Sergio's Grab Bag: No Fight

03/22/2025 03:56 PM

We talk about Juventus failing to get off the canvas, getting worse on set pieces and the schadenfreude of the Fiorentina loss for former Juve players.

I used to do a lot of boxing back in the day.

It started as an entertaining way to get in shape. Mostly sessions focused on conditioning, heavy bags and mitt work. As I got better, though, I started to get curious about sparring with some of my classmates that were more advanced than I was. After a few months, the coach deemed me ready to spar for the first time as he decided I knew enough about the basics to hold my own against other relative novices in the gym.

(PSA for anyone trying to get into boxing: Any boxing gym that throws you into the ring to spar in the first few lessons is a bad gym and you should stop going to it. To get anything worthwhile out of a sparring session, you have to be solid at defense, basic combinations and footwork to avoid just blacking out, throwing blind punches and most likely getting knocked out in devastating fashion.)

I got my ass kicked for a few rounds, but sort of held my own at times. I started getting better and better and was starting to be competitive against other guys who had between 1-2 years of training like myself — which felt reassuring.

One day, the coach decided to square a bunch of us novices up against a guy that was training for his first tournament. He was much more talented than us and had been training for a lot longer. The gist of the training was that the rookies — AKA us — would rotate in every three minutes and spar without giving the more experienced fighter a break. The point of the whole thing was for the guy in the middle to practice his conditioning and for us to get a crack at a better fighter.

He was given the instruction to not go too hard on us, his main objective was to move around and keep his stamina up during the extra long nine minute round he would have to go without a break while fighting three people consecutively.

As we all geared towards getting in the ring, I felt quietly confident. Yes, I knew this guy was better but I had been getting better myself as well. Holding my own and maybe even shocking some of the other people training that had gathered to watch was not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

Dear reader, it was not within the realm of possibility.

The more experienced fighter was better than us in every single conceivable way. Faster, smarter, stronger. The second you were thinking of a way to connect with a speculative jab, he had already landed a couple strikes on you and moved out of the way so your fist touched nothing but air.

After the first round it was very clear that we had no shot. However, the thing I remembered the most was the attitude each one of us took in relation to the challenge of the remaining rounds. One of the group got pissed off at how badly he was getting exposed and directed all that anger into his punches, hoping to land at least one. The angrier he got the less focused he became and the worse his technique got. He was easy pickings.

Myself, on the other hand, decided to change approaches for every round. I tried to counterpunch first but after seeing he was too fast for that, the strategy switched to being aggressive and maybe overpowering him with volume. When that failed and got rib shot to death in the process, I tried to work a super aggressive jab to set up body punches.

It all failed, but I felt that I at least tried something new each time.

The last guy, though, he knew he was done. It didn't matter if he got angry or changed strategies or tried to smart his way into a favorable result. He knew in his heart of hearts that his destiny was to get mauled by this dude and lost all sorts of interest in trying to escape his faith. He walked into the ring just waiting for the three minutes to be done. Each round worse than the last, completely shook and distraught.

I couldn't help to think back to that guy's vacant, defeated eyes when I watched Juventusget killed by Fiorentina 3-0 last weekend. After getting historically beat up by Atalanta the previous week, you would have liked to see some sort of response from the team after such a dispiriting defeat.

Instead of that, Juventus put forth an arguably worse performance against a Fiorentina side that was a decidedly mid-table team coming into this matchup. The tactics were wrong, the spirit was completely absent and the substitutions were awful. For a team that two weeks ago was six points off the lead in Serie A and could have theoretically put some pressure on the league leaders, Juventus played some of their worst football in their following two games.

Let's unfortunately cook.

Coaching Issues

I found something troubling.

The last two years of the Max Allegri era, Juventus led the league in goals coming from set pieces. At the time, it was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment for the offensive ineptitude of the team that we could only score from opportunities generated by set pieces and in no other way.

While that was a valid criticism of the general style of play the team had the last couple of years under Allegri, the cold hard truth is that a goal coming from a set piece and a goal coming from open play count the exact same on the scoreboard. And Juventus was remarkably good at seizing those opportunities.

Set piece goals are generally not goals that come from chance, even if for the untrained eye they appear that way sometimes. A lot of time and effort goes into coaching schemes and plays to maximize your chances at converting corner kick.

It's very similar to how a basketball team sets up plays. Trying to use misdirection, fake runs, hunt a mismatch or set picks to get one of your players an open run. This was a fun thing I found online that's a great example of this.

My point being with all this: Juventus wasn't the best team in Italy scoring from set pieces in the last two years by chance. They were the best team in the league because this was something that they trained and practiced over and over again until they turned it into a strength and a competitive advantage. And if you are a team that struggles to score goals from open play, focusing on being as dangerous as possible on set pieces is probably a good way to turn a weakness into a strength.

(There's obviously some variance and randomness like everything, but it's no shock that well coached teams are usually high on that list like Inter for example. As much as it sucks to admit that Inter Milan is doing something well.)

This season's Juventus on the other hand? Yeah, not so much.

There's many cases to be made that Thiago Motta has done a subpar job in terms of coaching this team up, but this is a neat example of that. It's very hard to go from best to almost worst in just one year, but it's clear that this was an area in which the Motta-led coaching staff just didn't really put a lot of emphasis in and it shows.

If this drop was countered by an attack that produces significantly more scoring chances from open play, I'd be more willing to overlook this but as this hasn't been the case it just seems like something this team used to be good at they got worse at for no particular reason other than a lack of coaching.

(And not having Gleison Bremer, I'm willing to concede that — dude was a menace on corner kicks. But the lack of one player cannot explain alone the huge disparity between seasons.)

Motta's on the hot seat because of the results and a lot of that has been out of his hands. But there's been a lot of things in which he has just shot himself — and the team — in the foot. This is a good example of that.

Salt on the Wound

Did the defeat against Fiorentina hurt? Yes.

Did it hurt significantly more that three former Juventus players had a lot to do with the Bianconeri getting spanked in Florence? Absolutely.

Moise Kean, Nicolo Fagioli and Rolando Mandragora were at one point or another valued Juventus prospects. Not every move out for these guys was completely unfounded. Kean very clearly needed a fresh start after a horrid last season with Juventus and Mandragora was on a different timeline for a team with a lot of veteran players in his position.

Fagioli is the one that I cannot for the life of me understand any footballing reasons to let him go. As everyone remembers, Fagioli lost almost an entire season for his gambling suspension. Most clubs would have cut bait at that point, but Juventus didn't. They stood by him during the whole scandal, signed him to a contract extension and played him as soon as he was eligible to return after his suspension.

He was a Juventus youth product who had never been shy about his love for the club. A guy that bled black and white, so it was nice to see the club back him up and set him as a guy to build around in the new Juventus era.

However, as soon as the Motta era started and for reasons only known to people inside that locker room, Fagioli immediately fell out of favor, playing sparingly in a crowded midfield that was deep in investment but shallow in terms of performance. His last meaningful contribution came in Juve's miraculous victory over RB Leipzig in the Champions League in which he played a pretty good game in arguably one Juve's high points of the season.

After that, he got frozen out of the lineup and unceremoniously sold for pennies on the dollar to a direct rival for the top four. Am I saying that Fagioli could have altered the path of this Juve season? Perhaps, who's to say? But what I will definitely say is that it was a dumb way of handling an asset from a team building point of view and it was completely in the realm of possibility that it was going to come back to bite them in the ass. And it did.

Parting Shot of the Week

A few weeks ago during an episode of The Old Lady Speaks Podcast, I mentioned that Motta's and Juventus future was in their hands. Finish the season strong, solidify the top four position and you are going to get the benefit of the doubt and another season. After those words were uttered, Juventus has done the exact opposite in every single way and yet ...

With head-to-head matchups still on the schedule against Bologna and Roma — two direct rivals for the final Champions League spot — they still somehow have their destiny in their hands.

So, once again: Finish strong, win those games and Motta and Co. should get another season. But, continue on the way the last few games have gone though and we might be in for another rebuild everybody.

See you next week.