Gatti criticized by Juventus fans for celebration against Milan: a matter of mentality

Juventus trusted the intuition of coach Luciano Spalletti, who in the last minutes of the match against Milan decided to throw defender Federico Gatti onto the field, activating him as a striker. The defender, using his inches, managed to score the final 1-1 equalizer, which broke out the celebration at the “Allianz Stadium”. But what caused discussions was the time that Gatti himself wasted celebrating, while he still had little time to try to complete the reversal, turn the game around and get the three points. After the goal, Gatti went to celebrate in front of the black and white fans’ stands, climbing up on the advertising boards and shouting. The defender hugged his teammates, showed his muscles to the fans in the stands and only then returned to his half of the field.

Precious time lost, which for some is a sign of a lack of maturity and a winning mentality that has not yet managed to enter the minds of the black and white footballers. Fans on social networks, on the contrary, have compared what Gatti did to the action of Hermoso in Roma-Atalanta. The yellow defender, after the temporary equalizer, did not celebrate at all, but immediately returned to take his position in half the field, just like his teammates.

For opponents who have just conceded that goal, this means feeling the pressure. Realizing that you are facing someone who is convinced that he can turn the game around and win it, taking advantage of every ball and fighting like a warrior, is not easy. And that is exactly what happened at the “Olimpico”, with Roma not giving up for a moment, forcing Atalanta to close in their penalty area and then, inevitably, conceding the goal. At the “Stadium”, on the contrary, the opposite happened. Milan, after seeing the reaction of the black and whites to that equalizer that seemed like pure gold watching the celebration, tried to spoil the “party”, even trying to win the match with that attempted counterattack by Cisse, who then collided with the author of the goal Gatti himself.

The black and white DNA, so much extolled by Spalletti between last season and the current one, seems to still be a distant memory of that concept to which the Agnelli family attached so much importance and which was fully adopted by the Juventus of old, made up of names like Del Piero, Nedved, Buffon, Trezeguet, Thuram, Pirlo, Marchisio and many others, just to name a few. A team capable of playing with the conviction that it could win, facing any opponent head-on and without fear. Today, however, the celebration made by Gatti still shows a Juventus in the "provincial" version - with all due respect to the teams that fall into this definition - that seems to be content with a draw in the extreme against Milan, without taking the risk of trying to win the match.

A team that seems incapable of showing its strength at the moments when it should intimidate its opponents, precisely when they are most vulnerable. The winning mentality is precisely the one that Hermoso showed, who did not waste a second celebrating after seeing the ball hit with his head end up in the net. Roma wanted to communicate to Atalanta that they would not give "Dea" a moment of peace until the referee's triple whistle. A matter of mentality, precisely the one that for Juventus, nowadays, still seems like a distant memory of the past.