Defender Chiellini looked back on the 2017 Champions League final, won by Real Madrid against Juve.
Former Juventus player Giorgio Chiellini looked back on his career in the podcast Sky‘s The
Overlap. He notably mentioned the two Champions League finals that he lost with the Old Ladyone in 2015 against Barça and the other against Real in 2017 in Cardiff.
The Italian first recalled that he had already beaten the Merengues two years earlier, in the 2015 semi-finals. At the time, Carlo Ancelotti preferred to play with James Rodríguez as a starter. The Colombian had a very good first season in Madrid, but Juventus was able to exploit the lack of defensive talent in a team that mainly relied on the Colombian and the BBC.
Two years later, the situation was different. Chiellini explains what changed in this final lost in Cardiff. “When they played Casemiro and Isco instead of Bale… Isco was the player who broke our whole game plan. He was truly unstoppable, because he created superiority on the left, right, center… It was really difficult for us to stop them,” admitted the Italian.
The former Juve player explained that although it was complicated, they knew how to stop Bale’s ‘predictable’ moves, but they were not prepared for Isco’s unpredictable moves: ‘An unpredictable player is better than a player you know what he’s going to do, even if he’s very good.”
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Real Madrid won the final in Cardiff 4-1 to cap off a near-perfect season in which Casa Blanca completed the Champions-Liga double. It was notably the second of the famous three consecutive Champions Leagues with Zinédine Zidane on the bench…
Senegal
