Juventus 1 - Hellas Verona 0: Initial reaction and random observations

After the big win over Inter over the weekend, things got back to the normal we’ve seen over the first three months of the 2022-23 season for Juventus at the Bentegodi on Thursday night.

“Normal” in the sense that Juve didn’t play well at all.

But what’s not necessarily the norm compared to earlier in the season is that Juventus actually has a winning streak now — and that very much continued in Verona.

Juventus beat Serie A bottom dwellers Hellas Verona 1-0 thanks to a second-half goal from Moise Kean that took more than one fortuitous bounce on its way to crossing the goal line. At its core, that’s pretty much all you need to know simply because the way that Juve actually played was nothing to write home about at all. Any replication of the performance that we saw over the weekend in the Derby d’Italia never took place, with Juve giving more of a predictable kind of showing after such a big win.

But the difference — besides the fact that they were actually coming off a win over a big opponent — was that Juventus actually won this game. No matter how much they had to hang on for dear life at the end of the second half and into stoppage time, Juventus was able to get the win and extend their Serie A winning streak to five straight.

And don’t look now, but with how the results have gone the last few week as Juve has ripped off these five straight wins, Max Allegri and them boys are now in third place.

That is no joke.

After a start to the season that was technically worse than the 2021-22 campaign in which Juventus couldn’t do much of anything right the first couple of months of the year, Allegri has gotten this team into third place ahead of teams like Lazio, Inter and Atalanta who were absolutely on fire in August and September.

Essentially what I’m trying to say is that the performance was bad. The result, however, was one that you will take pretty much every day of the week.

At least it wasn’t worse. At least it wasn’t Monza 2.0 or a result that resembled it. The performance might have, but they result didn’t — and that allowed Juve’s winning streak and suddenly quick move up the table to continue.

RANDOM THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS

• Alex Sandro totally took one for the team in getting sent off on the cusp of stoppage time. Appreciate you, Alex. Go ahead and get rested for your time with Brazil at the World Cup.
• VAR actually worked in Juventus’ favor. Considering how VAR hasn’t worked in Juventus’ favor recently — or for what feels like the last couple of years — it was nice to actually have VAR work in Juventus’ favor.
• You know that you too were waiting to fire off absolutely mad takes about Leonardo Bonucci if that penalty call wasn’t reversed by VAR. I was ready. You were ready. Then you saw the replay where Bonucci made contact with the ball JUST BARELY before making contact with the man and just had the thought of hoping VAR wouldn’t screw it all up.
• Bremer good.
• Danilo good.
• Seriously, those two guys have been pretty good the last few games.
• Juventus had one shot on goal in the second half. It was Moise Kean’s goal.
• Arek Milik has not scored a goal in a few games, but man that dude is working his ass off up front to make things happen. You wanna see who sprung everything loose on Kean’s goal? Yeah, it was Arek Milik.
• Juan Cuadrado led everybody in tackles. Juan Cuadrado!
• Filip Kostic only attempted six crosses on Thursday night. This is not a joke. Six!
• Congrats to Mattia Perin for having to make just two relatively simple saves in what proved to be a shutout on his 30th birthday. Seems like a good day at the office.
• One day you get an Adrien Rabiot goal, the next day you get an Adrien Rabiot assist. Welcome to the season of Adrien Rabiot, one where we still don’t know if his improved performances will actually result in a contract extension or letting him walk for free next summer.
• Although, you know Veronique Rabiot is sitting around at some expensive restaurant somewhere in France seeing her son record the assist on Kean’s game-winning goal and so many Euro signs come rushing to her head again. Who knows if they are actually going to get said Euro signs, but you know Veronique is thinking of them.
• Hellas Verona outshot Juventus 15-11.
• This is your reminder that Hellas Verona has one of the worst attacks in the league.
• Do we really need to say anything else about this game? I think that’s about it. There’s not much to take out of this one, to be honest. Juventus didn’t play well at all, they still got the three points and now we can just focus on Sunday night’s matchup where there’s a chance of moving up in the Serie A table again if things fall right.