Juventus’s first ever game in Serie B, following their self-inflicted relegation, saw them harassed into a draw against a team who only just avoided going down themselves last season, and for whom Adrian Ricchiuti ran between Jean-Alain Boumsong and Robert Kovac to drill an equaliser five minutes after they had a man sent-off, Juventus having taken the lead through Matteo Paro.
Tellingly, numerical inferiority was the only form of subordination they were made to endure all afternoon. This ground, barely a mile from the beaches of the Adriatic, seemed an appropriate place to recall that Juventus are currently no more than a shell. They lost their soul a long time ago, and at present the team has no heartbeat either. “The squad I have is strong enough to be competitive, but we’ve got to get used to the Serie B mentality,” said Didier Deschamps, their incoming coach, who managed to sound convincing when adding that: “I have no regrets about coming here. When I make a decision, there’s no going back. But this isn’t exactly a pleasant situation.”
The sheer indignity of it all was everywhere in black and white. The hands of Gigi Buffon, Alessandro del Piero and Mauro Camoranesi that nine short weeks ago were flexing to take hold of the World Cup were yesterday wiping away the grime of one of the more forlorn foothills that will usher in this new, long climb. The 10,000-seater Stadio Romeo Neri was apparently given a complete face-lift last summer: judging by how sharply it sagged under the weight of an almost uniquely full house, it must have been of the Jackie Stallone variety.
The surrounding side-streets were gridlocked a good four hours prior to kick-off, touts asking €1,000 (£680) for a ticket. To think that three seasons ago Juventus were a penalty kick away from winning the Champions League, never mind those two, hollow scudetti that have since been revoked. The most senseless aspect of Luciano Moggi’s connivance and corruption was that a team with the tangible talents of Buffon, Del Piero and the dearly departed Fabio Cannavaro, Gianluca Zambrotta, Patrick Vieira and Lilian Thuram, World Cup winners all, had no need of nebulous extraneous assistance to deal with their inferior immediate peers in Milan. Moggi was holding most of the aces even before he demanded to start dealing his own hand.
Those that managed to salvage their dignity from the wreckage were not allowed to bear their suffering lightly yesterday. While Del Piero and Pavel Nedved clearly kept a hold of their bags of tricks during the great fall, they were alone in looking out of place. Boumsong, whom Moggi’s successor Jean-Claude Blanc bravely tried to present as “Thuram’s inheritor”, was one of many who stood out simply for how swiftly he assimilated with these colourless new surroundings, often obliging Buffon to push up as a sweeper to cover those spluttering interjections Newcastle fans dreaded.
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You struggle to muster any sympathy for a club whose pain has been so graspingly self-wrought; only anger on behalf of a group of players who have, at best, wasted two years of a clipped professional life, and could now lose another two simply repairing others’ damage, and all this with no proof that any of them ever so much as woke up to the fiction in which they had been pitched as unwitting protagonists.
Blanc believes it will take “four or five years” for the club to clamber back to the position of pre-eminence that has defined it, but, somewhat more pressingly, they will now need to wait at least another six Serie B games to even consider that process under way, in light of the 17-point handicap that accompanied them into the season. David Trezeguet, yesterday’s only prominent absentee, will have to summon a contribution far in excess of what he has managed in the past two seasons if Juve really are to head up the queue of clubs clamouring to escape what seems to be a league for the morally or fiscally incontinent. Napoli, Bologna and Genoa will all be trying to squeeze themselves into the three promotion slots.
Considering where this club has come from, such a success would be as empty as its immediate predecessors. This cannot be the end for Juventus, but you wonder just what Moggi’s transgressions have started.