Fiorentina vs Juventus

But, the thing is, we're Juventus fans here. So, after a game in which Juve grinded through ineffective midfield play and hung on for dear life defensively on a ...

It was a cruel ending for a Fiorentina side that was clearly the better side against a shorthanded Juventus squad that was without nine first team players and had all but a couple of legitimate options off the bench for Max Allegri to turn to. It’s one of the more troll-y kind of goals that Juve’s scored in quite a while, and the ultimate kind of almost-walk-off win that gave the Bianconeri the last laugh on a night when the guy under the spotlight looked the most likely to score a goal of any player for the visitors. I mean, once Alvaro Morata came on you kinda just figured that was it for the changes coming from Juventus. (And he was under the spotlight for other obvious reasons, too.) But because it was an own goal, in second-half stoppage time, and against a team that just thoroughly was the better side, it had some kind of amusing laughter that came along with it. But sometimes, just sometimes, you throw the stats out, you take the win and then sometimes have a laugh at the same time. - Then Nico Gonzalez comes on for Ikoné and immediately runs right at De Sciglio, which didn’t help things at all. That was a rough assignment. I know why because the own goal tells me so, but I still don’t understand how they were able to keep Fiorentina off the scoreboard considering what the backline actually looked like and what kind of scoring chances Fiorentina was able to generate. That is thanks to a stoppage-time cross from Juan Cuadrado that bounced off Lorenzo Venuti’s chest and trickled across the Fiorentina goal line to give Juventus a 1-0 win in the first leg of the Coppa Italia semifinals. (Not that Manuel Locatelli or Adrien Rabiot gave him a huge run for his money or anything.) I had a few of those moments where I wished he had either passed the ball sooner or passed the ball forward as seems to be the case with a lot of Arthur games, but overall he was easily Juve’s best midfielder. The Franchi, for obvious reasons, was fired up, with the 75 percent capacity crowd sounding more like a full house on one of the biggest nights the old warhorse of a stadium has seen in years.