25 February 2022
Drawing conclusions is impossible, especially after 10 days of 1-1 draws for Juventus at home and abroad.
What emerged last weekend, however, when not one of Serie A’s top-eight teams going into Matchday 26 managed to win, is that a highly-contested run-in to the season awaits all of Italy’s top sides, when each victory will be as precious for morale as for the three points in the standings.
The point earned in last Friday’s derby stalemate with Torino extended Juve’s advantage in fourth place to three points over Atalanta, who were defeated by Fiorentina. Among the top three, neither Milan or Napoli could better Juve’s result, while Inter succumbed to Sassuolo.
An anomalous long weekend of action that left the Serie A table largely unchanged and which backed up Massimiliano Allegri’s observation that with more teams in need of the fewer points available from now until the end of the season, collecting any of those points will become even harder.
Considering the trip to Tuscany on Saturday, current form is certainly in favour of Juventus, having built a 12-match unbeaten run, especially when contrasted to Empoli’s nine matches without victory.
Outside of Turin, Juventus have gone seven games without loss, no other Serie A side can match such a run, and at the Castellani stadium in particular, the Bianconeri have notched up four victories in a row of their eight wins in total at Empoli.
What’s more, the Empoli defence has conceded in each of their last 14 Serie A games, the longest streak of leaking goals in the top flight in club history, but the Tuscans did show with their 1-0 victory the first time the sides met that they are capable of producing a shock.
The match winner from the meeting in September, Leonardo Mancuso left Empoli in January. The centre forward had lost his starter’s place to Andrea Pinamonti, who needs one more goal to reach double figures for the first time in his career and has struck two of the team’s most recent three goals.
The Inter youth product is backed up by a former Milan promise Patrick Cutrone, the match winner from Empoli’s last league win, a 1-0 success at the Diego Maradona stadium against Napoli in mid-December.
Since then Aurelio Andreazzoli’s side has suffered a dip in form, losing four and drawing five of their matches. Over that period, Empoli have seen both Milan and Roma hit them for four at home, while Sassuolo went one better with a 5-1 victory.
Following a torid week on the injury front, Max Allegri is asked to rally his players and turn their focus from Europe to Serie A for the first of back-to-back trips to Tuscany. The Italian Cup semi-final first leg against Fiorentina in Florence is scheduled for next Wednesday, March 2.
Weston McKennie, Alex Sandro and Kaio Jorge joined Paulo Dybala and Daniele Rugani as recent entries to the treatment room, where Federico Bernardeschi and Giorgio Chiellini are still working on returning to full fitness.
Alex Sandro’s and Dybala’s names appear on the scoresheet in two of Juve’s last four victories against Empoli, while the most recent match winner, in March 2019, was Moise Kean. A right-footed finish kick-started a run of four goals in as many matches for then still teenage striker.
Add to this the fact that Dusan Vlahovic has already netted at the Castellani this season, then Juventus can be confident they possess the talent and guile to punish the league’s second leakiest defence and bring an end to the sequence of draws.
