Massimiliano Allegri held the traditional pre-game presser today: “We do not feel scrutinized. We had a good game in Ferrara, Juventus-Inter is always important. We will play in front of 70k people in a marvelous stadium, we will try to do our best to come away with a satisfying result. We can not have gaffes, we are Juventus, we aim to make more points and have some stimulating fixtures coming up.”
On the meeting with Andrea Agnelli: “Our motivation will be the same as previous years. We will plan to create new goals growing-wise for everybody involved and to be as competitive as we should be. We will analyze what went well and what poorly. You need to evaluate the seasons properly in order to lay the foundations to be successful in the future. We have not set a date, there have been some holidays after the Fiorentina game. We are already ahead of schedule since we usually sat down in June.”
On the transfer market: “It is difficult to talk about what will happen next year. What matter the most is to be clear-headed, make the right decisions and create the right premises. Then the future results will do the talking.”
On the lineup: “Rodrigo Bentancur will not travel with the team due to muscle fatigue. Giorgio Chiellini is back and will play, the others are fine. If Moise Kean started, Federico Bernardeschi would come off the bench and vice versa. I am sure we will have a good performance.”
On Giuseppe Marotta: “It will be a pleasure to meet him again. I have spent four quality years alongside him. He, Fabio Paratici, Pavel Nedved and the president have done a great job in helping club grow. We are professionals, it happens to part ways, but that does not take away the good that was done.”
On experimenting: “I will not do anything tomorrow, but the ones I most curious about are Bernardeschi and Joao Cancelo as box-to-box. The former is forced to play as attacker right now, but I want to see if that can be his future role, since you need mental balance to be a midfielder and he has not reached it yet. You have pauses up front, there you do not, you need more consistency. Cancelo can shoot and score, so I might test him there too. Emre Can has already played as centre-back, he is an alternative, same as Juan Cuadrado in the midfield. I just want to see how they perform there. Can as defender has done well when we were attacking, you have to see if he holds up in the other phase.”
On Mauro Icardi: “He is an extraordinary player that always scored a lot against us. We will need to be focused to stop him.”
On Champions League: “It is a mean competition, you pay the price if you do not approach it without the best condition. We did well until the international break, then we started having some injuries. I do not know Douglas Costa’s hair color since he has been out for so long. We pulled one out of the hat against Atletico Madrid, then our health worsened. This year has been easy only on the surface. We had to push hard in Serie A games otherwise we would have arrived at these matches with a much smaller advantage. There are strong teams in Europe. I have heard the criticism after the Ajax clash, which was fair since the result matters, but we are not a fluke in Europe. We have established ourselves as a top-eight team. There are teams that have waited ten years to win it, you say that we have not for 25 years, but I can only talk about my time. It is excessive to push aside everything that was done. We have won half of the trophies. We know what went wrong and need some more luck. It was the first time we did not make it to the quarterfinals in peak condition and I have some responsibility there.”
On Costa: “He played the first four games and then he vanished. It happens. He is the kind of player that can do well in Europe, we saw that in Amsterdam, but then he stopped again.”
Again on the talks with the president: “We will have to come out of that in better position to plan a season that will be difficult, because we will try to win the ninth title, Champions League, Coppa Italia and Supercoppa. There will be a clean slate after the summer, we will have to work our way up, the past will not matter anymore.”
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