, Martino has gone back on his original call for Argentina’s two disappointing opening qualifiers, a 2-0 home defeat by Ecuador and a 0-0 away draw with Paraguay earlier this month.

When he failed to include Higuain in his squad for those games, many wondered if that was a vote of no confidence in a player who has missed match-winning chances in two painful Argentina defeats, namely to Germany in the 2014 World Cup final and against host nation Chile in this summer’s Copa America final.

In both those finals, Higuain missed a late chance to clinch the match. Worse still, against Chile, his miss in the penalty shoot-out proved crucial. All of that, however, seems to have been forgotten. Certainly, the quality of Higuain’s current football would suggest that the ex-Real Madrid player has long ago absorbed those disappointments.

We have already suggested in this blog that Napoli, currently second in Serie A, two points behind new leaders, AS Roma, are clearly contenders to regain a league title that they have not won since the Maradona days of the early ‘90s. That opinion is based on many different factors but not least among those is Higuain.

Just take the two goals he has scored in the last four days, in the 1-0 win against Chievo and the 3-1 win against Palermo. Faced with a well organised, very defensive Chievo on Sunday, Napoli seemed headed for a frustrating 0-0 away draw. Chievo were so cautious that they actually got into the Napoli half only once during the first 45 minutes. Napoli were having real difficulty converting their territorial and possession dominance into chances.

As the game moved to the 60th minute, Higuain produced a match-winning pearl. As Algerian full-back Faouzi Ghoulam made ground down the left, Higuain went on a diagonal run towards the near post. The pass was good, the run perfectly timed but the cherry on the cake was the speed with which Higuain blasted home his shot, with a vicious first time, left foot shot on the run.

Against Palermo, it was more of the same, except that this time Higuain unblocked an awkward looking game in the first-half. With Napoli again dominant but again failing to convert the dominance into goals, Higuain picked up a innocuous looking ball on the edge of the penalty area in the 40th minute. Then, as if he were tired of messing about, he unleashed a right footed missile that gave Palermo goalkeeper, Brazilian Rafael, no earthly chance.

Left foot, right foot, on the run, standing still, it matters little, Higuain is very much the real thing up front. More than that, though, he is a complete footballer capable of involvement in every moment of Napoli’s constructive game.

As the excitement begins to mount in Naples, coach Maurizio Sarri is working hard to play down fan and media expectations. We are the same team as were six weeks ago, he said this week: “That is, people were saying then that, by comparison with last year, we are a weaker team this year, led by a coach who is not good enough for an important club like this…”

With five successive wins behind them - against Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina, Chievo and Palermo – Napoli have clearly overcome their slow seasonal start. As the team gets better, so too does the Higuain contribution become more important. The remarkable thing is that coach Sarri says that Higuain still has “room for improvement”. Really?

Next stop on the Higuain-Napoli schedule comes away to Genoa on Sunday. Given that the leaders, AS Roma, have a difficult game away to Inter Milan, the Neopolitans might even find themselves top of the table on Sunday were they to beat Genoa.

As for Higuain and Argentina, what chance is there that he will start in that crunch classic against Brazil? Every chance, we would argue.