There is a particular sweetness to a goal that arrives just when the game has begun to sag towards stalemate, and Domenico Berardi supplied precisely that at the Mapei Stadium. His left-footed strike from the centre of the box, twelve minutes from time, settled a fluctuating contest in Sassuolo's favour and lifted the hosts to their first victory of the new Serie A campaign. The scoreline read 2-1, but the margins felt slimmer than that.

For Torino, the afternoon was a study in what might have been. Twice they were second best in the moments that mattered, and twice the ledger punished them. Three games into the season and still without a single point, Cristian Chivu's men — or whoever now shapes them — find themselves marooned in 16th, staring at a table that is already beginning to arrange itself unhelpfully around them.

Sassuolo, by contrast, will exhale. A win to accompany their opening-day defeat leaves them three points to the good and 12th, a modest perch but a functional one. On days like this, when the football is scrappy and the resolve is tested, three points is three points, and few in the home end will have quibbled with the manner of it.

Volpato lights the fuse

The opening exchanges asked patience of everyone, but it was Sassuolo who first found the incision. On 32 minutes Vasilije Adzic threaded the ball into space and Cristian Volpato took it with the confidence of a man who had rehearsed the moment. From outside the box he shaped his left foot around it and bent the shot into the bottom right corner, a finish of genuine class that gave the goalkeeper no realistic hope.

It was the sort of strike that changes the temperature of a stadium. Sassuolo, who had been probing without menace, suddenly carried the swagger of a side that believed the afternoon was theirs. Volpato, all poise and invention, looked every inch the fulcrum around which the hosts wished to build.

Torino, though, refused to fold. For a side without a point to their name, the composure to absorb the blow and keep pressing spoke well of their character, even if the results have yet to reward it. The half wore on with the visitors edging back into the contest, and their persistence would soon be repaid in the most galling of moments for the hosts.

Comuzzo's timely leveller

First-half stoppage time is the cruellest window in football, and Sassuolo were made to feel its bite. In the second of the added minutes, Alessio Cacciamani swung in a cross from the flank and Pietro Comuzzo rose in the centre of the box to meet it, guiding a header into the bottom left corner. The timing could scarcely have been worse for the hosts, nor better for Torino.

A goal on the stroke of half-time carries a psychological weight all its own. It sends one side down the tunnel deflated and the other buoyed, and for a spell it seemed as though Comuzzo's intervention might prove the pivot on which the whole match turned. Torino had ridden their luck and then seized their chance, the defender turning provider of hope with a header of real conviction.

The parity flattered neither side entirely and yet it felt just. Sassuolo had the better of the first-half craft; Torino the better of its final flourish. Level at the interval, the game was reset, and both benches would have sensed that the next goal — whenever and however it came — would likely decide the afternoon.

Berardi has the final word

The second half settled into the familiar rhythm of a match poised on a knife-edge, neither side willing to over-commit, both wary of the counterstroke. It needed a set piece to prise it open, and on 78 minutes Sassuolo found their moment. Fedde Leysen rose to nod the ball down with a headed pass, and there was Berardi, lurking with the instincts that have defined his career, to sweep a left-footed finish into the bottom right corner.

There was an inevitability to the identity of the scorer. Berardi has long been the beating heart of Sassuolo, the man for the occasion that demands a cool head, and he delivered again when the stakes were at their sharpest. The Mapei erupted, and the visitors were left to rue a moment of slackness from a dead ball that had promised so much less danger.

Torino pushed in the closing stages, but the equaliser that had come so naturally before the break now eluded them. The clock ran down on a side that has now begun the season with two defeats and no reward for its efforts. Sassuolo saw it out with the streetwise calm of a team that knew exactly what the three points were worth.

What it means

For Sassuolo, this is a first win of the campaign and a welcome corrective after their opening stumble. Three points, three goals scored and three conceded — a symmetry that speaks to a side still finding its feet, but one now perched comfortably enough in 12th to breathe and build. Volpato and Berardi both on the scoresheet is precisely the kind of creative dividend they will hope to bank on regularly.

Torino's position is altogether more precarious. Pointless after two matches and rooted in 16th, they have shown flickers — Comuzzo's header not least — but flickers do not fill the points column. Two goals for and four against tells the story of a defence that has yet to hold firm when it counts, and the pressure will only intensify if the trend continues.

The season is young, and neither table position is remotely fixed. But momentum matters at this stage, and it now runs firmly in Sassuolo's favour. Torino, meanwhile, must find answers quickly, before an unwelcome early gap on the table hardens into something far harder to close. On this evidence, the raw materials exist — but so does the urgent need to convert promise into points.