MILAN (AFP) – Juventus host struggling Roma on Monday (2.45am, Brunei time) with their tails up and ready to show the rest of Serie A that under Thiago Motta Italy’s Old Lady is fit for a league title tilt.
Two consecutive 3-0 wins against modest opposition have shown a clean break with the stodgy football of old and have given Motta the look of someone made for big club coaching.
But for all Juve’s fancy new football, Como and Verona are not any sort of barometer for a team’s Scudetto credentials like Roma – a club supposed to be challenging for Champions League football – even if Motta has refused to entertain any early title talk.
“We’ve only played two matches, even if we’ve done very well because we’ve won both and played very well,” Motta told public broadcaster RAI.
Motta’s start on the Juve bench has been all the more impressive as his team is still being built and he has made good use of youngsters from the ‘Next Gen’ team which plays in the third-division Serie C.
Samuel Mbangula, 20, scored Juve’s first goal of the season against Como and followed that up by setting up fellow Next Gen graduate Nicolo Savona against Verona.
Since then the signing of star Dutch midfielder Teun Koopmeiners from Atalanta for more than EUR60 million has been completed, another powerplay in a busy summer transfer window for Juve who last won Serie A four years ago.
Roma should in fact be a much less tricky proposition than previously thought as Daniele De Rossi deals with a horrible opening couple of weeks to his first full season in charge of his boyhood club.
Loudly booed off by over 67,000 supporters after a first ever home defeat to Empoli last weekend, a trip to Juve is the last ting De Rossi needed as he deals with the trickiest situation he’s had since replacing Jose Mourinho in January.
Less than a year separates De Rossi and Motta in age but the former is a managerial novice compared to the latter, who at 42 is already in his fourth job having also coached Genoa, Spezia and Bologna.
De Rossi’s only previous managerial job was an ill-fated four months at lower-league outfit SPAL which came to an abrupt end in February last year.
