Max Allegri believes his Juventus team ‘just stop playing’ at moments in the game but the problems are ‘psychological’ too. The Bianconeri slumped to a 2-0 defeat to Milan yesterday, but had a brief spell where they looked the more likely to score. Speaking to DAZN after the match, Allegri admitted there was little left to say about the performance:
After tonight’s game, there is little for me to say. We are in a moment where we seemed to be out of the negative period with these two victories, but we fell for it again. It’s a pity, as we did well for the first 20-25 minutes, then got deeper and deeper without even being forced into it.
We made a lot of misplaced passes and inevitably you pay for that.
Fitness issue? I think it was psychological too. It’s not easy at the moment, we dropped a lot of points against the lower-mid table teams, then in these big clashes we needed more confidence.
It is unfortunate that on both goals we conceded from our own mistakes. We just need to stay calm, roll our sleeves up and on Tuesday we must go to Maccabi Haifa with the mental strength to win that game.
It is strange, at a certain point we just stop playing and start to back down. After Leao hit the post, we started going backwards. And there are also some passes that are just impossible to get wrong.
It’s not as if two good games can resolve all the problems. It was five against three on some of our attacks, we need to score goals in those situations. We’ve got to be more determined in the challenges and shake off our fear, as otherwise we won’t have the balance to go far this season. If we shake off the fear, we can turn things around.
When you pass the ball backwards, the other side will push forward and don’t even need to press you that hard. We need to work on that and improve.”
