Inter go top of Serie A after a 3-0 win over Parma at San Siro

Inter needed barely half an hour to settle this one. Cristian Chivu's side scored three times inside the first 31 minutes against a Parma team that arrived at San Siro already toiling near the bottom of the table, and the result lifts the hosts above Roma and into first place in Serie A on 16 points from six matches.

Three goals in half an hour

Petar Sucic broke the deadlock in the 13th minute, finishing from inside the Parma box to open the scoring. Five minutes later Hakan Calhanoglu stepped up and converted a penalty to make it 2-0, and Marcus Thuram added a third in the 31st minute to end the contest before the first half was even over. Parma, who had taken a point from Monza and beaten Genoa in their previous two outings, simply had no answer to the pace at which Inter moved the ball through midfield.

Parma's back three of Diego Carlos, Franco Carboni and Mariano Troilo, set up to contain exactly this kind of attack, never got settled in front of goalkeeper Edoardo Corvi. Inter's front line of Thuram, Pio Esposito and Andy Diouf combined quickly in the final third, and by half-time the home side had already racked up more shots on target than Parma would manage in the entire match.

The expected-goals gap tells its own story: Inter's 2.36 to Parma's 0.30 is as lopsided as the scoreline suggests. With the game long since decided, Chivu used the hour mark to make three changes at once — Lautaro Martínez on for Thuram, Aleksandar Stankovic on for Calhanoglu and Ange-Yoan Bonny on for Pio Esposito — and later sent on Federico Dimarco's and Andy Diouf's replacements too, resting a chunk of his first-choice XI with the rest of October still ahead.

An unbeaten run in the league

That run shows a side that has not lost a single Serie A fixture all season, with the only blemish on the record coming away at Real Madrid in the Champions League. The win over Parma stretches the unbeaten domestic run to six matches and, crucially, snaps the two-game streak without a win — a draw at Roma followed by this — back into three straight points. Inter have now scored in every Serie A game they have played this season and have conceded more than once in a match only twice, against Napoli and Udinese, both of which they still won.

Parma's season stalls again

For Parma, this was a sharp reminder of the gap between the top and bottom of the division. They had looked to be steadying themselves with a win over Genoa the previous weekend, but conceding three times in half an hour against a team playing at this level drops them back into the relegation mix — one win from six games, with 10 goals conceded across their last two outings alone. The visitors never got a foothold in midfield, and with the back three stretched by Inter's movement, chasing the game from 2-0 down inside 18 minutes was never a realistic proposition.

What's next

Inter sit top of Serie A on 16 points, three clear of Roma, heading into the next international window in the form of their lives domestically. Parma, without a response to lean on, now face a run of fixtures where every point will matter if they are to pull away from the bottom three before the table starts to look as bleak as the goal difference columns already suggest.