Sicario wrote:
If we don’t get this kid is Rugani a viable plan b? I see a lot of people (I.e Klaus) writing Rugani off but is he that bad?
It's possible he improves in a new environment, Sicario.
In his defense, he has not benefited from being a bit-part player for so long. He sacrificed most of his crucial development years for the bench. He's also got some very large shoes to fill at Juventus, and that pressure keeps mounting the older his teammates get.
He's weak though, especially for being such a big bloke, gets pushed around too easy. And his size and athleticism was one of the things people were excited about when he was young. In Italy defenders need to be big and strong. There's a misconception that Italian defenders are usually technically able since most other Italians have cultivated technique, but you'll find few centrebacks who play it out from the back in Serie A. Atalanta play that way. Napoli do it. Juventus and Inter have some players capable of doing it. That's basically it. Distribution is much more important for Premier League defenders than it is for Serie A defenders, generally speaking.
And that's the thing about Rugani - it isn't that he comes up a bit short in the technical end at a top club; his passing is actually pretty decent and it probably makes him look more impressive than he is on youtube. But the things he's supposed to be decent at, like tackling, challenging forwards, reading the game and blocking space, are just not there. There's an air of Granit Xhaka about him, if you think back on how rarely you see Xhaka win a defensive challenge. He's done too easily, gets sucked in and then bypassed, or he's positioned wrongly.
Could he be a good signing? Sure. But most things we know about him suggest that he won't be, and the Juve fans who watch him day in and day out are particularly sceptical. They've seen him fail to stake a claim for years now. There used to be this idea that he was waiting for his turn, but I don't think that's how it works in football. Great players don't wait for their turn. They might need an opportunity, but when it comes along they take it. Rugani is their Johan Djourou or Philippe Senderos, players who weren't disasters but never quite had enough ability to go all the way. We used to think that Senderos would be a good player somewhere else, and he wasn't. Once he left Arsenal he deflated instead, because it was a confirmation that he didn't have it in him to be great and he lost that final bit of edge.
I think that'll happen to Rugani too eventually. If he comes here he's also left with the monumental task of having to learn how to defend properly, in a team that let in 51 league goals last year... having previously failed to learn it from arguably the best defence in the world. Safe to say the odds are well stacked against him.
