Fiorentina hand Juventus a second straight heavy loss
03/17/2025 03:10 AM
Juventus was toothless on both sides of the ball as they received another drubbing to drop out of the top four.
There were questions as to whether Sunday's match between Juventus and Fiorentina would even be played. Severe weather in Tuscany had caused some severe flooding, but the danger subsided long enough for officials to give the game the go-ahead.
Would that it had kept raining a few more days.
A week after their 4-0 drubbing at the hands of Atalanta, the Bianconeri again found themselves on the back end of a thrashing. They allowed two goals in three minutes in the early phases of the first half — one was somewhat unfortunate, the other a complete defensive meltdown. Juve's attack simply couldn't muster a response, once again going the entire first half without putting a shot on target.
An early goal in the second period from another defensive hash was the nail in the coffin, and Fiorentina simply saw the game out from there, with Juve's response as limp and listless as we've ever seen from a Juventus team.
The defensive meltdowns and complete lack of response in the 3-0 loss were discouraging signs for a team that needed points to defend its place in the top four. After the results of earlier in the day, they had been leapfrogged by Bologna, who now hold a one-point lead in the race for the final Champions League place. As the international break descends, the rest of Juventus' season has come into sharp focus.
Thiago Motta had a surprisingly full deck to pick from. Arkadiusz Milik and Douglas Luiz were the only two active players unavailable to him. Despite having the likes of Francisco Conceição back in the fold, he picked a somewhat curious group to start the match. Michele Di Gregorio anchored the 4-2-3-1, with Timothy Weah, Pierre Kalulu, Renato Veiga, and Lloyd Kelly starting in front of him. Manuel Locatelli and Khéphren Thuram stood in midfield, while Weston McKennie was handed yet another job to do starting on the right wing, along with Teun Koopmeiners and Nico González in support of Randal Kolo Muani.
Raffaele Palladino also had a squad that was almost complete. The only absentees were the Andrea Colpani and the now-ineligible Eduardo Bove. Palladino employed a 3-5-1-1 that had more than one player with Juventus history. David De Gea started in goal, defended by Marin Pongracic, Luca Ranieri, and Pablo Marí. Dodô and Robin Gosens manned the wing-back positions. Midfield included two ex-Juve players, one of very recent vintage: Rolando Mandragora and Nicolò Fagioli joined Danilo Cataldi in the middle. Albert Gudmundsson played just off Moise Kean up front.
Juventus took up a lot of possession in the first 10 minutes, but showed very little initiative to do anything with it. When they did start to push the ball towards the box, the last touch or two simply weren't there to get a shot off.
Fiorentina had mustered some concerning counterattacks, but their goal came out of relative nowhere once Juventus had conceded their first corner kick of the game. Gosens, an old thorn in Juve's side from his Atalanta days, was left unmarked for a header. Veiga was in the way, but the ball rebounded right back to the German, who volleyed it into the net so hard that Di Gregorio barely had time to reset himself, and left Thuram flabbergasted as to what had just flown past him.
The Bianconeri barely had time to register what had just happened when the ex effect took a double bite out of them, with the help of some terrible defending.
It came out of what seemed like a nothing ball into the air. Kean nodded it down to Gudmundsson, who shifted it to Fagioli. Kalulu had been pulled out of position trying to challenge Gudmundsson, and Veiga showed no effort to try to close the gap, which Mandragora duly charged into. Fagioli found him perfectly in stride, and Mandragora swept the ball into the far post with a first-time shot from 19 yards.
If there was a bright side to Fiorentina's one-two punch, it was that it had come with more than 70 minutes left in the game. But Juve's response was tepid. A few shots were blocked, including one from Veiga on the back end of a free kick that might've started to make up for his error, but the season seemed to be summed up in one play when Kolo Muani squared the ball for Koopmeiners, only to see the Dutchman skew it so badly he may as well have not shot it at all.
They didn't allow another shot on target either, but Juve was so tepid coming forward that all that could be done was to hope for one of those games where Juventus came out of for the second half looking completely different.
Narrator's voice: The second half did not look completely different.
It was rather stunning that Motta chose not to make any changes at halftime. Juve managed to muster their first shot on target six minutes into the half — a weak header by Veiga on the second ball from a corner — but two minutes after that, the chance for any subs to have an impact was crushed.
The defense again went to sleep for Fiorentina to seal the game. As Fagioli crossed midfield with the ball, a gargantuan empty space opened up in front of Gudmundsson. No one came out to close the Iceland international down. Locatelli had pulled back to cover a run by Kean, and Veiga moved toward him only at the last minute, and Gudmundsson thundered the ball past a flying Di Gregorio, scoring his third goal in three games in all competitions.
Fiorentina nearly put together another quick double when Kean caught Veiga in his own half and charged into the box one-on-one with Di Gregorio, but after the finish the flag went up, as he had been in an offside position when the pass that Veiga had just intercepted had been played.
It was only at this juncture that Motta finally brought someone off his bench—two full-backs in Andrea Cambiaso and Alberto Costa. The move pushed Weah up the field and added Cambiaso's skill to the left flank, but it was still a strange move and, regardless, far too little and far too late.
Fiorentina easily saw the rest of the game out against a Juve team that simply had no fight. The only shot on target came from Thuram, who had victimized the Viola twice in December but this time could only hit a long shot right at De Gea. Injury was added to insult when Dodô went in on Cambiaso from behind and rolled up his already-vulnerable ankle. It was a bad challenge that went totally unpunished by Michael Fabbri, but forced the full-back off the field and into the trainer's room.
Fabbri only added two minutes of stoppage time to a game that had been over some time before, and Juve headed back to their locker room with the international break to ponder what has gone wrong the last two rounds.
LE PAGELLE
MICHELE DI GREGORIO - 6. The only player who performed his duties adequately. Faultless on the goals, and made a couple of well-timed runs outside his box to pick off balls behind the defense that Kean was chasing.
TIMOTHY WEAH - 5. One of the few guys who looked like he was still pushing while he was on the field, even though his end product was pretty lackluster.
PIERRE KALULU - 5. Got sucked out of position on Juve's second goal, but led the team with three tackles. Unfortunately, he was one of only two members of the starting XI to actually register one, which was part of the whole problem today. Of the back four perhaps the least culpable.
RENATO VEIGA - 3. A shocking performance after he looked so good before he got hurt. Directly responsible for the last two goals, simply not moving to address the threat until it was already too late.
LLOYD KELLY - 4. Wasn't good at either position he played until he was hauled off. There has to be someone else who can play here if Cambiaso isn't starting.
MANUEL LOCATELLI - 4.5. Arguably should've been keeping an eye on Gosens on the first goal, and simply got overrun by the Fiorentina midfield. Couldn't impart any kind of impetus or pace to the attack.
KHÉPHREN THURAM - 5. Got a shot on target, tepid as it was, and had a pair of tackles. Tried to push the ball through midfield but had nowhere to go with the ball most of the time.
WESTON McKENNIE - 5.5. The only player on the team to record more than one key pass (he had four) and also led in dribbles with three. One of the few guys that looked like he was playing hard until the end. But in the end, the question is why in hell is he playing this position?
TEUN KOOPMEINERS - 4. Credited with 10 cross attempts — although a lot of those were from free kicks — but he only connected on one of them, and had no other meaningful part to play in the buildup. Then there was that shot. I think it may have hit the Ponte Vecchio.
NICO GONZÁLEZ - 4. Work rate wasn't a problem, but there is simply no end product from him right now. Perhaps that's because he's being played on his weaker side, but he's still just not looking up to it right now. His continued presence in the starting lineup is a mystery.
RANDAL KOLO MUANI - 5.5. I can't be too harsh on a striker who gets hardly any service. Even the one key pass he made was the one that Koopmeiners sent into orbit. The lack of bite in the attack was anything but his fault.
SUBS
ANDREA CAMBIASO - 5.5. Flashed a little bit of quality on his flank. If Juve made any decent moves in the second half, Cambiaso was involved. Hopefully that cheap shot he took from Dodô didn't cause anything too serious.
ALBERTO COSTA - 5. Completed 95 percent of his passes, but caused little in the way of danger. He did get things a little tighter defensively, racking up two tackles.
FEDERICO GATTI - 5.5. Made the defense a little more solid when he replaced Kelly, and even had a key pass, but why was he even going on down 3-0?
FRANCISCO CONCEIÇÃO - 5. Couldn't create much off his dribbling. Should have been on WAY earlier.
SAMUEL MBANGULA - NR. No time to do anything. Another player that should've been entering the game much early.
MANAGER ANALYSIS
Thiago Motta got so much wrong in this game.
The starting XI was a complete mistake. Kalulu and Veiga have barely played together, and that unfamiliarity showed. Lloyd Kelly is Lloyd Kelly. As versatile as Weston McKennie has proven over the course of his career, starting him on the right wing when all of the true wingers on the team were healthy was mystifying in the extreme.
Equally mystifying were his substitutions. With the team so flat in the first half, a change or two at the half was frankly necessary, but the same 11 players were sent into the fray. Within eight minutes Fiorentina had their third goal and any moves he made were window dressing.
But even then, the windows looked ugly. Three of the first four players Motta sent on — while down 3-0 — were defenders. Where was Kenan Yildiz? Where was Dusan Vlahovic? When you're down like that, you either push your luck or throw in the towel, and it looked as though Motta did the latter with his changes.
It's a strange thing to see, because we've seen Motta do the exact opposite before. In the win over RB Leipzig earlier in the season, he sent Douglas Luiz on after they had been reduced to 10 men — an attacking change that was a clear sign to the players on the field that he wasn't packing it in. It was the Fino alla Fine motto spelled out on the field.
On Sunday night, it was the exact opposite.
I have advocated patience for Motta, and I am still prepared to extend that to him. But he made serious mistakes against Fiorentina that need to be addressed, along with dealing with the mental aspect of the players, which just looks awful right now.
LOOKING AHEAD
The international break is upon us. Those who aren't decamping for their national teams will have two weeks with Motta to get things right. Coming out of the break they host Genoa, who they beat 3-0 in their first meeting, before taking a critical trip to a white-hot Roma team.
