Roma 3 Juventus 4 – unpicking the chaos and fallout from an instant classic
By
James Horncastle Jan 10, 2022
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It was a match to savour before new restrictions come into effect in Italy which will limit attendances at Serie A games to 5,000 fans for the next fortnight. Either the Italian Football Federation consented to it or prime minister Mario Draghi was prepared to shut down the league until the international break at the end of the month as cases of COVID-19 continue to spike.
Roma supporters have been turning out in droves for games at the Stadio Olimpico this season. The appointment of Jose Mourinho and €112 million invested in the transfer market got their hopes up. Only Milan averaged bigger crowds in the first half of the campaign and the 408,000 tifosi Roma attracted to the Olimpico counts as almost double the draw of co-tenants Lazio at the same venue, even with the promise of Sarrismo.
Sunday’s game against Juventus was truly unforgettable.
The adrenaline pumped long after referee Davide Massa blew the final whistle. It was an instant classic even by the standards of this rivalry. It was so absurd film directors Federico Fellini or Paolo Sorrentino at their best could not have scripted it. And yet the outcome — Roma, from 3-1 up, losing 4-3 after their former goalkeeper saved a late penalty for Juventus to prevent a 4-4 draw — quite stunningly remained true to history and evoked that line from one of the great pieces of Italian literature The Leopard: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Same old Roma. Same old Juve.
This, however, was not any old game.
It may only be January but the stakes felt very high indeed.
Before the evening kick-off, Milan claimed their third straight victory away to Venezia and temporarily went top of the table. Napoli overcame Sampdoria with a scissor kick from Andrea Petagna and Atalanta showed no mercy to a COVID-decimated Udinese side by beating their hosts by a tennis score (6-2).
That all made Roma vs Juventus a must-win game for both teams if they were to stay in touch with the top four in the race to make it to the
Champions League, an objective of paramount financial importance no matter the mid-term aim of their respective projects.
In Italy, there is still an element of cognitive dissonance when watching a treble winner and the most successful Italian coach of the last decade desperately fighting over a level of success their reputations and backstories may have once deemed beneath them — the absolute minimum.
The game hardly conformed to stereotypes about the brands of football attributed to Mourinho and Massimiliano Allegri — indicative to some of waning influence, relevance and dated ideas, whereas to others it was symbolic of poorly constructed teams, caught between one philosophy and another.
There were great goals from No 10s in Lorenzo Pellegrini and Paulo Dybala and the entertainment it provided will probably go unmatched between now and the end of the season. But the standard of performance, even by the victors, was nowhere near the peaks Napoli showed against Lazio in late November, not to mention those champions Inter Milan consistently delivered throughout December.
The drama was driven, in part, by novelty.
Three Englishmen playing together on the same Serie A team for the first time ever with
Arsenal loanee Ainsley Maitland-Niles making his Roma debut next to Chris Smalling and Tammy Abraham.
Roma twice taking the lead and going into the final half-hour 3-1 up, after losing by the same scoreline to a makeshift Milan team only three days earlier.
Pellegrini curling in a free kick but missing that penalty.
Wojciech Szczesny, whose mistakes cost Juventus at the start of the season, saving Pellegrini’s spot-kick and denying Roma a point from the spot — just as he did in October’s reverse fixture.
A rare goal from a Juventus midfielder — Manuel Locatelli’s first ever with his head — and a winner from Mattia De Sciglio of all people, a player who had only ever found the back of the net once before in the top flight and that was over four years ago.
Then there was this Juventus team, the least prolific since the turn of the century, scoring four times, including three in seven second-half minutes to come back from the point of no return in scenes equivocal only to the Derby d’Italia in April 2018 when two goals in the last five minutes beat Inter 3-2 at San Siro.
Locatelli was on the scoresheet for Juventus (Photo: Giampiero Sposito/Getty Images)
Roma had largely controlled the game for an hour. Abraham opened the scoring — making it nine goals in his last nine games — and with a bit of luck could have had a hat-trick. Their English duo of Abraham and Smalling wrought havoc from corners. Mourinho’s change from three at the back to a 4-2-3-1 transformed the passive team we saw at San Siro on Thursday to a more aggressive one.
Dybala’s equaliser on 18 minutes, a trademark, beautifully-placed shot from outside the area, came out of nothing after a rare foray forward with Federico Chiesa drawing defenders to him and skipping past them as he cut inside.
Chiesa’s injury shortly afterwards was a buzzkill for Juventus.
Already hobbling after diving into a challenge with ‘Smaldini’, hindsight tells us Marco Landucci — the assistant coach standing in for the suspended Allegri — should have taken him off. But Chiesa’s comeback goal against Napoli on Thursday after being out since November and the assist he had just provided stayed Landucci’s hand. As was the case with Nicolo Zaniolo and Merih Demiral last season, this fixture — to say nothing of this Olimpico pitch — appears to have claimed another ACL.
It has been the story of Juventus’ season. If Dybala is fit, Chiesa isn’t, and vice-versa.
The Old Lady can’t have nice things. And when Henrikh Mkhitaryan’s 48th-minute shot deflected in off De Sciglio and Pellegrini found the top corner five minutes later with a picture-book free kick his old team-mate Miralem Pjanic would have been proud of, it looked like Roma were not only about to bounce back from the inexcusable loss to a weakened Milan but back up the encouraging 4-1 win over Atalanta a week before Christmas.
Juventus, on the other hand, looked down and out, and attention turned to how the Roma win would be framed.
Abraham opened the scoring, making it nine goals in his last nine games (Photo: Antonietta Baldassarre/Insidefoto/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Mourinho’s predecessor Paulo Fonseca — unfairly maligned for his record in big games — had also defeated Juventus, but the context of that result was it came at the end of the 2019-20 season, when Maurizio Sarri and his players had already won the league.
This prospective win would surely have attained greater significance and generated more clamour (not least from Mourinho himself).
But the overwhelming emotion upon watching the first hour of the game was almost unanimous — isn’t this the worst Juventus team since the one that finished seventh, missing out on Europe, under Luigi Delneri in 2011? The debate around that only made losing the game all the more galling, unjustifiable and laden with regret.
The good reaction to Thursday’s shambles in Milan, the goodwill it engendered, the confidence Roma must have gained from it, went from reality to mirage in the most crushing way imaginable.
Mourinho lamented “a psychological collapse” and there may be some truth in that. But this group of players did dig in and hold their nerve when knocking out Ajax on the road to reaching last season’s
Europa League semi-finals. Here, Roma were outmanoeuvred by Allegri from the stands. It was a sign that his intuition has not deserted him.
Allegri’s reading of games and ability to change them from the sidelines has often been hailed as his superpower but his substitutions this season have often hurt rather than helped the team. Sunday’s decisions to put on Alvaro Morata for the ineffective Moise Kean and Arthur Melo for Rodrigo Bentancur —
two players Allegri insists are staying but could still move by the end of the January transfer window — just after the hour changed the game.
Mourinho, on the other hand, complained that swapping Felix Afena-Gyan for Eldor Shomurodov on 71 minutes let Juventus back into a game they could be forgiven for thinking was lost. “Who came on made a mistake,” he said. Not him.
What feels like the 600th Matthijs de Ligt handball since his move to Italy two and a half years ago did, however, present Roma with a chance to share the spoils — but results elsewhere meant a draw would do little for either cause.
Pellegrini’s penalty miss, on 83 minutes, need not have been fatal.
De Ligt’s red card had given Roma 16 minutes (including added time) to find at least an equaliser, which is why the sight of Giorgio Chiellini coming on immediately after the dismissal and needing a bandage wrapped around his head within seconds of taking the field ticked another box as to what made this game great.
Almost straight away, Chiellini took out Pellegrini in a way calling to mind that shirt-pull on
Bukayo Saka in July’s European Championship final at Wembley. The Roma skipper then had to withdraw with a cut to his own head.
Giorgio Chiellini was called upon after Matthijs de Ligt’s red card (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
This win keeps Juventus within touching distance of the top four, but it may be pyrrhic.
Chiesa’s injury will keep him out until the end of the season — a huge blow for Juventus, and for the national team with the World Cup play-offs coming up in March. De Ligt and Juan Cuadrado will now be suspended for the Super Cup against Inter on Wednesday.
In the cold light of Monday morning, it remains to be seen if winning in the capital last night is the latest turning point in Juventus’ season. For now, the four goals and the identity of who scored them, not to mention the quintessentially dogged Juventus reaction, is encouraging and extends their unbeaten run in all competitions to eight games.
FiveThirtyEight’s model gives the Old Lady a 44 per cent chance of qualifying for the 2022-23 Champions League.
Roma’s, by contrast, is now down to six per cent. This marks the first time in more than 30 years that Roma have lost at home to Juventus, Inter and Milan in the same season.
Not only are they nine points outside the Champions League places, they are eight points off where they were a year ago (when Fonseca had them in that coveted fourth spot). The squad is nowhere near as bad as their place in the table suggests and while it’s true the likes of Edin Dzeko, Pedro and Cengiz Under left, more than €100 million was spent on replacing them.
Past Roma coaches have turned the team into instant contenders with a lot less. Rudi Garcia comes to mind and while it’s true that Inter and Milan sorting themselves out makes the top four harder to reach, Atalanta have done it for a fraction of the budget despite the team being broken up two or three times under Gian Piero Gasperini.
When the Friedkin Group gave Mourinho a three-year contract last May, it wasn’t to qualify for the Champions League in year three.
The owners are not where they anticipated being at this point. But support for Mourinho continues and is shown once again in the transfer market.
Central midfielder Sergio Oliveira is expected to arrive from Porto this week — the sixth new signing of the past six months. Perhaps he’ll inspire Roma to win the Coppa Italia or the Europa Conference League.
Only a trophy between now and May can save this season, unless Roma start showing the sort of consistency that has proven beyond them so far under Mourinho.
Roma and Lazio should really do something about that pitch quality though, not only another player got another ACL tear in Olimpico, but the holiness of that pitch also cost them 2 points last night.
And we're still short around 5 goals season wise, as we're on 32 goals with 36.84 xG.
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