Pippo Inzaghi put his arm around Andrea Pirlo’s shoulder before kick-off at the Allianz Stadium. It was an instinctive moment of reconnection between two men, who played together for a decade at Milan. They were brought to San Siro by the same agent, Tullio Tinti, in the summer of 2001 and shared more than 200 matches side by side.
As players, they achieved some of football’s highest highs. On the footage of Milan’s 2007 Champions League final win over Liverpool, you can see them in an identical pose, Inzaghi pulling his friend close as they head for the changing rooms at half-time. He had scored the game’s opening goal moments earlier, deflecting Pirlo’s free-kick beyond Pepe Reina.
The stakes over the weekend were different. Lesser, in the most obvious sense, but perhaps higher in others. There was no trophy awaiting the victor in Turin, but Pirlo needed a win to keep Juventus’s Scudetto hopes alive and to save his first season of management from being remembered as a catastrophic failure. After nine consecutive Serie A titles, the Bianconeri trailed Inter by 10 points in the standings. This was their one game in hand.
Inzaghi faced a different kind of pressure as he sought to break an 11-game winless run. Benevento, playing in Serie A for only the second time in their history, had far exceeded expectations during the first half of this season but now found themselves sliding back towards the relegation zone.
They were without their highest-paid player, the centre-back Kamil Glik, as well as the central midfielder Pasquale Schiattarella. Inzaghi would later confess that he had prepared the statement he would give in defeat, “in part for superstition, but [mostly] because I need to be rational.”
Defeat did seem like the most probable outcome. Juventus, for all their disappointments, had won 10 out of 13 league games so far in 2021. They could call on a squad of world-class players, led by the man who just overtook Pelé in the all-time scoring chart. Cristiano Ronaldo was presented with a commemorative shirt before kick-off, emblazoned with the acronym GOAT (Greatest of All Time).
Perhaps those truths made Juventus complacent. They dominated possession and the shot count on Sunday, yet there was a lack of intensity, a presumption that a goal would eventually come. Instead, in the 69th minute, Arthur played an unnecessary, underhit pass across his own penalty area. Benevento’s Adolfo Gaich intercepted and blasted a shot beyond Wojciech Szczesny.
Too late, Juventus discovered their urgency. Federico Chiesa was denied a penalty and Cristiano Ronaldo sent an overhead kick wide. The champions piled up the expected goals, but could not find an actual one and fell to a 1-0 defeat.
“We could stay here for three days trying to understand why we played like this,” said Juventus’s director of football, Fabio Paratici. Only one-third of the time, then, that he and his colleagues took to promote the rookie coach hired to look after their under-23s to the first-team manager’s role last summer.
Pirlo is not the first person responsible for Juventus’s regression. That responsibility falls to Paratici and his fellow directors, whose squad building in the three years since signing Ronaldo seemed driven more by name-recognition than any coherent vision.
The manager’s inexperience, though, has played a prominent part. Pirlo’s failure to adapt his ideas to fit the players at his disposal was only exposed further by this meeting with Inzaghi – who likewise jumped in at the deep end when he took his first management job at Milan in 2014.
Despite a two-year apprenticeship coaching the club’s academy teams, Inzaghi still struggled badly, finishing 10th at the end of a season that featured such indignities as having his boss, Silvio Berlusconi, drop into his changing room and command him to scream “Attack!” at his players, over and over.
Six years later, Inzaghi is still learning on the job. He has had some successes – taking Venezia to promotion from the third tier in 2016-17, then leading Benevento’s barnstorming run to the top of Serie B last season, when they finished 18 points clear. In between, he had a dismal stop at Bologna, winning two out of 21 games.
What stands out in this campaign is his flexibility. Benevento began playing the same gung-ho football that earned promotion last season. They came from 2-0 down to beat Sampdoria on the opening weekend, but wound up on the wrong side of 5-2 defeats by Inter and Roma. When Benevento faced the Giallorossi again last month, they drew 0-0. Inzaghi has learned that sometimes it pays to be cautious, swapping out his back four for a back five.
“We had lost touch a bit with reality,” he said on Sunday. “Setting all those records in Serie B, and then the numbers we had in the first half of the season, some people were fooling themselves.”
It would have been hard for anyone involved with the club not to get a bit carried away again on Sunday. Benevento are the first promoted team to win away to Juventus in eight years, and the first to keep a clean sheet at their stadium in nine. They have taken four points off the champions this season, after drawing at home to them.
The club’s sporting director, Pasquale Foggia, leapt off the bench at full time and went running up into the stands to hug the club president. “He had the brilliant idea of trying to pick me up, but then he felt something go in his back,” said Oreste Vigorito. “He had forgotten that I weigh fully 70 kilos. Lying on the steps of the stadium, we discovered that it is marvellous.”
They deserved to occupy centre stage, but the scene was stolen back late on Sunday night by Massimiliano Allegri, appearing on Sky Sport’s Calcio Club. He has given few interviews in the two years since he parted ways with Juventus, so this was quite the moment for his re-emergence, with his former club at their lowest ebb in a decade.
Allegri’s interview was wide-ranging, and he spoke with characteristic eloquence about the struggles of Italian teams in Europe and the qualities that he thinks need to be cultivated in managers to ensure better results in the future. He offered his observations on the current Serie A season, too, highlighting the traits that impressed him in Antonio Conte’s Inter.
Quick Guide
Serie A results
Parma 1-2 Genoa, Spezia 2-1 Cagliari, Crotone 2-3 Bologna, Roma 0-2 Napoli, Fiorentina 2-3 Milan, Udinese 0-1 Lazio, Sampdoria 1-0 Torino, Juventus 0-1 Benevento, Verona 0-2 Atalanta.
The headlines were made, though, by his remark that he plans to return to management this June. Allegri said he was fascinated by the thought of coaching abroad, in England or Spain, but also that he would happily return to Serie A. Asked about Juventus specifically, he deflected, pointing out that they already have Pirlo.
“Being a manager is very difficult,” he reflected at one point. “You cannot explain how to do it. There are managers from Monday to Saturday, which is one craft, then Sunday is a whole different thing because you need to navigate the unexpected. Then it’s nothing to do with technique and tactics, you won’t find the answers in a book. A manager lives by their sensations.”
The overriding sensation among supporters in Turin on Sunday night was a longing for his return.
from Football | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OYAkaD
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