Agreed. I picked Juve to finish third about halfway through the season this year, so it's not exactly a surprise. I would say a third-place finish would be fair given the personnel at our disposal on the team and the front office.
That said, this team had a chance to do the Juve thing -- which was to exceed expectations as something greater than the sum of its parts. We saw that against Real Madrid. We saw some of it against Chelsea. We saw it against Milan and even Roma.
But the late collapse this year, when you cannot blame injuries or any other obvious failures, is a tough one to swallow. Particularly because this is what we have all always ridiculed Inter over. A late season collapse like this has shown the team's truer colors, but we would have loved to have continued our suspension of disbelief ... in the little engine that could.
We couldn't, and the team today is listless. And for the fans, we have to remember that sports is entertainment. Capello didn't bring us much of any entertainment in our play, but at least we won and achieved some goals. This time we don't even have that much, which makes watching Juve play that much less entertaining and that much more painful.
The season is really over for us. But it would be nice to have some suspension of disbelief that the status quo is far from satisfactory for the players, the coach, and the board at Juve, and that we are promised positive changes coming soon.
I guess the only silver lining to all this is in what a footie-loving neighbor of mine across the street of me says: "I don't like teams that haven't suffered for what they've achieved." I'll take this Juve over the fair-weather-fan, gloryhound-ridden club we had a few years ago. And there's elation in suffering in B, getting back to the CL, etc. But this year really showed no progress over last year -- save for some limited European success -- and that is what's a little disappointing for me.