Juventus captain Manuel Locatelli stepped up to the penalty spot in the final game of the 2024-25 season last May. With his team’s Champions League hopes were hanging in the balance, he took about as cold-blooded penalty as we’ve seen from a Juve player in a few years. The moment, the stakes, everything that came with it certainly ran through his head before making contact with the ball. But on that nice in Venice, he was nails.
Fast forward to Juve’s final game before the international break 10 months
later, the same cannot be said about that same player stepping up to the penalty spot.
Of course, that was in the season finale. This penalty kick came with eight games on the schedule still to play. But it’s hard not to think of the ramifications of what Locatelli absolutely flubbing his 87th-minute attempt from the penalty spot and ultimately sending Juventus to a 1-1 draw against a Sassuolo side that they absolutely hammered all of 2 1/2 months ago. With the team directly in front of Juventus still to play this weekend, Luciano Spalletti could very much be watching his team fall three points behind Como by the time lunchtime is over on Sunday.
No matter how you feel about the penalty — and it certainly looked far from conclusive considering the angles and replays that we were given during the lengthy VAR review — it was a golden chance for Juventus to get a go-ahead goal with only minutes to go.
And they completely whiffed on it.
Some may say that the ball don’t lie. That is true. Others will also say that this result was more a by-product of Juventus not putting Sassuolo away when they had the chance in the first half and then looking completely out of whack following the equalizer all of a few minutes out of halftime. Both parts are very much the truth — and it all added up to Juve dropping points in a game in which they couldn’t knowing who Como has on the schedule this weekend.
So as much as Juve and Como are even on 54 points right now, it feels like a pretty hallow situation.
Are you really sitting there thinking Pisa, a team that will be relegated in a couple of months, is going to pull off one of the more surprising results we’ve seen against a Como side that looks like its truly picking up steam?
I’m not. When I wake up Sunday morning, I am fully expecting a Como win and for Juventus to be three points off fourth place with eight games to play. Maybe I’ll be wrong. Hell, I’ll pour myself a drink before 10 a.m. if Pisa can take points off Como and actually give Juventus a standing chance of somehow overtaking them over the final eight games.
But at this point … I dunno, man. You aren’t going to jump into fourth place playing like this. The more you drop points, the more you’re going to demand that you need to be near-perfect over the course of the final eight games. And if there’s one thing this Juventus squad have proven to us both this season and in previous iterations, long winning runs is not something that they can do on a regular basis.
In the end, though, it pretty much is just a microcosm of Juventus’ struggles up front this season. They had eight shots on goal and scored just once. Sassuolo had seven shots — total. I’m guessing you won’t be surprised to hear the news that Juve allowed a goal on Sassuolo’s first shot on target on Saturday. You know, the kind of thing that Juventus have been doing all season long.
This game should have been put away well before any sort of last-minute penalty might have been needed. But outside of Kenan Yildiz’s 10th goal of the Serie A season, Juventus were unable to convert much of anything. While it’s true that Sassuolo goalkeeper Arijanet Muric hulked up and kept his team in the game, the lack of Juve putting another team away came back to bite them right in the culo.
We don’t know if it will end up costing them a spot in the Champions League next season just yet. But it’s hard not to think that they are only so many get of jail free cards left for this team before they are in even more serious of danger than they may well be right now.
Juventus can’t afford to drop many more points this season — and this has been the case for weeks now. Yet, on Saturday night, they weren’t able to get more than a single goal during a first half in which they were clearly the better side and then it came back to haunt them. Not exactly the best way to go into an international break that is already going to be tense as hell for pretty much every person with Italian heritage.
RANDOM THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS
- Just when you think they might be starting to snap out of whatever the hell was wrong with them in February, Juve go and drop this kind of result on us. Not great, Bob!
- Boy, I sure didn’t expect to be feeling this kind of way when I saw Juve go coast-to-coast in the span of 12 seconds and take a 1-0 lead through Yildiz. That looked the beginning of something good. Instead, it turned out to be the high point before things just took a complete nosedive.
- A whooping cough outbreak within the squad? Are we back in 2020 again? Or is this just a weird kind of second edition of all the madness that 2020 proved to be?
- You can’t beat a team that is short-handed because of said whooping cough outbreak and is rolling into Turin on back-to-back losses? Not great, either, Bob!
- Maybe whooping cough would have been better than watching that second-half performance. I think it’s still up for debate. Feel free to prove me otherwise. I’m all ears at this point.
- What in the yellow hell is that Sassuolo away kit? I’m glad we don’t have to see that again?
- What was worse to look out: Sassuolo’s away kit or Juventus’ second-half performance? Yeah, hard to pick!
- Juventus’ first shot on goal was a wide-open header from Locatelli. Just as we all predicted it would be. (Was a good save on it, too — credit where credit is due because that’s what we do here.)
- Then again, it was a much better header than whatever the heck that penalty kick attempt was.
- I will say, though, I have no problem Locatelli taking the penalty kick. The sample size of him taking PKs is still small, but he’s been good up until this point. Yildiz has barely taken any PKs as a professional. Dusan Vlahovic was out for four months and probably rusty as all hell when it comes to those pressure-packed situations no matter how much his league-high salary may tell us otherwise. It was Locatelli’s chance to be The Man and live up to the captain’s billing. Instead, he sent a pretty easy shot right at Muric.
- Spalletti is out here throwing on guys who hadn’t played in four months and 700 freakin’ days to try and get a goal. If that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about Juventus’ striker situation as we hit the final two months of the season, I don’t know what does.
- Juve needed a goal and Jonathan David and Loïs Openda were nowhere to be found. I repeat, Arek Milik, who hadn’t played in almost two full seasons, was a better option in Spalletti’s eyes than either one of those two summer signings. What’s the use of spending so much money on these new attackers then? Spalletti clearly has lost faith in David and Openda and it’s hard to see a way forward with them beyond this season if this is how it’s going to be the next two months.
- Yes, that being said, if you’re going to spam the ball into the box, then guys like Vlahovic and Milik who are better in the air is the right call. Just didn’t expect Milik to make his triumphant return in such a desperate kind of situation where Juve needed to score.
- It’s good to hear the reception those two guys but especially Milik got as they came on. Man has been through it and deserved a warm welcome back onto the field.
- Who would have thought that the midfielder in which Juventus spent €60 million on two summers ago would end up being the last man back as they chased a late winner against a mid-table team. Not me, that’s for sure. But here we are. That is what Teun Koopmeiners’ role has turned into with this team.
- I miss the happiness that came with that counterattack on Yildiz’s goal.
- That outlet pass from Mattia Perin was a thing of beauty. I honestly didn’t know he had that in him.
- The run from Francisco Conceição? Wonderful. The one-time finish from Yildiz? Beautiful.
- That was supposed to be the ignition point and what we all hoped would become another win. Nope, we were all wrong. Juventus’ bad side came back to play. I hate it all.
- Weston McKennie ran close to 6 km in the first half alone. Dude is a madman.
- Credit to Khephren Thuram for playing 70 minutes after passing a late fitness test. But man, there were some moments and turnovers in this game that had you wondering just how fit he actually was.
- Also, I’m a little worried about Bremer. He didn’t look very good on the Sassuolo goal. Not at all.
- I don’t want to talk about this game anymore. I’m going to go outside and do something that won’t make me want to throw things or yell bad words. The cat is trying to nap. Cheers to the weekend — it can’t get much worse than how Juventus played in the second half, I’m guessing.
