Lecce 3-2 Monza: Coulibaly brace inside 22 minutes holds off a late scare

Lecce needed just 22 minutes to put this game almost out of reach, and then spent the rest of it hanging on. Lassana Coulibaly scored twice from corners in a blistering opening spell, Tiago Gabriel added a third soon after, and Lecce held off a Monza response to win 3-2 at the Via del Mare — their first home victory of the season.

Score by half

Coulibaly opened the scoring in the 4th minute, heading in from an Ivan Ilić corner, before Tiago Gabriel doubled the lead in the 11th with another header from the same source. Monza hit back through Ricardo Mangas in the 20th minute, but Coulibaly restored the two-goal cushion within a minute, converting from close range for his second of the afternoon. That was effectively the game's shape settled inside the first half, though Monza were not finished: Exequiel Zeballos pulled one back with a free-kick in the 89th minute, and Lecce had a nervous final stretch before the whistle went.

A game Monza dominated without winning it

The numbers make for odd reading next to the scoreline: Monza had almost two-thirds of the ball and nearly three times as many shots, including 11 on target to Lecce's 3, yet they leave Lecce with nothing. It was Lecce's efficiency in the opening 22 minutes, not their share of the game, that decided it.

A first home win, and a familiar problem for Monza

Lecce had opened the season with a 2-0 win away at Venezia before a 0-4 home defeat to Roma, so this was as much about erasing the memory of that Roma result as it was about the three points. Guriball's Serie A table had Lecce 14th on three points before kickoff; this win lifts them to six points and out of the bottom third, still with the Roma scoreline as their only real dent so far.

Monza's afternoon fits a pattern that is becoming a concern. They arrived without a win in three matches — 1-4 at Inter, 2-3 at home to Udinese and a 1-1 draw at Parma — and this is now four games without a victory despite generating enough chances at the Via del Mare to have expected more. Guriball's table had them 18th on a single point; even with another spirited second-half showing, they stay in the relegation zone as they wait for a first win of the campaign.

Where the table stands now

Five matchdays in, the win over Monza still looks like Lecce's best result of the campaign. They sit 12th on 6 points, with a goal difference of -4 built almost entirely on that 0-4 at home to Roma and a 0-3 defeat at AC Milan either side of a 0-1 loss at Cagliari — the Monza game remains their only multi-goal display in league play so far. Monza, despite matching that -4 goal difference goal-for-goal on paper, sit six places and two points lower, in 16th, because they have only the one win to show for a run that has produced goals in every match: 8 scored, 12 conceded across five games.

What came after

Neither side kicked on immediately. Lecce followed the Monza win with back-to-back defeats — 0-1 away at Cagliari, then 0-3 at AC Milan — the kind of results that make this game look less like the start of a run and more like a one-off spike inside an otherwise difficult opening block. Monza, for their part, finally turned the underlying numbers into points: a 1-1 draw at Parma preceded a 2-1 home win over Sassuolo, their first victory of the season, arriving five matchdays late but arriving all the same.