The Old Lady Speaks Podcast, Episode 183: Juventus get (very) defensive to beat Fiorentina

During Max Allegri’s second tenure at Juventus, we’ve seen nights like what we saw in Florence over the weekend. The low block, the defending for the vast, vast, vast majority of the game after getting an early lead, the suffering — this ain’t new to us.

We saw it again Sunday night — crosses after crosses cleared, with Juventus having very few spells of possession once Fabio Miretti was able to get on the scoresheet for the first time in his senior career.

Juventus have won three straight games by the same 1-0 scoreline. They’ve been three different kinds of games considering that one of those 1-0 wins came against 10 men at the San Siro. This most recent 1-0 win, though, it saw Fiorentina fail to do much of anything despite having nearly 70 percent of the ball and attempting so many crosses that we might have to break out the modern day Serie A record book just to see where things fit in.

Juventus beat Fiorentina 1-0 in the ultimate corto muso way. Low block will low block and La Viola couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

On Episode 183 of The Old Lady Speaks Podcast, we discuss:

• Takeaways from Juventus’ win over Fiorentina — including how much of a pain in the ass Juve must be to be playing against right now, how the counting stats don’t tell the story about how well Moise Kean is playing of late, and just how ineffective all of those Fiorentina’s crosses ended up being.
• So, about that performance against Fiorentina ...
• The defense was good! The rest of the deal? Maybe not so much.
• But hey, Bremer was an absolute beast! So was Daniele Rugani!
• In a game in which the defense was the star of the show, Juventus could have maybe been a little bit more expansive when it came to their attempts to go forward ... right?
• Twitter questions — including when Juve’s last truly ugly win was, were we secretly smiling like Max Allegri was as Juve’s defense shut Fiorentina down, and is there even the smallest of chances that Arthur wears bianconero again. (Hint: there isn’t.)

You can listen to Episode 183 of the Old Lady Speaks Podcast on your preferred podcasting platform or through the media player below:

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