If Juve depend on Zhegrova, the situation is grave but not serious
Flaiano never wrote it, but he could have: the situation is grave, but it is not serious. It fits Juventus right now. Their latest, paradoxical lifeline is a Kosovan winger with deft feet, the sort of player who would rank among the world's best if football were played without goals. With all due respect to Zhegrova, and that respect is entirely sincere, if a team called Juventus depend on his dribbling and moments of skill for their footballing salvation, he isn't the problem. Everything else is.
Juventus' familiar paradox brings a bitter smile: they don't play badly and have almost all the statistics in their favour, yet they remain the only team who can do all that and still seem unable to score. The numbers against Cagliari offer another example this season. Possession without a goal, a siege without a breakthrough, effort without reward. It's a statistical anomaly, almost a conceptual work of art.
They always have the ball, and sometimes they keep it too long. They surround opponents, force them back into their penalty area, pin them in their own half and win an enviable number of balls. Then they waste them. A high regain should launch a fierce attack, but instead they pass, ponder and slow down while their opponents reorganise. By the time they decide to strike, nine or ten men stand in their way and there's not a square metre of space. The penalty area is an underground train at rush hour: everyone is packed in, nobody moves and the ball has nowhere to go.
Juventus play at one pace: slowly, without ruthlessness. In football, ruthlessness isn't a character flaw. It's a technical quality: the first forward pass, the run into space before the defence can draw breath, the shot taken when there's just enough room, going face to face with Yerry Mina rather than leaving your manager to do it afterwards. Instead, Juventus are almost diplomatically courteous. They build, they polish, they give opponents time to consider their response.
Kolo Muani stands amid the sluggishness, a centre-forward ill-suited to this style of play. He needs space, counter-attacks and open ground ahead of him. Those were the things that made him great in Frankfurt, and this system denies him all of them from the outset. He is a javelin thrower asked to compete in a hotel room. He barely shoots and grows despondent. When a good chance does come, he blasts the ball against the crossbar from zero metres out, rendering pointless the first goal of his season, which he had scored with enormous difficulty shortly before. The club wanted and paid for a centre-forward despite knowing since the summer what kind of football Luciano Spalletti would play. Grave, but not serious. Again.
That leaves Zhegrova and Alajbegovic, the only two with what everyone else lacks: genuine technique. They can beat a man and create an advantage where none seems possible. In Turin, it might sound heretical to suggest a team with this history can't do without them. But the evidence is there, and this isn't a whim on the manager's part. When the team reaches the opposition's low block, they need someone to unlock it with a dribble. Intricate passing moves break down too, because of everyone else's considerable technical shortcomings.
Against Sassuolo, Zhegrova changed the tempo and the game as soon as he came on. Last night against Cagliari, he did it again: taking players on, using his quality to break the deadlock and offering his dribbling as a last resort for a system with few technical resources of its own. It works. But the contradiction remains: if your entire attacking strategy depends on Edon Zhegrova coming up with something, you've only shifted the problem. He comes on and everyone leaves it to him to beat his man, absolving themselves of responsibility. That, too, tells you where things stand.
Juve's crisis turns to comedy: they aren't a team without ideas, just a team with one idea. It's the football of block-of-flats managers in a city that has demanded leaders for decades. When quality is lacking, you make up for it with intensity, transitions, hunger and a willingness to bring 'something else' when little is happening on the pitch. Instead, Juve have chosen to pass the ball around, the one thing that requires quality.
Juventus' start has already left them behind, a serious problem in a Serie A without dominant sides. The outlook is even less convincing for a team who seem to have forgotten the game's most basic connection: the one between the ball and the net. Until they rediscover it, Juve's fate will rest at the feet of Edon Zhegrova and Kerim Alajbegovic. One is a high-wire artist whose career has been defined by 'inconsistency', the other a youngster being asked to skip steps in his development. That says everything about their talent, and almost everything about the rest.
