Views: 36

Juventus-Cagliari: the bianconeri’s Coppa Italia starts from the round of 16, scheduled at the Allianz Stadium against the Sardinians.

Contested and booed. The tactical masterpiece against Manchester City, helped not a little by a putrescent Guardiolismo on the verge of complete exhaustion, was swept away by the performance against Venice. Those surprised by this schizophrenia of performances evidently follow football myopically.

It’s one thing to play against the Citizens, with all the favoritism on one side and an opponent who always has your back: where you have to limit yourself (so to speak) to defend in an orderly manner and then break out with plenty of space ahead. It’s different to play against a team that on one hand has nothing to lose and on the other will fight tooth and nail to survive, aware that they have nothing to lose.

However, the aspect of motivation and mental resilience is fundamental. It’s easy to find motivation to face a Guardiola team on a challenging stage like the Champions League. It’s much less easy to immediately prepare mentally, just a few days later and with the adrenaline still in your body, for the league, when you’re up against a completely different opponent who has been thinking about you for a week.

This step of maturity is usually achieved by great teams and that’s where the core of the issue lies. Because Juventus, currently, is not (yet) a great team. The league is still long and Thiago Motta’s project under the Mole is explicitly a multi-year one. It would be a grave error of recentism to make judgments after the first six months of the first year, but there is still a factor to consider.

In Turin, on the Bianconeri side, at the moment the fourth place is openly discussed as the seasonal objective. For intellectual honesty, it must be acknowledged that the club’s stance was the same last year, but the damnatio memoriae that the new ownership carried out in the summer on Agnelli’s management and Allegriism aimed to sever ties with the past.

This entrepreneurial line was presented as a virtuous path, leading to take Madama to the “Next Level” by undertaking a kind of technical restoration. However, the truth is different, namely that the much-vaunted ruins were not there and have never been. The demonization of those who were there before brought disgraceful economic wastage, only to find themselves pursuing the same objectives as before.

After spending nearly 200 million on the market to prune the dead branches and create a team in the image and likeness of Motta, Juventus plays worse; has fewer points in the standings; and the same seasonal objectives. It will be a long journey (no doubt) and perhaps paved with satisfactions, but was a revolution really necessary in Turin?

Was it really fair to consider a third place in the standings and a Coppa Italia in the trophy cabinet as a disaster, only to find yourself six months later seeing that same result (so vilified last year, when there was someone on the bench representing a different and probably unacceptable way of seeing football) as a sort of lifeline?

Juventus-Cagliari, official line-ups

Below are the official line-ups for Juventus-Cagliari.

JUVENTUS (4-2-3-1): Di Gregorio; Savona, Locatelli, Kalulu, McKennie; Koopmeiners, Thuram; Conceicao, Yildiz, Mbangula; Vlahovic. Coach: Thiago Motta.

CAGLIARI (4-2-3-1): Cagliari: Scuffet; Zappa, Palomino, Wieteska, Augello; Zortea, Marin, Prati, Deiola (C); Gaetano; Lapadula. Coach: Davide Nicola.