Pirlo is not impressed: Inexperience, injuries and ineffective Ronaldo cost Juve
By James Horncastle Feb 17, 2021
As you can imagine, it takes quite a lot to gain Andrea Pirlo’s approval. His standards were as high as those arcing passes he used to play first-time over some of Europe’s best defences for Alvaro Morata and Stephan Lichtsteiner. So high, that when he was still a Juventus player they thought it might be entertaining to start a series called
Pirlo is not impressed, in which the hirsute former playmaker served as an inscrutable judge of talent.
On Wednesday in Porto, Pirlo was not impressed again.
“This wasn’t the game we wanted to play,” the 41-year-old said, shaking his head.
The 2-1 defeat at the Estadio do Dragao was mitigated by Federico Chiesa’s perfectly mishit late away goal. The deadline-day signing —
who emulated his father, Enrico, by scoring in the Champions League against Dynamo Kyiv at the start of December — once again provided a silver lining on an otherwise disappointing, though not disastrous, night in northern Portugal. Juventus had finished the group stage on a high. For the second season in a row, they qualified with games to spare and went through as group winners after, arguably, the finest night of Pirlo’s young coaching career, an emphatic 3-0 win over Barcelona at the Nou Camp.
As was the case a year ago, the hope projected onto this team was that the change of coach and style — last season,
it was Maurizio Sarri’s patient build-up — was worthwhile as long as the best performances kept coming in Europe. And as was the case a year ago, Juventus did not pick up where they left off when the knockouts came around, even after a favourable draw. Instead, they fell flat and lost the first leg of their last-16 tie for the third season in a row — Atletico Madrid, Lyon and now Porto. The coaches change, the results remain the same but — as with Tolstoy’s unhappy families — each of these games is unhappy in its own way.
“You know, in the Champions League you’re always focused,” the club’s chief football officer Fabio Paratici claimed before kick-off in Porto. “It’s not like we weren’t against Lyon (last season). We played a good game and, by the way, we didn’t deserve to lose.”
Oddly though, the team’s concentration was an issue this time around as Juventus conceded at the beginning of each half. It was especially strange considering the Italian champions are eight points off the top in Serie A (albeit with a game in hand) and could be forgiven for paying even more attention to Europe.
You’d have thought it would have focused their minds. Instead, mental lapses cost the Old Lady dearly.
First, Rodrigo Bentancur’s casual back-pass turned into an assist for Mehdi Taremi and the Iranian was able to score the third-quickest goal ever against Juventus in the Champions League. Then his fellow midfielders neglected to shadow Moussa Marega, who was able to double Porto’s lead just 19 seconds after the interval.
Porto doubled their lead almost as soon as the second half kicked off (Photo: Octavio Passos – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
Chiesa couldn’t explain it. “I haven’t played a lot of these games,” he admitted. “It’s my first knockout game.” The same was true of Dejan Kulusevski and Weston McKennie. This was the youngest Juventus starting XI in the Champions League since the 1998 final in Amsterdam.
Naivety, however, is not an acceptable explanation. The team still had enough experience in its ranks to put on a better display at the Dragao.
“There are some important absences but that can’t be an excuse because we have a squad of real quality,” said Juventus vice-president Pavel Nedved before kick-off. His former Lazio team-mate, Porto coach Sergio Conceicao, had no problem listing off all the problems Juve could still pose his team. “We knew Adrien Rabiot could be an important player for them (as he proved on Juventus’ goal). Chiesa’s great in one-v-one situations. Cristiano is… Cristiano,” he said. “They’ve got so many strong points.”
All of which is true. But Juventus missed Leonardo Bonucci’s direct, line-breaking passes, Arthur’s tempo-setting, quickstep possession game and the versatile Juan Cuadrado, who already has 13 assists for the season in all competitions and is emerging as the team’s most reliable creator. Without them, Juventus struggled to break Porto down. Credit for that must go to Conceicao and the strategy he devised — which the former Inter Milan winger was only too happy to share, perhaps with a view to working in Serie A at some stage in the future.
“Up until the 70th minute, Juventus created almost nothing,” the 46-year-old explained. “Marega stopped Rabiot. Giorgio Chiellini had problems in the build-up.” Conceicao allowed the Juventus players least comfortable on the ball plenty of time with it at their feet and spent the interim crowding out those he thought could hurt Porto. “We played a great game, albeit one that was by no means spectacular because we had to defend,” Conceicao elaborated. “You need to do that against Juve.”
The game plan meant Cristiano Ronaldo had a quiet night. The five-time Ballon d’Or winner’s slow-ish start to 2021 — he has failed to score in seven of Juventus’ last 10 games — had been justified in terms of him making absolutely sure he was in peak condition for the Champions League’s resumption. Ronaldo had scored
all of Juventus’ goals in the knockout stages since his arrival in Turin from Real Madrid two and a half years ago, but not last night. Back home in Portugal, he was on the end of some rough treatment from Mateus Uribe and perhaps should have been awarded a penalty in stoppage time.
It was surprising that referee Carlos del Cerro Grande wasn’t advised to go to the on-field review area and, in the end, that decision wasn’t the only one that hurt Juventus. A harsh booking on former Porto defender Danilo rules him out of the second leg on March 9, making an attritional evening even worse. Juventus lost Bonucci on the eve of the game and then Chiellini after 35 minutes. Matthijs de Ligt cramped up in the final stages and the Dutchman had to grit his teeth just to get through to the final whistle. Morata, Juventus’ top scorer in the Champions League, wasn’t fit enough to start and also hasn’t been the same since he had a bout of flu. “He came on in a time of need,” Pirlo said, “but as soon as the game was over, he had to take a lie down. He fainted.”
The Spaniard’s introduction for the final 20 minutes coincided with Juventus’ best spell of the game. His link-up play and willingness to stretch Porto’s defence with runs in behind helped shift the momentum back their way. Up until then, they had been all too predictable. Juventus’ attack is only the sixth-best in Serie A in terms of goals scored and it’s not the first time they have given the impression of lacking ideas on how to unlock deep defences. Some of that is down to a pedestrian passing game in Arthur’s absence and the likes of McKennie and Kulusevski receiving possession with their back to goal rather than on the turn. In this sense, Paulo Dybala continues to be a big miss and Pirlo hopes he can have the impact of a January signing once he’s fit again.
“When you get the ball and you’re always taking three or four touches, you lose time and they did a good job, particularly in midfield, at getting back and helping out their defenders,” Pirlo observed. “We had to be more lucid in our reading of the game and switch it from one side to side more because they were compact between the lines and there was a lot of space out wide. But the ball movement was too slow. We weren’t quick enough in figuring out certain situations and this was the problem.”
It was a near-repeat of what happened in Saturday’s 1-0 defeat to Napoli when Juventus gifted their opponents a goal and watched them park the bus for the rest of the game. “It was more or less the same,” said left-back Alex Sandro. “We finished the game well and started badly.”
After the Super Cup win against Napoli a month ago, Juventus seemed to be in the zone and they need to rediscover that mindset if they are to reach the final eight from here.
They have turned around bigger deficits at the Allianz Stadium — a Ronaldo hat-trick cancelled out a 2-0 defeat to Atletico in his first season in Italy. But memories of their elimination at the hands of Lyon in August are fresher still.
If Juventus go out at this stage again, Pirlo won’t be the only one unimpressed.
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