Inter Milan Beat Venezia 2-0 Thanks to Two Own Goals

By TaazaPulse News Desk · Published: 29 October 2026 · TaazaPulse International Desk

Inter Milan beat Venezia 2-0 at the Stadio Pierluigi Penzo on Wednesday night without scoring a goal of their own making: both Inter goals were Venezia own goals, three minutes apart, in a match the bottom club had fought to a standstill for 79 minutes. Matías Moreno deflected a Marcus Thuram cross into his own net, then Redouane Halhal turned a Carlos Augusto header the same way, and Inter left the lagoon level on points with Serie A leaders Lazio.

There are defeats that confirm a team's level, and defeats that feel like theft. For Venezia, bottom of the table with three points and now eight defeats from nine matches, this was the second kind. They had a goal disallowed by VAR for a marginal offside, struck the crossbar, and matched a heavily rotated Inter for nearly 80 minutes. Then, in three minutes, two of their own defenders did what Inter's attack had failed to do all night.

Venezia fight, and the woodwork fights back

Davide Nicola's side played with the organisation of a team that knows its survival depends on nights like this: compact, disciplined, and dangerous in bursts. Lion Lauberbach thought he had given them the lead, only for VAR to rule the goal out for a marginal offside — the kind of decision that feels, to a team at the bottom, like the season in miniature. Venezia also hit the crossbar, and Akor Adams was flagged offside in another promising position. Inter's goalkeeper Ivan Provedel made four saves across the night, several of them essential.

Inter, for their part, were poor for long stretches. Cristian Chivu rotated heavily, as a coach with a derby on Saturday reasonably would, and the rotated side played — in Chivu's own post-match admission — "without conviction". The league leaders-in-waiting did not create a clear opening of their own in the first half and were grateful to reach the final quarter of the match level. What they had, and Venezia did not, was depth on the pitch in the decisive minutes and the game's luck running entirely one way.

Three minutes of cruelty

The breakthrough, when it came in the 79th minute, was an own goal: Thuram drove a low cross into the six-yard box and Moreno, stretching to intercept, deflected it past his own goalkeeper. Three minutes later it happened again — Carlos Augusto's header, Halhal's touch, 2-0. Two own goals in three minutes, both from the kind of defensive interventions that are correct in principle and catastrophic in outcome. Nicola stood on the touchline watching a point his team had earned dissolve into the lagoon air.

Chivu did not pretend otherwise afterwards. His side had been "lucky", he conceded — a strikingly honest verdict from a winning coach, and an accurate one. Inter have now scored in 19 consecutive league matches, a run that survived even this night of own goals, and they sit level on 25 points with Lazio, whose start is the best of the three-points-for-a-win era. But the coach's words matter for Saturday: play like this in the derby against Milan — beaten 4-2 at home by Bologna the same evening, in the night's other Serie A story — and luck will not be enough. Our report of Bologna's win at San Siro tells that half of the story.

The Penzo: football's most romantic away day

A word for the setting, because the Stadio Pierluigi Penzo is unlike anywhere else in Europe's top five leagues. Tucked onto the island of Sant'Elena at the eastern edge of Venice, it is reached by vaporetto and on foot through streets that have never heard of a team bus, and visiting supporters arrive by water. It is one of the oldest stadiums in Italy still in use, small and tight against the pitch, with the lagoon at its back. On Wednesday night, under lights, with the bottom club in the country going toe-to-toe with the joint league leaders for 79 minutes, it was everything its legend promises. Venezia's fans stayed to applaud a team that had lost to two of its own deflections — they understood what they had watched, and it was not a performance to boo.

That is the paradox Nicola must manage. His Venezia are organised, brave and, for long stretches, genuinely competitive — and they have three points. Newly promoted and smaller-budget sides in Serie A live on exactly the margins that decided this match: a VAR line drawn a boot's width the wrong way, a crossbar's thickness, a defender's outstretched leg. Over a season those margins usually even out; over nine matches they have all fallen against Venezia at once. The performance level says this team can survive. The table says it cannot. Both things are true, and the winter will decide which one wins.

Bottom of the table, heads held high — for now

History offers Venezia one cold comfort: leagues are not decided in October, and the gap at the bottom of Serie A is rarely unbridgeable before Christmas. A team that can hold Inter scoreless-by-its-own-efforts for 79 minutes can take points off the sides around it — and it is those fixtures, against fellow strugglers rather than title contenders, that will decide whether the Penzo hosts top-flight football next season. Nicola, a coach who has built a career on exactly these rescue missions, knows the calendar as well as anyone.

For Venezia, the arithmetic remains brutal: three points from nine matches, eight defeats, and a survival fight that will be measured in seasons like this one unless results turn. And yet any neutral watching Wednesday's game saw a side that can compete at this level for 80 minutes at a time. The Penzo, the little stadium on the edge of the lagoon that visiting teams reach by boat, has seen famous nights before; this was nearly another. Nicola's task is to convince his players — after a defeat delivered by their own boots — that the performance, not the result, is the truth about their team.

A note, too, on Provedel's contribution, because own goals have a way of erasing goalkeepers from the story. Four saves, several at moments when a Venezia goal would have changed the match's psychology entirely, kept Inter level long enough for fortune to intervene. Rotated sides survive nights like this on exactly such performances: a goalkeeper in form, a bench that raises the level late, and the patience to stay in a game that is drifting. Inter's depth, assembled for a title challenge and a European campaign, earned its keep on the lagoon — even if the two finishes that decided the game belonged, in the cruellest technical sense, to the home team.

Inter, meanwhile, take the points and the warning in equal measure. The derby on Saturday now pits the league's joint-leaders against a wounded Milan in one of the season's defining fixtures, and Chivu will restore his first-choice side knowing that rotation almost cost him two points in Venice. A title race is built on winning games like this one — ugly, lucky, late. Champions, as the saying goes, find a way. On Wednesday, the way was found by two Venezia defenders, and Inter were honest enough to say so. More European football is covered in our international section.