“Are you mad?” was Gigi Buffon’s prickly response when La Repubblica asked him if Juventus could finally start talking about the Scudetto after their mightily impressive 1-0 victory away to Lazio on Saturday. The 33-year-old goalkeeper had given his best performance of the season so far, and it was from one of the saves he made off Tommaso Rocchi that Juventus sprung the lightning fast counter-attack, one which ended with Simone Pepe scoring in the 34th minute.
True, they had ridden their luck at times. Hernanes had hit the post for Lazio and appeals for a penalty were also dismissed, but Juventus stayed positive, they kept playing their football and deserved to leave the Olimpico with the spoils. There was cause for celebration. Juventus were six points better off than they were at this stage last season and still unbeaten after their first 11 games in Serie A, a feat they last achieved under Marcello Lippi in 1997.
And yet Buffon refused to believe the hype. “Yes, you’re right,” he snapped at La Gazzetta dello Sport. “We’ve already won the Scudetto. We’ll easily beat Napoli on Tuesday. Is that what you want to hear?” Well, it was, sort of, yes. Antonio Conte had already exasperated reporters by insisting that he will never say the ‘S’ word. That led La Stampa to liken the Juventus coach to the Fonz from Happy Days, because just as he could not bring himself to say “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong”, so Conte won’t freely talk about the title.
The caution and restraint Juventus were showing was understandable. Humbled after back-to-back seventh place finishes in Serie A, theirs is not superstition, nor false modesty. It’s genuine: A case of once bitten, twice shy. Juventus have been built up before, and on each occasion that has made the fall ever harder to take.
In a series of interviews on Monday, Buffon revealed the scale to which he personally has been scarred by the disappointments of the recent past. He expressed a concern that “things have gone a little too well up until now”, that he doesn’t have any kind of certainty, “only hope” that this season will end differently to the last, and that there are “at least two teams better than us.”
Most revealing of all was his preparedness to admit, “I dread that everything will go back to how it was some months ago.” Buffon then added, “I need to understand how we will behave when we are missing two or three fundamental players, whether we will manage to stay competitive and stick together in circumstances like that.”
He got some answers on Tuesday when Juventus travelled to Naples.
Juventus's base formation is a 4-1-4-1, seen here as it was set up to face Lazio on Saturday. With Claudio Marchisio out for Tuesday's match in Naples, Antonio Conte was forced into changes.
While driving to the stadium their bus was attacked. Eggs were pelted, stones thrown and windows were smashed. No one was hurt, but it was clear that an intimidating atmosphere awaited the visitors. This was to be their biggest test yet. Would they pass? Would they fail? It was time to find out.
Juventus had lost on each of their last four visits to the San Paolo, and though there were reasons aplenty to be positive - from the defeats they had inflicted on Milan and Inter earlier this season to the news filtering through that an ankle injury had consigned Napoli striker Edinson Cavani to the stands - at the end of the day they had to come to terms with the fact they were without the suspended Claudio Marchisio.
The Italy international midfielder has proven himself to be fundamental to Juventus’s game-plan under Conte. He allows the team’s best player, Andrea Pirlo, to do what he does best. Think of it this way: If Pirlo is Juventus’s quarterback in their 4-1-4-1 formation, Marchisio is their left-tackle, protecting his blind side, blocking the pass-rush, preventing the sack. Until Tuesday, he was also Juventus’s joint top scorer with Alessandro Matri on five goals.
So Conte needed to adjust his strategy. What he did came as a surprise. He opted to play a 3-5-2 system instead. Stephane Lichtsteiner and Marcelo Estigarribia became wing-backs and were told to stop Juan Camilo Zuniga and Christian Maggio bombing forward. Simone Pepe then moved from the right-wing where he had played so well against Lazio on Saturday to Marchisio’s inside left position, in front of Pirlo. With numerical superiority in midfield it was thought that Juventus would be able to dominate and put pressure on Napoli's central midfield: Walter Gargano and Gökhan Inler.
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