Maurizio Sarri called it an “ambush” by Serie A officials, scheduling his Lazio team to face Bologna in the early 12.30pm kick-off on Sunday after a midweek Champions League appointment with Bayern Munich. “We’d like to thank the league for doing it again,” was his sarcastic remark. “Just like they did after our Coppa Italia derby against Roma.”

Maybe he had a point. Then again, just think what Bologna had to put up with. They played a big game of their own on Wednesday night, hosting Fiorentina, a direct rival in the fight for European qualification. Now they had to go away on a short rest to Lazio: conquerors of Bayern Munich.

Yet Thiago Motta took a different view. “A fantastic day, a fantastic stadium, let’s hope it’s a good match,” said the Bologna manager during his pre-game interview with Sky. “We are a team that always comes to play its own game, to impose our own football. We’ll try to do that again.”

The contrasting mannerisms of these managers was an entertaining subplot. Rare are the weeks when Sarri finds nothing to grumble about, though he allies his cynicism with self-deprecating humour. Invited to define “Sarrismo” last season – a word typically translated in English into “Sarriball” but which literally just means “Sarri-ism” – he replied: “My wife might say: ‘A moody man and a bit of a dickhead.’”

Motta, 24 years his junior, has a different persona: the shiny new thing in Italian football, relishing his breakout season as a coach. Perhaps this world looks different, too, when you have already been there and won it all as a player: the Champions League (twice), La Liga (twice), Serie A, Ligue 1 (five times) – just to name a few of the highlights.

Their paths collided at a pivotal moment. Lazio’s victory over Bayern was historic, their first Champions League knockout win in 24 years, but their prospects of returning to the competition next season have been complicated by a slow start to this campaign. Joint-seventh in the table and five points behind Bologna, they needed a positive result.

Motta’s team, meanwhile, were trying to sustain momentum after beating Fiorentina 2-0 on Wednesday night. Unlike Lazio, runners-up last May, Bologna did not begin this season with any expectations of fighting for the top spots. Yet going into this weekend they were joint-fourth, level on points with Atalanta.

For all Sarri’s laments about the early kick-off, his team started brightly. Ciro Immobile has looked like a man unburdened since hitting his 200th Serie A goal against Cagliari earlier this month and thought he had bagged his fourth in as many games when he nutmegged Lukasz Skorupski in the 13th minute before spotting the linesman’s raised flag. Instead, he provided the assist on Gustav Isaksen’s opener moments later.

The 22-year-old Danish winger has taken time to find his feet since joining from Midtjylland in the summer, but his performances have improved in the last three months and it was he who earned the penalty from which Immobile sealed the win over Bayern. His direct running and willingness to take on his man from the right wing are much needed by a team that is missing the injured Mattia Zaccagni on the opposite flank.

Lazio have struggled to establish a new attacking identity in the wake of Sergej Milinkovic-Savic’s move to Al Hilal. They could never really hope to replace a player who combines the 6ft 4in frame of target man with the nimbleness of a No 10 and the workrate of a box-to-box midfielder, but the hope had been that summer arrivals Isaksen, Daichi Kamada and Taty Castellanos might allow the team to grow in a different direction.

When Lazio have thrived, such as against Bayern, it has often been a testament to Sarri’s fastidiously drilled zonal marking schemes that keep opponents far from goal. They have kept 11 home clean sheets across all competitions, joint-most, with Lille, among teams from Europe’s “big five” leagues.

They had a chance to put the game to bed against Bologna. In the 30th minute, Isaksen carved in from the right, bouncing off one defender and evading a second before firing a shot between two more. Skorupski denied him with a contender for save of the season, forcing the ball on to the post with the tips of the only two fingers that could reach.

Bologna were then gifted an equaliser before half-time. Luis Alberto’s back-pass to Ivan Provedel was ill-advised but the goalkeeper’s attempt to play the next ball short with four Bologna players in front of him in the box was madness. Giovanni Fabbian intercepted, and Oussama El Azzouzi finished.

The second half was a different story completely, Bologna taking control of the pitch. Sarri’s substitutions of Immobile and Isaksen did not help, their replacements Castellanos and Pedro failing to impact the game, but it was striking how the home team faded. Perhaps this was in part the tiredness of having to play long stretches out of possession for a second time in four days.

But it also spoke to the nature of Motta’s Bologna: a team that always plays out from the back when it has the ball and gets in opponents’ faces when it doesn’t. With the third-youngest starting XIs, on average, in all of Serie A, one part of their success is an ability to wear opponents down.

This is not a team packed with superstars. Lewis Ferguson has been excellent all season and right winger Riccardo Orsolini is also playing the best football of his career. Yet the former has still started only twice for the Scotland national team while the latter, at 27, has made all five of his appearances for Italy off the bench.

The one standout talent might be the 22-year-old Dutch forward Joshua Zirkzee, a natural connector whose free-roaming interpretation of the No 9 role allows him to link up with teammates all over the pitch, creating space for midfield runners to attack into. He helped to create, and then finished, the goal that settled this game, feeding a pass to left-back Victor Kristiansen on the overlap before meeting the return ball with a half-volley into the bottom corner.

A 2-1 win allowed Bologna to keep pace with Atalanta, who thumped Sassuolo 3-0 on Saturday night. The Bergamo club have a game in hand, but it is away at Internazionale. Where the Nerazzurri have pulled away from the pack in top spot, the race for Champions League places promises to be fierce.

Juventus and Milan look certain to take up two places but behind them the field is wide open. Roma’s renewed form under Daniele De Rossi has moved them above Fiorentina, Lazio and Napoli into sixth. But even the last of those, nine points behind Bologna with a game in hand, might not be out of the picture just yet – especially with talk of a second managerial change this season looming.

There is a possibility Serie A might send five teams to next season’s Champions League instead of the usual four. Lazio’s win over Bayern strengthened Italy’s top spot in the coefficient rankings. It could ultimately be the team that beat them this weekend – Bologna – who benefit.

Motta is not ready to think about that just yet, insisting: “There’s still a long way to go.” The 500 fans who waited with flags and fireworks to meet the team on its return to Bologna are several steps ahead of him. “Take us to Europe,” they sang.