Juventus 1 – Fiorentina 0: Initial reaction and random observations

There was one reason and one reason only as to why this wasn’t a complete runaway after 45 minutes Sunday night: Of the four times Juventus found the back of the net, three of them were wiped out thanks to VAR ruling things offside. That meant that Juve had to make a Federico Gatti goal 20 minutes in stand rather than having a stress-free second half for the first time in months.

That meant things went the way of the first time these two teams met this season back in November: sit back and protect the lead.

Sit back they did. A lot.

But protect the lead they did, too. Although they can thank their keeper who was in his highlight green kit for that on a rare occurrence Fiorentina actually put something on frame.

A one-goal lead through Gatti’s latest eventual game-winning goal that would have been two or three (at least) if not for the offside rule being such a cruel thing saw Juve revert back to basically what they did in Florence back in November. That meant essentially dare Fiorentina to break down their defense no matter how much of the ball they had. And La Viola had a whole hell of a lot of it, but a simply stunning 84% possession after the break only resulted in a few genuine chances, none of which were able to get past Wojciech Szczesny a couple of moments of simply world-class goalkeeping, as Juve held on for a 1-0 win over Fiorentina.

It was Juve’s first league victory since they beat Frosinone on Feb. 25.

And it was just Juve’s second league victory since the draw against Empoli in late-January started this nine-game run in which things went more than just a little sideways.

This team isn’t out of the woods yet. But you have to hope that two wins in the span of five days can hopefully — HOPEFULLY, HOPEFULLY, HOPEFULLY! — start to turn the tide a little bit more and help them get any sort of positive momentum going again heading into the final seven league fixtures of the 2023-24 season.

Like we saw so many times during the first half of the year, it also helps when you get a defender contributing goals like Gatti did against Fiorentina.

With the way the first half was going, you didn’t really care who scored a goal that counted, you just wanted Juventus to get a goal that counted. It didn’t matter if it was Gatti or Dusan Vlahovic, just something that stood after they had basically every single quality scoring chance and also limited Fiorentina to next to nothing on the other end of the field. Of course, we didn’t expect a goal to be called off due to offside on THREE DIFFERENT INSTANCES, but that is just the reality of what happened. Juve were playing well, but the offside calls were simply the one thing holding them back from running away with it.

Then that second half … boy, that second half sure was something.

Lemme…