Man what a freaking letdown! We just beat Inter last week, we are due for a 2 week international break with no Juve football, and we were about to play one of the biggest contenders for the title in a place where we haven't won since the year 2000!
Unfortunately, the Napoli game won't be taking place today. The official reason given was that the recent heavy rain and floods across Italy have made the city of Naples dangerous for 60,000 fans to go across to get to the San Paolo stadium.
Gotta say, that makes a lot of sense to me. Especially since yesterday it was reported that 6 people had died from the flooding in Genova. Can you imagine walking/swimming to the stadium in a post-tsunami like river of trash and mice? Ugh.
The pitch at the San Paolo is reportedly fine and most likely capable of enduring 90 minutes of a grueling battle between the bianconeri and partenopei, but we won't be seeing that until later this year.
There is also rumor (haven't found reliable written source) that Andrea Agnelli called the FIGC to protest the decision to postpone the match. He apparently asked for the game to be played tomorrow (which makes sense to me actually), but I am guessing he probably made the call as more of an obligation rather than an act that would've amounted to something.
I am not one for conspiracy theories (yeah right), so I don't think that this decision was made only to favor Napoli. Don't get me wrong - Napoli is certainly the happier of the two teams right now. They just came off a tough week in which they played Bayern on Wednesday and are surely in a much worse spot than Juventus at the moment, both physically and mentally. But I don't believe that De Laurentiis set this whole thing up in a shady room somewhere in Naples. I just don't. Could just be me.
Either way, the match is most likely going to be played out on December 14. If that is the case, I'll be pretty pissed off. We play Roma on December 12, how the hell can we play at San Paolo 2 days later?
Here's Juventus' schedule for December if the game really is postponed for the 14:
Dec 4 - Juventus v Cesena
Dec 12 - AS Roma v Juventus
Dec 14 - Napoli v Juventus
Dec 18 - Juventus v Novara
Dec 21 - Udinese v Juventus
F7U12 FIGC!!!!! This is some bullshit. 4 Games in 9 days, two of which are against Roma and Udinese? Screw that.
To really kill you off, let me remind you that the next Juventus game is on November 20 against Palermo in Torino. That is 14 days of no Juve games. Watch out for John and I compensating with silly but heartfelt posts in the meantime here on the Juventus Offside.
I'm off to finish off my ruined Sunday with a hike and a 6-pack. If you still feel like watching some Juventus football despite the Napoli game postponement, you can always just re-watch the Inter game. Muahahahaha.