The boos greeted Fideo’s latest match in Turin, who only played at his level for two months in black and white. Changing the club’s mind about the future
In the 19th minute of the second half of Juventus’ fifth home defeat of the season, at 10.09 pm on the Continassa meridian, the ten-month adventure in Turin of the world champion Angel Di Maria ends. Fideo’s last home game in black and white has the history of the last three months, with the difference that the opinions of the Stadium’s “gallery” also arrive strongly on the end credits. With the Argentine making a face, almost amazed.
Only two months
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The test of the naked eye for once coincides with that of the numbers, and the gross numbers are enough, not those of the advanced statistics, which saw Di Maria beat the last shot in the Juve shirt with the 1-0 goal in the went with Freiburg on 9 March, curiously with a header, to close the few months in which he lived up to his fame, and his talent, and his palmares fresh from the World Cup. With the highlight of the hat-trick in Nantes, he racked up seven goals and three assists in his first 14 games after being the decisive man in the final with France in Qatar, paving a road that looked to take him straight to the extension of the his experience in Turin. Which ends here instead.
The long goodbye
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The calculation on a seasonal basis tells 8 goals and 7 assists in 39 seasonal games, out of the 55 season, with a number of stops for physical reasons (at least six) that he had never had in his career. Sometimes he amazed with flashes that made him shine even from a physical point of view. Sometimes he also enlightened just by playing from a standstill. At one point he seemed to have erased the scars of the disputed pre-World Cup, in which for four months it seemed in the eyes (not only) of the fans to keep his energies good for Qatar, including the black day in Monza complete with expulsion. Continue for another year, the situation that was materializing in the spring, also reaping the benefits of the Growth Decree that would come with a biennial report, to get ready for the 2024 America’s Cup… because then the reasons go round and round beat there. Until the air changed once again after the European elimination of Sevilla (with a giant mistake in front of Angel’s goal) and the new 10 penalty points that arrived a week ago to coincide with the away game in Empoli.
New ratings
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To distance Fideo from Continassa it is not only the future scenario that emerges in the Juventus home, from which Di Maria’s assessments seemed in part to ignore, ready to remain even without the Champions League. What drives him away is the idea that in the meantime Juventus has formed (a year late?) on the sense of moving forward, in a season that is necessarily transitional, by spending significant resources on a splendid 35-year-old champion who, however, cannot be a brick of the future. And that for most of these ten months it was frankly not even that splendid. There will be few regrets, it is likely that Fideo, with that aura of what could have been and then was not, remains rather one of the symbolic faces – perhaps the main one – of a vintage that will surely remain in the memory, and not for the successes. Since there have already been some social appetizers, it only remains to understand how to break up.
29 maggio – 08:48
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