After winning their first game in the post-Igor Tudor era on Wednesday under stand-in coach Massimo Brambilla, Saturday’s match against Cremonese was the Juventus debut of their new full-time manager,
Luciano Spalletti.
The result was the same. The way they got there was decidedly different.
Brambilla only had one training session between Tudor’s firing and Wednesday’s game. He kept thing pretty much the same as they had been, except perhaps easing up on Tudor’s notoriously regimented system a bit. Spalletti, similarly, had one training session between officially taking over and Saturday’s match. He opted for an ambitious tactical twist, keeping the three-man back line intact but dropping embattled midfielder Teun Koopmeiners into the back three, using him as a super-deep lying playmaker. That, plus a few other shuffles, saw Juve come out of the gates hard, taking the lead in less than 90 seconds and coming very close to adding to that lead over the course of the first period. Cremonese pushed hard for an equalizer for much of the second half until Andrea Cambiaso took advantage of a mishit clearance to double the lead.
It would be a decisive goal, as a misplay in the back late on led to a grandstand finish that Juve were able to see over the line, clinching a 2-1 win that started the Spalletti era on a high note.
Spalletti came into his first game missing his best player, Kenan Yildiz, who was left home to rest a persistent knee problem. Gleison Bremer, Lloyd Kelly, Juan Cabal, Carlo Pinsoglio, and Arkadiusz Milik were also absent, perhaps allowing Spalletti to bring his surprising twist on the 3-4-2-1 into play. Michele Di Gregorio started at the base, with Pierre Kalulu, Federico Gatti, and Koopmeiners in front of him. Cambiaso and Filip Kostic played as wing-backs, bookending Manuel Locatelli and a returning Khéphren Thuram in midfield. Loïs Openda and Weston McKennie backed up Dusan Vlahovic in attack.
Cremonese boss Davide Nicola had never beaten Juventus in 14 previous tries throughout his career, but had delivered one of the surprises of the season when he pulled off a 2-1 win against Milan at the San Siro and had his team on its best top-flight start in their history. He was down half a dozen first-team players, including Antonio Sanabria, Giuseppe Pezzella, Alessio Zerbin, Alberto Grassi, Michele Collocolo, and Faris Moumbagna. He started a 3-5-2 that included a pair of former Juventus academy players. The first was Emil Audero in goal, who was screened by Federico Baschirotto, Filippo Terraciano, and Matteo Bianchetti. Former NextGen fullback Tommaso Barbieri started in the right wing-back spot opposite Romano Floriani Mussolini, bookending Martín Payero, Jari Vandeputte, and Warren Bondo in midfield. Federico Bonazzoli and Jamie Vardy tipped the spear in attack.
After going up in the fifth minute on Wednesday, Juve wasted even less time taking the lead in Cremona. McKennie slipped a beautiful feed to Openda in the right channel, and the Belgian tried an audacious back-heel feed to Vlahovic. Vandeputte tried to stick a foot out to block it but ended up serving the ball into open space on the left, where Kostic had all the time in the world to run onto it and sweep it past a stranded Audero to take the lead 85 seconds into the game.
Juve continued to turn the screws as the half went on. Cambiaso almost provided an assist to double the lead two minutes after the lead, but no one in the box could get a touch to it. In the 21st minute Vlahovic made a fantastic turn and charged downfield, but couldn’t beat Audero across the goal with his right foot. Five minutes later Locatelli was desperately unlucky when he hit a low shot from the top of the box that Audero got the barest fingertip to to push it off the post. Openda hit the side netting when he likely could’ve taken a better shot earlier, and another shot from distance by Locatelli went over the bar by about six inches.
Cremonese came out of the gate hard in the second half looking for an equalizer. Barbieri had a shot from a set play off a corner blocked high over the bar, and a few minutes later Bonazzoli tried to flick the ball to the top corner with the outside of his boot, but Di Gregorio was there to snatch it out of the air.
Juve tried to take the air out of their hosts in the 67th minute when Kostic and Cambiaso sent multiple balls across the goalmouth, but Vlahovic could only catch one to send it wide, although Cambiaso recovered the ball before it went out and kept the attack going.
They kept on pushing, and Francisco Conceição pushed the ball down the right side of the box and centered it. He missed Vlahovic, but Terraciano, who was marking Openda, made a poor attempt at a clearance and, like Vandeputte, only managed to put the ball into empty space in the box. Cambiaso met it just to the right of the penalty spot and fired it through the feet of Audero, who could only deflect it off the underside of the bar and in to double the lead.
That took some wind out of Cremonese’s sails, but they still pushed on, and Koopmeiners had to make a double block 10 minutes after Cambiaso’s goal to keep the lead at 2-0. But five minutes later a mistake made the finish a lot more stressful than it needed to be. Substitute Denis Johnsen finished a period of head tennis in the Cremonese half by whacking a ball upfield for Vardy. The 38-year-old managed to overpower Gatti and take off with the ball, settling the ball before firing across a helpless Di Gregorio to set up a grandstand finish.
Juve ceded more than 65 percent possession for the last seven minutes plus stoppages, but made certain that that finish never reached a crescendo. Cremonese registered only a single shot over that period, although Spalletti still began to lose his mind in the technical area as stoppage time wore on. But Juve were able to push things past the finish line in relatively good order, wrapping up consecutive wins for the first time since beating Genoa and then Inter on either side of the September international break.
