Juventus can have little to complain about after they were disappointing for the opening 45 minutes of the match, but appeared destine to overturn Fiorentina‘s half-time lead in the second-half.
Manager Andrea Pirlo opted to change things up this afternoon, starting with three centre-backs in what appeared to be a 3-5-2 formation, and it initially looked positive.
It didn’t take long before La Viola were the ones comfortable in possession however, and Juve were looking second-best.
Things went from bad-to-worse when Adrien Rabiot lifted his arms as he tried to scramble the ball away inside our own box, and VAR noticed a hand-ball by the Frenchman to award the penalty. Dusan Vlahovic put his side ahead with a nice Panenka penalty which send the goalkeeper the wrong way.
Fiorentina would have gone into the break happy, but within a minute of the restart everything was different. Alvaro Morata had only been brought on during the interval(along with birthday-boy Dejan Kulusevski) and he has levelled the scoring with a delightful goal within around 30 seconds of the restart.
Juventus were building momentum as the half continued and with 25 minutes left of normal time a winner looked inevitable. Weston McKennie came off the bench next with just over 20 minutes to play, replacing Ramsey, and you couldn’t help but be happy with the three players that have been brought on to make the difference.
Very little happened after this change however. Juve were throwing numbers forward, which threatened to punish us when Fiorentina countered at speed, but our defence wasn’t to be beaten.
I was certain that our dominance was to be paid off when Kulusevski floated a perfect-looking cross into Cristiano Ronaldo, only to see the Portuguese mistime his jump and miss the ball completely with around five minutes left to play.
When the assistant put up that only three minutes of injury time was left to play, the draw now-looked inevitable, and it was.
Juventus now face the daunting prospect of dropping to fifth in the table if both Atalanta and Napoli win this weekend, raising alarm bells on our hopes of holding onto our place in the top four.
Patrick
