Ivan Juric in Turin’s limbo

Perpetually dissatisfied, maniacal, provocative, demanding to the limit. Italian football, especially in the last two years, is trying to understand what is, and what should be, the place of Ivan Yuric. Gasperinian to the core, from his master he seems to have incorporated strengths and weaknesses, including the tendency, in moments of nervousness, to unload his players, protected and pampered until a few hours before. The collapse against Napoli is almost irrelevant in analyzing Turin’s season, penalized by the results of the last 72 hours to the point of slipping to eleventh place. But Toro is fully in the running for what, roses in hand, should be the grenade’s maximum goal in the league: eighth place, first behind the big seven.

Between the summer and the winter session, Juric saw three technical and emotional leaders leave, one for each department: Bremer in defense, Lukic in midfield, Belotti in attack. Compared to a year ago, Mandragora, Pobega and Brekalo are also missing, all of whom have returned home after various loans. In return, he found himself rebuilding the team having to regenerate players who were getting sad elsewhere (Miranchuk, Radonjic, Vlasic) and trying to enhance the qualities of one of the most interesting signings of the entire summer transfer window of our Serie A. Perr Schuurs, immediately appeared a player made by the tailor for Juric’s football ideas, aggressive to exhaustion. Then there is another line of players, those who seemed totally forgotten: until the injury, Juric restored perspective and dignity to Valentino Lazaro, and now he’s doing the same with Yann Karamoh. In January, Lukic’s farewell was compensated for by the arrival of Ivan Ilic, who formed an undoubtedly interesting duo with Samuele Ricci.

But Juric, unlike many colleagues, has no problem washing dirty laundry in the public square. He did it against his will in the summer, when the video of his physical fight with the sporting director Vagnati went around the web. To comment on it, he had left a totally unconventional statement to reporters: “That fight was beautiful, the essence of all things. I provoked him so much that when he reacted I said to myself: ‘Oh, finally!’. I think it was a good moment for him too.” And he keeps repeating press conference after press conference, underlining how Turin always lacks that extra something to win, despite doing things right. “When you have good players you don’t have to give them away, you have to add more to raise the level. If you lose good players all the time, if everything goes well and you work fantastic the level stays the same, or it goes down.”

During the derby against Juventus he inserted and removed Nemanja Radonjic after a quarter of an hour, the best representation of the players the Turin transfer market has been feeding on for years: the former promising talent, not yet too old, rejected by teams of medium to large size. Having Juric means giving yourself a chance to regenerate them, but the miracle doesn’t always succeed. And the Croatian coach, after the derby, lost his mind: “He lacks respect for this game. I’ve been trying to make him a football player for six months but I haven’t succeeded”. All finished? Not at all. In Lecce he gave a show: “I hope he finds continuity, he has crazy physical skills. If he wants…”.

Taurus, meanwhile, is still in limbo. A limbo which, however, seems to depend more on the club than on his work, which tries to be as methodical as possible: in the meantime, among Mancini’s squad, it is no coincidence that the name of Alessandro Buongiorno has popped up, one of the players who has grown the most under the legal management. The leap towards a great one in our football still seems premature, but it also becomes difficult to imagine it in a further intermediate step. There seem to be two solutions: either Turin will indulge Juric’s desire to grow and win, or it will end up with a farewell, perhaps abroad. For a compatriot like Igor Tudor, who had picked up on Juric’s legacy in Verona, things aren’t going so badly at Marseille.