Two decades of hurt came to an end for the Granata on Sunday afternoon when they finally overcame their neighbours 2-1 in the derby.
A simple banner hangs in the upward reaches to the right of the Curva Maratona. ‘Noi vogliamo 11 leoni’, it reads.
It is the Torino supporters’ plea to their players, asking for 11 lions on the field. For 17 games and 20 years, their wishes went unanswered — in terms of victorious lions at least.
Battered bulls was more like the story of the Derby della Mole since 1995. Until last weekend that is, when the Granata ended all of that hurt with a performance of courage and quality from beginning until end on an afternoon when those lions roared.
Like all heroic wins though for an underdog, they had to survive more than a few scares on the way to the win, secured after coming from behind.
Stefano Sturaro sent a header against the upright, as did Andrea Pirlo. The Juventus maestro made no mistake with the second swing of his right boot from another masterful dead-ball however, opening the score with a glorious first half free kick.
Juventus hit the post a third time before the end and Arturo Vidal sent a header creeping past the post by the most minimal of margins. Those were efforts that should have gone in — that was the logic of the derby after all.
“We debunked a lot of taboos about the derby with this success,” said Torino coach Giampiero Ventura afterwards, a man who had succeeded where the previous 29 incumbents in his position had not.
“I said during the past four years that we have built a cake but all that we were missing was the icing.
“This game marks the end of a four-year cycle. And the start of a new one for us. This is a team that is much more mature: victories like the one in Bilbao could not have happened if we were not.
“There has been a general growth of the individual and in the mentality of the team. The stadium was full because they believed we could win and that thought translated onto the players.”
Despite some of the other unsavoury incidents that surrounded the fixture in and around the stadium, that belief certainly did seem to seep into the dressing room.
They were the team that were on top in the match until Pirlo’s opener stunned them. Torino teams of the past would have and did crumble under such adversity.
But Ventura was proven right.
There is a steely mentality in this Torino team to go with their excellent technical ability, which often goes unnoticed in comparison with other sides.
In Nikola Maksimovic, they have one of the finest ball-playing defenders in the league, Alessandro Gazzi is tireless and tigerish as is Matteo Darmian — all contributing to the fifth best defence in Serie A and all of whom were standouts in their success on Sunday.
Darmian, who spoke before the season started about adding goals to his game, was deserving of the reception he received upon leaving the field, exhausted at the efforts he put in — rewarded with the equaliser. It may have had a touch of fortune about it but for a club whose history is littered with misfortune, that will keep smiles stapled on Toro faces for the foreseeable future.
Darmian was again involved, this time in the winner, his perfect cut-back being rammed home by Fabio Quagliarella — a man who had started his career as a youth prospect before leaving to forge out a career as a journeyman, counting Juventus Stadium among his homes, but back where he belongs, he has written himself a special page in the history of Torino.
In the grand Scudetto scheme of things, the champagne may only have been put on ice temporarily but the icing that Torino have put on Ventura’s cake is one they are sure to gorge on for some time yet.
