Amauri scores double against Shamrock Rovers

While Juve’s main con­cern this sea­son isn’t the Europa league, the Euro­pean com­pe­ti­tion is help­ing Del­neri build his team. So now that Juven­tus has played and won their first com­pet­i­tive match against Sham­rock Rovers in Europa League qual­i­fi­ca­tion, Del­neri will have a lot of pos­i­tivies to look at. But Juven­tus hasn’t qual­i­fied yet, they’ll need to play the return leg at Mod­ena, and all they need to do is not lose by more than one goal.

Juven­tus started well right away, in the third minute Amauri com­bines with Diego to com­plete a give and go which pen­e­trates the frozen Irish defence leav­ing Amauri to fin­ish with his left for the first goal. A per­fect exam­ple of how Del­neri wants Diego to work as a “tre­quartista”, or num­ber 10. Every oppor­tu­nity Juven­tus cre­ated was fil­tered through Diego, just like Del­neri did with Cas­sano at Sam­p­do­ria and Doni at Atlanta. Amauri was a dan­ger­ous pres­ence up front and the wingers, Mar­tinez and Lan­zafame, con­stantly changed sides every five min­utes, dis­ori­ent­ing the Irish full­backs, and maybe them­selves a lit­tle too con­sid­er­ing their aver­age performance.

In the sec­ond half Amauri scored again, an offen­sive push which passed through Diego and fin­ished with Amauri. The Italian/Brazilian headed the ball down­wards across the goal, to hit the far post and bounce into the back of the net for the final goal. While Juve came close again, and Diego could’ve earned a penalty, the scor­ing stopped with Amauri’s sec­ond in the 74th minute. The Sham­rock Rovers were dan­ger­ous from set pieces, using their phys­i­cal­ity and strength to get close to a goal in their home sta­dium, but Juve held out well to win 2–0 away from home, hope­fully ensur­ing their qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the Europa League.

Tagged as: Amauri, Diego, Europa League, Juventus, Shsmrock Rovers