It feels absurd to say of a team that has dropped six points in 22 games, but Juve have not been playing well for some timeNine points clear at the top of Serie A, Juventus are on the cusp of a crisis. Well, that’s what the papers say. Even La Repubblica, typically a sober voice in Italian sports coverage, applied the ‘c’ word to the Bianconeri on Sunday’s front page.Hyperbole? Certainly. But Juventus had conceded six times in the space of four days. A 3-0 defeat to Atalanta in the Coppa Italia was followed by a 3-3 draw at home to Parma in Serie A. Worse, they let a two-goal lead slip inside the last 20 minutes against the Ducali....
Other matches featured seven goals, two penalties and red cards but Atalanta’s comeback against Roma beat the lotIt was one of those days in Serie A. Oh, you know the sort: when the lunchtime kick-off features seven goals, two penalties, and a red card, but turns out not to be the most entertaining game of the afternoon. Next up on Sunday came a pair of three-goal comebacks plus a 4-0 away win for a Frosinone team that had only scored 12 times all season.There was drama everywhere, from the Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi – where Fiorentina blew a two-goal lead, then recovered to beat Chievo with 10 men – to the Tardini – where Spal ended an 11-game winless run after...
After its grim end to 2018, Serie A returned from the winter break with an entertaining round of gamesThe crowd at San Siro was the smallest it had been for any game in this Serie A season, yet also perhaps the most uplifting. Inter’s match against Sassuolo was originally supposed to be played behind closed doors, as a punishment for racist abuse of Kalidou Koulibaly by supporters at the stadium last month. Club officials persuaded the footballing authorities to let them distribute 11,000 tickets to schoolchildren instead.They filled a part of the stadium’s lower tier, with the remaining seats covered over by gigantic banners upon which ‘BUU’ had been printed in various fonts. That spelling is used by Italian journalists...
There was support, if not united, for Kalidou Koulibaly in Naples, while VAR issues clouded the final games of the yearKalidou Koulibaly was suspended for Napoli’s final game of 2018. He will miss the first league fixture of next year, too. He had been one yellow card away from a ban before picking up two in the Boxing Day defeat to Inter. Serie A’s sporting judge was not minded to show leniency towards a player who lost his cool after being racially abused.Still, Koulibaly did not want to miss Saturday’s game at home to Bologna. He took up a seat in the stands at the Stadio San Paolo, and was greeted by the sight of his own face: over and...
A fan was killed before the Inter v Napoli match while Kalidou Koulibaly faced alleged racist abuse from the stands during itIt should have been an occasion to celebrate. For the first time since 1971, a round of Serie A fixtures was being played on 26 December – St Stephen’s Day, to most Italians, though the sporting press seemed eager to embrace the English lexicon of “Boxing Day football”. More than a quarter of a million fans attended games up and down the country, and many were treated to entertaining fare.In Bergamo, Atalanta became only the second team this season to take points off Juventus. Despite falling behind in the second minute, they roared back to lead 2-1 and appeared...