A lot of those passes were dangerous and only just successful, lucky to have not been intercepted. The thing is, most of his passes were backward or lateral passes that added nothing to build up play. He doesn't need to make Pirloesque long passes to players through on goal but should at least spread the ball to stretch defenses, play the ball forward to an attacker who can hold up play in the opposition half or play the pill into space that players can run into to break Napoli's high press. But he barely attempted to do that and by passing left, right and backwards we remained in the stranglehold of Napoli's press as panic slowly but surely set in. His pass that led to Higuain's goal was just another unimaginative pass. It wasn't risky or daring. It was just an absolute poo water pass that should have been easy (albeit us useless to any attempt to bring the ball closer to our goal). My point is, even as he took the easy route, he still risked Napoli counter attacks regularly.