The abundance could not last for ever. Serie A’s first goalless draw of this season arrived in its 54th match, ironically between two of its more prolific teams. Perhaps things might have ended differently between Como and Roma if the division’s leading scorer, Donyell Malen, had not earned a red card at the start of the second half.

A missed opportunity for both sides? Roma started brighter and hit the post through Lorenzo Pellegrini. Como dominated absolutely after the red card, with 80% of possession, but could not make pressure count.

In the end, it was a result each team could live with. Returning from this season’s first international break, Como and Roma remain the most likely contenders to challenge Inter. But a couple of more surprising teams are making their presence felt near the top of the table. Lazio’s 3-1 win over Monza on Sunday kept them level with the Nerazzurri in first place. An astonishing feat at a time when their fans won’t even come to home games.

And then there is Cagliari. The Sardinians have finished in the upper half of Serie A only once in the last 30 years. Champions of Italy in 1970, they have scarcely made it into another title conversation since. But they began this season with four wins from five matches, their best start to a top-flight campaign for more than half a century.

Should we have seen this coming? Cagliari ended last season strongly. The first signs of a project coming together under Fabio Pisacane, a popular former player who returned as assistant coach in 2022 and then worked with the academy for two years before leading the first team in 2025.

An extraordinary individual, who earned the Guardian’s first-ever Player of the Year award in 2016, Pisacane lived with Guillain-Barré syndrome as a teenager, becoming paralysed and spending 20 days in a coma, but recovered and ascended Italian football’s lower divisions to make his Serie A debut at 30. Along the way, he made headlines for reporting an attempt by a Ravenna director to bribe him to throw a match in the third tier. None of which necessarily meant he would succeed as a manager. Pisacane has shown himself to be a canny tactician

“I’ve worked with many great coaches in my career,” said the Cagliari midfielder Harry Winks in a recent interview. “Coach Pisacane is certainly at the very top level … Since I arrived here, he has already improved everyone, myself included. I really enjoy working with him; I think he can reach the very top of the sport.”

OK, pause. Readers less acquainted with Cagliari’s story might need a moment to process that the person speaking is indeed Harry Winks, the former England international, previously of Tottenham and Leicester. Now 30 years old and enjoying his life and his football on the beautiful island of Sardinia.

If I mention now that he has been playing with Yerry Mina at Cagliari, you might get the image of a team of Premier League castoffs, chucked together for one last sun-soaked hurrah. That would be the wrong impression. Most of Cagliari’s regulars are 25 and younger, including the pair who combined to carve open Juventus’s defence on Sunday night.

There was not much more than 15 minutes gone when Daniel Maldini cut in from the left. His initial shot from the corner of the box looked optimistic but it pinged back on to him from a defender and then to his teammate Paul Mendy, who held off a marker brilliantly and returned the ball to Maldini for a close-range finish. A fourth consecutive Serie A game with a goal for the forward, and an excellent way to celebrate his 25th birthday.

To say that these have been a rollercoaster few weeks would be some understatement. Maldini had his driving licence confiscated last month after crashing his car and failing a breathalyser test in an incident that was reported to have left five people with minor injuries. Subsequent hospital tests for narcotics returned negative, and he was called up to the first Italy squad since Roberto Mancini’s reappointment as national team manager.

Maldini’s individual performances for the Azzurri were a mixed bag, but he lined up with his Cagliari teammate Alessandro Romano for the 3-1 home win over Turkey. It was the first time in more than half a century – since 1972 – that two of the club’s players have started a competitive game together for Italy.

In both cases, the opportunity was well earned. Maldini, son of the great Milan defender Paolo, has often been dismissed by his critics as “un raccomandato” – someone who owes their opportunities to knowing the right people. Or, in his case, being part of the right family. Not just a nepo baby but a nepo grandbaby, whose grandfather Cesare won a European Cup with Milan and whose dad repeated that feat five times more. Those are big shoes to fill. Daniel, who grew up in Milan’s academy and made his senior debut for them as long ago as 2020, never cut it at San Siro and has bounced since then from Spezia to Empoli, Monza, Atalanta and Lazio without ever finding his stride.

But Pisacane has been adamant from the start about the player’s potential, highlighting the way he connects lines of midfield and attack. The manager has not been shy about addressing shortcomings, too, stressing that Maldini needs to be more consistent in his application.

Plainly, he is not at the height of the previous two generations. Even the current scoring run has included a degree of fortune. Maldini’s goal against Udinese was facilitated by defending that Benny Hill could have considered a bit much. But there is a player in there, and Pisacane has been getting the best of him in a system that allows freedom to move between the wing and a more conventional No 10’s space.

It is a similar story all throughout the team of individuals thriving in roles that suit them. Winks’s unshowy work in front of the defence allows the 20-year-old Romano, more freedom to get up and down the pitch. The 19-year-old Mendy is growing in confidence as a target man.

And goalkeeper Elia Caprile has been magnificent. He helped Cagliari cling on to a point, after Juventus came to life in the second half. He had made saves from Edon Zhegrova already before Randal Kolo Muani equalised from Kerim Alajbegovic’s cross. Glanced across him at close range, there was little the keeper could have done on the goal. Moments later, Juventus hit the crossbar and Caprile held Nick Woltemade’s follow-up. There was then a brilliant stop from Muani’s point-blank volley, though the forward was in an offside position.

The game ended 1-1, and Pisacane said Juventus deserved at least that much. He and Luciano Spalletti were both shown red cards after the final whistle for a post-game scuffle that was hard to parse. They clasped hands at first, but the Juventus manager was shouting angry words from the start and appeared to react to the way Pisacane put a hand on his elbow, though none of these gestures looked violent in any obvious way. Spalletti later said he had been praising Pisacane for his player’s cleverness at time-wasting. Pisacane, for his part, seemed bemused, overheard asking: “What did I do?”

It all looked like a storm in a teacup. But we might answer Pisacane’s question another way. What he has done is take Cagliari to six wins and a draw from their last eight matches, dating to last season. Only Roma have picked up more points in that stretch.