Napoli treat themselves to a dream night at Maradona and beat a willing but disarmed Juventus.
The age-old and somewhat cloying debate around the beautiful game and the results, the quality and the ideas, the form and the substance, have mistakenly led us to convince ourselves that to watch an entertaining match we must necessarily go looking for excellence, to watch the speed technique and the perfect plays. It doesn’t always take that much. As often happens, it is instead the difficulties that break the bank, dissolving the hesitations and putting each of the two teams in front of themselves in the rawest and most truthful way. Napoli and Juventus they are two sick teams, with obvious difficulties, even if in different states of their malaise, but in their imperfection they offer an absolutely enjoyable gamenot perhaps for the cleanliness of the technical gestures, but certainly for the level of emotional involvement. And isn’t that why we follow this sport?
To the photo finale it is that of the Azzurri who celebrate a victory on the Maradona lawn which, in terms of timing and meaning, could represent a turning point in the season. Behind the liberating celebrations under the curve there is the desire to change a season in which almost everything went wrong, almost a redemption after months of arid purgatory. Clearly we won’t stand here and say that Calzona has rediscovered the recipe for a disruptive Napoli, resurrecting the team that dominated far and wide last championship, because that wouldn’t be realistic. What can be said though is that Napoli seems to have rediscovered, even in suffering, the spirit to overcome difficulties and look for the result even when everything doesn’t flow as you would like. And now it can also reconnect with both of its technical leaders.
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Juve leaves without points and could be defined as surprisingly good, given the current moment and the final result. Allegri finds himself with a midfield which, if normally its quality doesn’t sparkle, is also halved by the waste of the victory against Frosinone. Alcarazacclaimed by popular acclaim, causes little more than great confusion, but a resuscitation Miretti probably shows off his best performance of the season. Despite an unusually proactive attitude, almost as if they wanted to force the reversal of a sinister trend, Juventus seem unable to escape their own ghosts, slamming into themselves and their own weaknesses at the very moment in which they are required to show their claws: the finalization. Juventus creates a lotall things considered more than Napoli, but never more than in this away match do they find themselves having to deal with one of the most debated topics of the year: the lack of quality. Some errors in the very last meters simply scream revenge.
He inevitably ends up in the dock again Dusan Vlahovic, one of the most controversial characters of this turbulent Juventus season, in his constant pendulum between penalized and penalizing, which swings undaunted according to sensitivity. As on the occasion of the match against Inter, the Serbian is always among the most anticipated at Juve, but still fails when it comes to shifting the tide of a big match. At least two of his errors in front of goal are serious (while he is a bit unlucky when he hits the post), for a footballer who, if he wants to definitively change his status, must begin to have a positive impact on these matches. Today he does it negatively, on the very day his department mate Church seems to find the light again after so much darkness.
The meaning of this result is more emotional than arithmetic, at least from the perspective we can have today. For Napoliin full swing for Europe and waiting for a great Champions League away match, to be able to convince themselves that they still know how to win these matches it could represent a mental turning point, at the head of a group that had fallen into a hole at some point this season, but which still has many of the quality elements that guided it during last year. For Juventus it will probably be the next challenge to decide whether the Champions League entry can be considered a formality or not, in the meantime Allegri’s challenge seems to be to re-motivate a group who, on the lawns of San Siro and the late San Paolo, seems to have left not only points but also some of the most intimate convictions.