Juventus and Napoli: A history apart
When Juventus come face to face with Napoli on Saturday evening, they will play out a game that will resound for the rest of the season, whatever the outcome may be.
It will pit the undoubted star strikers of Serie A to date, Gonzalo Higuain against his young pretender, Paulo Dybala – an Argentine subplot to an Italian story; not the first involving Napoli.
It will also see Paul Pogba, the creative force in the Bianconeri midfield, attempting to outdo a resurgent Lorenzo Insigne.
The two sides that have brought so much to the Serie A season will play off for the right to lead the league.
Yet even before they go into the game, both sides approach it from such differing aspects that it is not just a clash of the two best football teams in Serie A at the moment, but two almost antithetic entities.
Even at a very basic geographical level, Turin and Naples are opposites. Turin is the North, Naples is the South.
Turin has a Savoy Palace, Naples was ruled by the Bourbons. You can look down the streets of Turin and see snow-covered Alps, their frozen majesty rising from the land just outside the city limits. In Naples, one can scarcely avoid Mount Vesuvius, a red hot reminder of how precarious human life can end up being.
Even on the dining table, Neapolitans would favour a tomato-based sauce and turn their noses up at the creamy pasta dishes of their northern counterparts. The two cities, like the two teams, are as different as chalk and pecorino.
After World War II, as many as a million left the south of Italy for the north, often travelling to work for companies such as FIAT. As one would expect, where one’s bosses own a football club, it is natural to support them. A generation of southerners who may have gone on to support Napoli (amongst other clubs, for Basilicata and Calabria bore the brunt of the departures) were clad in the black and white instead.
On the pitch, the teams have established a unique rivalry of their own. Napoli have always seen themselves as the flag-bearers of Southern Italy, and the most important nose to bloody within that particular dispute has more often than not been Juventus.
The rivalry between the two became most pointed when they were vying with one another for Serie A titles in the 1980s. Michel Platini, the figurehead of the Bianconeri was the undoubted best player in the world during the early part of that decade.
He led his side to both European and domestic success. The World Cup of 1986 illustrated a turning point, and confirmed that while the Frenchman’s powers were on the wane, and there was a new player in town.
Diego Maradona is perhaps the single most important figure in the battle between these two giants. For a start, he led Napoli to palpable success. The Napoli of Maradona won two Scudetti, two more than the club had managed throughout their whole history.
The week the Partenopei vanquished Juventus at the Stadio San Paolo, a cartoon in the press showed a battle-ravaged Platini passing his tricoloured shield to Maradona – it has been famously recreated in mural form. The week Napoli after clinched the title, there were coffins bedecked in Juventus colours carried through the streets of Naples.
As has often proved the case when teams outside the north-west win titles, Napoli’s success was fleeting. By 1994, Ciro Ferrara decamped from one side of the divide to the other, becoming an important cog in a Juventus team that dominated not just Italy, but Europe.
Napoli faded as the money ran out, eventually falling as far as Serie C. Juventus, after shaking themselves down, resumed their trophy winning, the battles with Inter and Milan becoming the pre-eminent clashes in Italy.
Indeed, the Partenopei only troubled the Bianconeri when the two were battling for Serie B promotion in light of the Turin giants’ enforced relegation.
After their joint return to the top flight, the games between the two were increasingly hard fought and though the Turin side sometimes lost the battles, particularly at the Stadio San Paolo, they generally won the war.
Everything Napoli had tried up to this season had failed. All coaches, all players, all styles. There was often improvement, and often promise, but always ultimately disappointment. Then, under Maurizio Sarri, it clicked.
For the first time since 1990, Napoli look genuine title contenders. It was almost inevitable that, should they get to the point of reaching that summit, their old adversaries would be the last obstacle in their way.
The ghosts of history will not overshadow Saturday’s game, there is too much current importance riding on it, but they will certainly inform it – there is no way they cannot.