Calcio Debate: It's Too Easy To Blame All Juventus’ Problems On Ciro Ferrara, Diego & Felipe Melo
Ciro Ferrara, Diego & Felipe Melo have been made the scapegoats by fans
There is no denying that Juventus are in crisis. The club have lost four of their last five games in all competitions, conceding 12 goals in the process. They have slipped six points off the pace in Serie A despite the victory over leaders Inter, and most tragically of all are already out of the Champions League.
In apportioning blame for these troubles it seems to be fashionable to blame three men, and three men only – coach Ciro Ferrara and big money summer signings Diego and Felipe Melo.
Granted, all three have grossly underperformed this term. Ferrara has displayed all his inexperience and has been unable to find a suitable tactical system, making numerous Claudio Ranieri-esque selection errors. Diego, it can be argued, has only played one good game in a Juventus shirt when he tore Roma apart in week 2 with two stunning goals. As for Felipe Melo, after a dominant start the 26-year-old has lost his way and his passing has been nothing short of abysmal.
Melo won the dreaded 2009 Golden Bin
But the criticism of the three has gone too far. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Diego is a supremely talented playmaker and that he needs the right players around him to make him shine. At Werder Bremen he was consistently the scourge of Italian teams in Europe, yet suddenly he is considered useless?
Felipe Melo is the star holding midfielder of the world's best international team and has excelled in almost every game he has played for Brazil since his debut against Italy at the beginning of the year. Even in the midst of his poor Juve form he produced a powerhouse performance for the Selecao in their win over an albeit weakened England team. All this despite being exhausted having not taken a break since the summer of 2008.
Meanwhile, Ferrara has been championed by none other than coaching legend Marcello Lippi. We all know that Lippi mixes politics with football – hence the exclusion of Antonio Cassano and Fabrizio Miccoli from the national team – but you would presume that the Italy boss must have seen something to consider Ferrara worthy of the Bianconeri.
The main issue with Juventus at the moment is that the blend of the team is all curdled. In simple terms, half of the team is geared to play in a technical system and the other half are only comfortable playing in a physical system. These two sets of players seem incapable of combining together.
Playmaker Diego needs forwards ahead of him with pace, movement and intelligence in order to execute through balls, play one-twos and work his creative magic. This is isn’t possible with a target man like Amauri, a slow static penalty box striker like David Trezeguet, or even to an extent a physical harrier like Vincenzo Iaquinta. Thus, every time Diego picks up possession and looks up, he has no options in front of him.
Diego has no one to pass to
The three aforementioned attackers require crosses into the box to be at their best because they are all exceptional in the air and average on the floor. But, Juventus have committed this season to a game through the middle in which Diego is the main creator. Only very occasionally do we see balls being whipped into the area by full backs Fabio Grosso and Martin Caceres, and when the former isn’t playing you can rule out the chance of a Cristian Molinaro cross ever reaching its intended target.
Then if we move further back into the central midfield department, we see further curdling. Felipe Melo and Momo Sissoko are considered the first choice holding midfielders, yet both are poor passers of the ball. Neither seems capable of regularly moving the ball to technical players ahead of them like Diego, Mauro Camoranesi and Alessandro Del Piero. Thus, Juventus’ dream of replicating Barcelona’s orgasmic pass-and-move game ends before it has even begun.
Although there are clear weaknesses in defence, the idea that Juventus don’t have the quality of players to challenge for the Scudetto or even hypothetically reach at least the latter stages of the Champions League is quite frankly nonsense. As is the notion that if you remove Ferrara, Diego and Melo then everything is solved. The problem is that the blend of the team has been mixed all wrong as there appears to be two camps that cannot co-exist.
The blame thus lies primarily with the management of Giovanni Cobolli Gigli, Jean-Claude Blanc and Alessio Secco, who it seemed were starting to win over doubters following these summer signings that everyone, this writer included, expected to take Juventus to the next level.
Juve's leadership is again under question
Luciano Moggi was perhaps the only person this summer who criticised Juventus’ transfer work, and one of the reasons he cited was the imbalance of the squad. Once again it is clear why Moggi was such a genius in the transfer market as he understood that signing big names didn’t guarantee success unless the team was constructed correctly. Never has this been more apparent than at Juventus this season.
Carlo Garganese, Goal.com