Mauro Camoranesi let slip an inadvertent indictment of Serie A during an interview with Italian sports daily Tuttosport last week.
When asked about Juventus midfielder Andrea Pirlo, who will miss Wednesday’s Champions League match at Borussia Dortmund with a calf injury and has seemed to struggle at times this season, the former Juve winger leapt to the 35-year-old’s defence.
“Sometimes I hear criticism and I laugh. Pirlo can never be a problem; he solves problems,” he said.
But, he added, “given the current level of Italian football he can play until he’s 50 or 53.”
Wednesday programming alert: Watch Barcelona vs Manchester City on the four main Sportsnet channels and Borussia Dortmund vs Juventus on Sportsnet World. Coverage starts at 3:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet World NOW || Broadcast schedule
It’s the second part of Camoranesi’s endorsement that’s especially revealing, and less so regarding Pirlo’s ability to play into his dotage than the standard of the country’s top flight, and how it could impact Juve’s ambitions in Europe.
Despite a run of three successive scudetti that will shortly become four, Juventus have been unable to translate their domestic dominance into Champions League success. They won Serie A by four points in 2012, by nine in 2013 and by a whopping 17 last season—a gap they could conceivably stretch this spring.
And they’ve done it losing just eight matches in nearly four campaigns combined. Meanwhile, their continental programmes have yet to include anything beyond the quarterfinals, and they embarrassingly crashed out at the group stage in December 2013.
Winning titles in Serie A simply doesn’t equate to contention in Europe. Not anymore. And while the standard of football on the peninsula may be slowly improving after recently hitting rock bottom, it’s still a long way from adequately preparing its top clubs for showdowns against Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid.
And maybe even Borussia Dortmund.
Surprisingly mid-table after a disastrous first half of the Bundesliga season, Dortmund have started to show signs of the team that finished runners-up to Bayern last term. Since a February 4 defeat at home to Augsburg they’ve compiled a six-match unbeaten streak in the German top flight, and while they haven’t found the back of the net in either of their previous two matches they haven’t conceded, either.
Disaster, which visited them with such disturbing regularity before the winter break, is now a rather less frequent houseguest at Dortmund, although with 12 points between themselves and fourth-place Bayer Leverkusen a return to the Champions League is a pipe dream at best.
That is, unless they win it this time around. And to retain any hope of doing that they have to bring everything they have into Wednesday’s match against Juventus.
In other words, the desperation with which they’ll be approaching the clash should provide a stiff test and then some for an opponent whose ambition perhaps outweighs its ability at the highest level, and certainly its experience.
Crucially, Dortmund manager Jurgen Klopp has managed to stay positive despite a double-whammy of bad luck and the malaise that has clearly set in with many of his players. If there’s a sense that a shakeup is in store for the club at season’s end the 47-year-old will certainly have his current group go out swinging.
“The challenge for us is to produce the goods consistently on the pitch,” he said on Saturday, following a scoreless draw with Cologne. “We did not concede again; we can build on that. We have to work hard to achieve things.”
He added: “We can do better and we now have four days to work on doing just that. The boys can do it.”
If they do—if they get the 1-0, 2-0 or 3-1 result they need to progress to the next round of Europe’s most prestigious club competition—they’ll do it at the expense of a Juventus side that continues to bang its head on the glass ceiling.
Jerrad Peters is a Winnipeg-based writer. Follow him on Twitter