It is is a sign of how bad things have got that the clash of Italy’s title-race frontrunners is greeted with relief and celebration Across Europe a spirit of competitiveness has broken out. Not in England, perhaps, where Manchester City’s excellence looks sure to win out. Nor in Germany, where Bayern Munich remain inviolable. But elsewhere revolution is in the air. Paris Saint-Germain are not top in France, neither Real Madrid nor Barcelona are top in Spain and Juventus are not top in Italy. The elite are being challenged in a way they have not been for almost a decade.The temptation is to blame the pandemic for this spirit of revolution, to see Covid as the explanation for everything. It...
After Juve’s walkover win over Napoli was cancelled and they lost 3-0 to Fiorentina, could it finally be someone else’s year?There have been times in Juventus’s recent history when dropping six points in a month might have been considered as a run of poor form. On Tuesday, they saw that number slip away in the space of less than six hours.First came the news that the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) had overturned the decision by Serie A’s sporting justice to award Juventus a 3-0 win for their unplayed game against Napoli in October. The Partenopei were a no-show for that fixture in Turin after two members of their first team, and a further member of staff, tested positive for Covid-19....
Winning the Scudetto was not on Milan’s list of objectives for this season, but investing this January would seem a wise moveRafael Leão needed 6.76 seconds to score, and four hours to become a Serie A punchline. His goal for Milan against Sassuolo was the fastest ever in the Italian top flight, and across any of Europe’s top five leagues. When Luis Muriel found the net within a minute of coming on as a substitute in Atalanta’s game later that afternoon, his teammate Matteo Pessina leapt from the bench to chide him: “Who do you think you are? Leão?”Over in Venice, meanwhile, the phone of Paolo Poggi would not stop buzzing. His strike for Piacenza against Fiorentina (8.9 seconds) had...
Will the rookie manager steer Juventus to a 1oth straight title or could Inter, or Lazio or Atalanta, finally topple them?Millions of Italian children went back to school on Monday. So did the manager of Juventus. Andrea Pirlo was completing the final stage of his Uefa Pro licence course, defending a thesis he had submitted two weeks earlier under the title “My Football”.His writings will soon be made available, joining those of every other coach who has passed through Italy’s famous Scuola Allenatori (Managers’ School), in the library of the technical centre in Coverciano. Most of us, though, will get our first real insight into Pirlo’s vision for how the game should be played when Juventus host Sampdoria in their...
Gino Pivatelli does not have a prominent place in the hearts of Milan fans but a foul in a European Cup final and telling Arrigo Sacchi he wasn’t good enough changed historyYou can plan, you can plan and you can plan some more and then something happens over which you had no control, that you couldn’t reasonably have been expected to foresee, and everything changes. That’s not to say that there’s no point in coaches and directors planning, but it is to say that there are times when entirely external events take control – and that doesn’t have to mean something as enormous as coronavirus. Football can turn on events that seem random, unconnected, unpredictable – the bounce of a...