Aaron Ramsey (5 Viewers)

s4tch

Senior Member
Mar 23, 2015
27,872
i usually enjoy horncastle's contents, i wish every journalist was more like him, but this is a meh story from him. he didn't even properly answer his own question while the answer looks quite obvious for most of us.

https://theathletic.com/3086716/2022/01/24/where-has-it-all-gone-wrong-for-aaron-ramsey-at-juventus/

Where has it all gone wrong for Aaron Ramsey at Juventus?
James Horncastle 7h ago
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Aaron Ramsey’s sixth and most recent goal for Juventus, a stoppage-time tap-in amid the pouring rain away to Sampdoria, was almost a year ago.
He had just come on for Arthur Melo when Juan Cuadrado drew the goalkeeper and set up his Welsh team-mate to score into an open goal.
It was the night before deadline day and although rumours circulated about Juventus’ willingness to listen to offers for Ramsey, the former Arsenal man was going nowhere. The squad was already considered too short to support then-coach Andrea Pirlo’s style of football. It’s quickly forgotten that Alvaro Morata arrived after the season had already started. Matthijs de Ligt missed the first couple of months following shoulder surgery. Paulo Dybala had barely played and then was out from January to April with a knee problem and Miralem Pjanic’s replacement, Arthur, had repeated issues with his ankles.
The tight turnaround from one season to another and late start to 2020-21 due to COVID-19 led to unprecedented fixture congestion, with further disruption caused by positive cases meaning Pirlo needed all-hands on deck.
Flash forward a year and things are different in lots of ways.
For a start, Pirlo is gone and Massimiliano Allegri is back. The calendar has stabilised and Juventus are publicly saying Ramsey is on the market. There has been no backtracking or reintegration, as in the case of Arthur, whose agent Federico Pastorello voiced concerns in December about his client not playing enough in a World Cup year. Transgressions like being late for training which led to Arthur being left out of the squad for the vaporetto ride to Venice made his days at Juventus look numbered, especially with Arsenal offering to take him on loan.
But Arthur’s pivotal cameo in the comeback against Roma a fortnight ago and his subsequent start against Udinese are indicative of a change of heart from Allegri, who won’t green-light the Brazilian’s departure unless he receives guarantees over a replacement.
Such a volte-face on Ramsey doesn’t seem on the cards.
His recent recovery from COVID-19 meant Ramsey was available for Sunday’s critical game with AC Milan at the Allianz Stadium. But Allegri and the club are not for turning.
At a summit in Turin before Christmas, Ramsey’s agent was instructed to find him a new club and when Serie A resumed in early January after the winter break, Allegri made no secret of it. “Ramsey is on the way out,” he said then, and he quoted himself back word-for-word at this weekend’s pre-match press conference to remind potential suitors that the club’s position has not changed.
That he did so was quite telling.
The winter window closes in a week and, for now at least, Juventus seem no closer to a solution.
A free agent when he joined from Arsenal in the summer of 2019, Ramsey — then 28 — signed for five years and could not have got a better deal. He is one of Juventus’ highest earners along with De Ligt, Dybala and Adrien Rabiot, the enigmatic Frenchman who also joined on a Bosman that same summer.
Now 31, Ramsey has 18 months still to run on his contract and if a Premier League team were to match his Turin wages, they would be making him one of the best-paid midfield players in England. Finding someone willing to take on that salary remains a challenge, particularly when any cost-benefit analysis will look at Ramsey’s game time and see he has completed 90 minutes just twice in two and a half seasons in Serie A.
How fair a representation that is of Ramsey’s durability contrasts starkly with his ability to go the distance in a Wales shirt.
Ramsey started and finished three of their four games at the European Championship last summer, being subbed after 85 minutes of the other one, and scored three goals while going the distance in two of Wales’ four October and November World Cup qualifiers as they secured a place in March’s play-offs.
A more bespoke approach to his physical preparation was the secret — Ramsey took things into his own hands and used a personal team of trainers to get him ready for Wales’ latest major tournament.
“I still feel good, given the opportunity and managed correctly,” he said. “It has been frustrating that I have picked up these little injuries (at Juventus), which have cost me a lot of games. I would like to see myself playing more and be out there more.
“The number of minutes I’ve played, it has been difficult. There have been many factors and changes that I haven’t been used to. I have my own team around me, who are focused on me, to get myself into the best possible shape. Football is a team sport and a lot of the time it is about the team and everybody doing the same things, when maybe some players need a bit more attention.”
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Ramsey celebrates his most recent Juventus goal in January 2021 with Juan Cuadrado and Cristiano Ronaldo (Photo: Getty)
Ramsey isn’t the only one to be disrupted by injury at Juventus.
Dybala played just 43 minutes more than Ramsey’s 1,089 in the league last season and then broke down in tears when he overextended his left thigh against Sampdoria last September. As for Arthur, he featured for 25 minutes more than Dybala and then had to undergo surgery in July to resolve the calcification of the membrane between the tibia and fibula in his right leg.
Tellingly, the Juventus futures of all three are now in doubt.
Dybala is out of contract in the summer and while the player and his agent, a used-car salesman by the name of Jorge Antun, were confident of signing a new deal before Christmas, talks have been put off until next month and the terms may be revised. Arthur, meanwhile, continues to attract interest from Arsenal and what happens to him over the next week, or at the end of the season, will tell us a lot about the style Allegri has in mind for Juventus.
Pirlo wished to partner him with Manuel Locatelli and mirror the dynamic that Italy enjoy in midfield with Jorginho and Marco Verratti. Allegri, on the other hand, seems inclined to make Juventus more physical and transition-oriented.
Goals from midfield have always been dear to him. They are so now more than ever Cristiano Ronaldo is gone.
While Locatelli got the winner in October’s Turin derby and started this month’s comeback against Roma with a rare header, he has never been a regular source of goals. Rabiot may be tall, elegant and left-footed but aside from his wonder-goal against Milan late in his debut season, he has next to no vision and isn’t about to become Arturo Vidal, Claudio Marchisio, Paul Pogba or Sami Khedira, all of whom could be relied upon to get close to double figures.
The thinking, when then-chief football officer Fabio Paratici signed him after 64 goals in 11 years with Arsenal, was that Ramsey could be that player. Fans now see that as a miscalculation, the end of Juventus’ remarkable streak of adding value in free agency which began with Pirlo and included Pogba, Fernando Llorente, Kingsley Coman, Patrice Evra and Khedira. The same is said of Rabiot, who has not been considered any better value for money either.
The difference between the two is, Rabiot plays.
Paratici’s belief that Ramsey had the skillset to pick up the slack left by Khedira wasn’t theoretically wrong. It just hasn’t worked out that way.
Ramsey signed his pre-contract with Juventus in early 2019, when Allegri was still their coach. But he suffered a nasty hamstring injury playing for Arsenal against Napoli a few months later that meant he moved to Turin while still going through his rehabilitation.
Juventus then sacked Allegri and decided to go in a different direction — their first change of coach in five years.
Ronaldo’s first season at the club had not ended in the hoped-for Champions League glory and the pressure and expectation were relentless. As stalwart defenders Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci have said since, Juventus began to lose their DNA. The club tried and failed to sell Dybala and Gonzalo Higuain. Players such as Mario Mandzukic and Emre Can were left out of the Champions League squad. Maurizio Sarri was the club’s most radical choice of coach since Gigi Maifredi in 1990. What he stood for seemed philosophically incompatible with Juventus’ identity, and he would have to compromise on his ideals to accommodate Ronaldo.
Joining a winning team may look easy but it was way more complicated than that.
Ramsey, initially used out of position as a No 10, only got a run as a No 8 in the early spring of 2020. He started three consecutive games and helped settle a title decider against Antonio Conte’s Inter Milan by scoring a goal and linking up with Dybala, who zig-zagged through the blue and black defence to kill off the pretenders to their crown with a spectacular solo effort.
That was their last game before the pandemic closed Serie A down for three months. Just as Ramsey’s Juventus career was taking off, COVID-19 grounded it.
When football resumed in the June and teams had to play catch-up to finish the season, Ramsey did at least emulate his great compatriot John Charles in winning the scudetto with Juventus.
Their coach has since claimed that achievement was taken for granted.
“It was on the outside, but also on the inside too,” Sarri told Sportitalia. “We won a scudetto without celebrating it. Everyone went out for dinner on their own. I saw they celebrated after finishing fourth (last season under successor Pirlo).”
Sarri would later observe of his 2019-20 champions: “Two players went to the US afterwards (Higuain and Blaise Matuidi, who joined Inter Miami of MLS). A phenomenal player like Khedira retired shortly afterwards (in May 2021) because of issues with his knee.”
Juventus released them all, with Higuain’s contract resolution costing €18.3 million.
Under Pirlo, Ramsey started well in a hybrid role, playing on the left side of a 4-4-2 when out of possession before moving inside as a shadow striker when Juventus were on the ball.
In the first episode of Amazon’s Juventus: All Or Nothing documentary series, Pirlo is shown telling Ronaldo after their season opener against Sampdoria that he could have scored three or four goals in the game, rather than the one he did get. The chances to which Pirlo was referring were set up by Ramsey, who also featured in one of the high points of Pirlo’s one season in charge — a 3-0 win over Barcelona at the Nou Camp in the December.
“He’s been a surprise to me,” Pirlo said. “He’s an intelligent player and is very good at finding spaces in which to play.”
Weston McKennie would make the shadow striker role his own, however, particularly as Ramsey succumbed to more injuries.
Last summer, the dysfunction at Juventus continued with a third change of coach in Ramsey’s three seasons at the club, this time with Allegri returning.
Ramsey started the season-opener against Udinese but it once again felt like nobody at the club had bothered to watch him before signing him. Instead of using the Welshman as a No.8, Allegri put him in front of the defence, where Pirlo and Miralem Pjanic used to begin their build-up play.
He has barely played since. Only Ronaldo, who moved to Manchester United after that Udinese game in August, and 18-year-old wonderkid Matias Soule have clocked up fewer Serie A minutes among the first-team squad.
Now time is ticking for a move away this month.
There are parallels with Christian Eriksen’s first year at Inter after moving from Tottenham in January 2020. Executives publicly put up the Denmark midfielder for sale and Conte seemed to have made up his mind that they were not compatible.
Put off by his high salary, nobody came in for Eriksen and for a time, it looked like he would spend the second half of last season on the bench. Instead, he adapted and played a major role in Inter winning their first title for a decade.
Ramsey, by contrast, has already won everything in Italy. As much as Juventus are determined to free themselves of his salary, if they are unable to move him on this month you wonder if there might still be a chance he unexpectedly turns his time in Turin around.
Alas, it seems distinctly unlikely.
Juventus are proceeding with caution as they look to the future. Their next moves will decide what kind of team they’ll have for the next five years.
For the first time in a long time, a Juventus coach is being allowed to say their season is one of transition. The priority is bringing costs under control — they are deliberating before committing to contract extensions to put themselves in a position to sign players such as Fiorentina’s Dusan Vlahovic in the summer.
For Ramsey, it could mean that goal he scored against Sampdoria this time last year may well be his last in a Juventus shirt.
 

Siamak

╭∩╮( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╭∩╮
Aug 13, 2013
14,979
Aaron #Ramsey has rejected 3 bids from #PremierLeague’s club. #CrystalPalace, #Burnley and #Newcastle had shown interest to sign #Juventus’ midfielder. #transfers

[@NicoSchira]
 

Espectro

The Grimreaper
Jul 12, 2002
13,687
That’s why he needs to play so that if he gets injured, he doesn’t get to play for Wales either.

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Right now we are paying him t rest and try to be fit for Wales.
The problem with Ramsey is that he gets injured with us and when he gets call to Wales he gets fit!

You know who does that also... Bale...

Ramsey its a lost case, you cant "make him play", he will get injured with Juventus and play with Wales no matter what you do.

He is in the "Confort zone" of having a luxury salary, a long contract and an agent that gets a bonus if Ramsey stays in the team.
 

cimenk

Senior Member
Jul 23, 2008
2,833
Aaron #Ramsey has rejected 3 bids from #PremierLeague’s club. #CrystalPalace, #Burnley and #Newcastle had shown interest to sign #Juventus’ midfielder. #transfers

[@NicoSchira]
It's amaze me that he already got more than 1 month time not even training, just for discussing and look for clubs in PL.

He needs to do reality check himself. He can't get all the things perfect. If he want money, he should go to Newcastle. If he wants 1st team football, Newcastle or Burnley should be no problem, but both are relegation battlers this season. If he want better side,it should be C. Palace but they seems stacked in midfield with Eze, Gallagher, Olise, Milivojevic, etc so they seem wont offer him a very big wages he wants.
 

s4tch

Senior Member
Mar 23, 2015
27,872
Never buy British players again. They're all shit outside their delusion-land.
tammy is doing fine for roma, tomori has been pretty good for milan, smalling is also a starter for roma if healthy. history also has some examples like platt doing fine for bari and samp (not so well for juve in between) or ince who played very well for a season or two at inda in the '90s. ramsey himself is also a good player, if he was healthy he'd be our most impactful midfielder. some of us already forgot how tidy his final third passing can be. the main issue is the contract itself.

now, if you said never hire freebies on unrealistically high wages - i'd agree then. rabiot is one injury away of being an other ramsey, and he's not even british. we should never get ourselves in a situation when a player is impossible to move.
 

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