29 October 2015
Gianluigi Buffon has urged his team-mates to stand up and be counted after
Juventus lost 1-0 to Sassuolo on Wednesday evening.
The Bianconeri faced an uphill battle following Giorgio Chiellini’s 39th minute dismissal, but the 37-year-old captain ruled out blaming referee Andrea Gervasoni for his side’s fourth reverse of the season, insisting that their showing before the break fell far short of the usually high standards set by the club.
Buffon began: “Our first-half display was unacceptable. If we’d been a provincial side, I might have been satisfied with the way we played over 50 minutes with ten men. But given our objectives here at Juventus, we return home extremely disappointed.
“Referees do not make mistakes on purpose and so I’m not accepting the red card as an excuse. It’s very simple, if you don’t win any of your 50-50s or aerial battles and you can’t string together three passes, then that’s no recipe for success.”
He concluded: “It’s true that we’ve undergone several changes over the summer, but this argument loses currency when almost everyone is available and we’ve come here on the back of three clean sheets. I believe that we’ve a squad made up of 22-23 very good players who can fill in for one another, but we were all at fault tonight.”
