Chapter 589: Difficult March (2)
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After a big home win over Piacenza, Fiorentina flew to Germany to prepare for the second leg of the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
For this game, although Fiorentina has enough attention to the Dortmund team, in general, the mentality of the players is relatively relaxed. After all, with the aggregate score already 5-0, the probability of the Germans wanting to complete a comeback in the second leg can be said to be infinitely close to zero.
Therefore, for this second leg of the game, Capello did not send the strongest squad to respond, but made a large rotation of the starting lineup to ensure that the players have enough physical fitness to cope with the subsequent games.
De Sanctis, Fortunato, Materazzi, Ferrara, Angeloma, Tomasi, Di Biagio, Zanetti, Ze Roberto, Effenberg, Ronaldo and Batistuta, that's Fiorentina's starting line-up for this game.
Looking at the home team, the 0-5 defeat in the first leg put the whole Dortmund team under great pressure, and Andrés Müller, who has always looked at the manager's displeasure, began to make waves in the team, trying to get rid of Scala and let him be the boss of the team.
Under this kind of pressure from all sides, the head coach Scala, who has been playing the role of an angry little daughter-in-law in the team, finally broke out, directly using a quick knife to cut through the mess Andrés Müller, who disobeyed his discipline, into the cold palace, and straightened the talented teenager Lars Ricken as the team's main striker; He also promoted a number of players from the academy and bench to replace Summerer and Paulo Sousa, who had been reimbursed for the whole season, and finally established his own prestige within the team.
Compared with last season's Heathfield team, which had Somer, Riddle, Ann Muller, Coral and other good players, Scala's Dortmund team looked a little bleak, but it was this slightly civilian team that played a wonderful game in the second leg against Fiorentina!
Chapuisat used his clever movement and precise finishing to score twice in the 18th and 36th minutes to lead the home side to a two-goal lead at the end of the first half; Meanwhile, when Fiorentina fought back in the second half and it was Ronaldo and Batistuta who made it 2-2, it was the Swiss star who stepped up and set up Ricken to score from the edge of the box.
Had it not been for substitute Philippe Inzaghi who picked up a pass from Roberto Roberto in stoppage time, Dortmund could have won at the Westphalia Stadium.
In the end, when the game was over, Fiorentina, who were playing away, stubbornly pulled the score to a 3-3 draw after falling behind by two goals at one point, and eliminated Dortmund, the runner-up of last season's Champions Cup, with an aggregate score of 8-3, and advanced to the quarterfinals of the Champions League!
The Fiorentina players did not get much rest after returning from the Champions League, and after two days of resting in Fiorentina, Capello and his players rushed to the south of Italy to prepare for the 25th round of the league against Lecce.
Although Lecce, who have underperformed in Serie A this season, currently sit third from bottom of the table, just above Napoli and Empoli, who have been battling for the bottom spot, while Fiorentina are the league leaders, the disparity in quality between the two sides makes the outcome of this game look undoubted.
However, the result of the match was that Fiorentina, as the leader, was spicy to the tongue by this little pepper - because Fiorentina had only been back in Italy for a few days, and had played an unusually fierce match against Dortmund in Germany, the Fiorentina players who played away on the afternoon of March 15 did not seem very excited, and were a little listless by the warm and humid climate of the Mediterranean.
Fiorentina's performance naturally gave the Lecce players hope of picking up points at their home stadium.
In the eighteenth minute of the game, Lecce midfielder Maspero took advantage of a set-piece opportunity in front of the field to help the home team Pepper take a one-goal lead!
Spurred on by the 0-1 deficit, the Fiorentina players finally recovered from the warm sunlight and remembered that they were still playing.
At the same time, Capello's cold eyes made all the Fiorentina players on the pitch shiver unconsciously - they knew that every time the manager put on such an expression, it meant that some of them were going to be unlucky; And if you only look at the performance of the first ten minutes, it is estimated that they will all be unlucky this time!
Recalling the horrors that Capello once brought them, these Fiorentina players did not want to go through another high-intensity training package specially created by Capello, the Fiorentina coaching staff, and the sports medicine experts at the physiotherapy center!
As a result, the Fiorentina players launched a ferocious counterattack in the ensuing period, pushing Lecce, who was playing at home, back into their own half, and playing a half-time offensive and defensive drill!
It looked like Fiorentina were overtaking the lead and it was only a matter of time before they came back from behind, but sometimes it was a matter of luck to score goals.
When you're lucky, scoring goals can be said to be easy, how to play; If the players are unlucky, even if they face an empty goal, they may directly hit the plane.
The Fiorentina players were not very lucky in this game, whether it was Vieri's header bombardment, Costa's free kick, or Davies and Carlos's long-range shots, there was no way to blast the goal guarded by Lecce goalkeeper Llorrie, and even Inzaghi's scramble shot from three meters in front of the goal in the 63rd minute weirdly hit the post of the goal and bounced off the bottom line...... The difference in luck in Florence this afternoon is evident from this.
In desperation, Capello had no choice but to send in super substitute Julio Cruz, so that he and Vieri could partner in the forward twin, and the big Inzaghi was in the two to see if he could reverse this extremely unfortunate situation for Fiorentina.
And Cruz didn't live up to Capello's expectations, or rather, the only thing in the Fiorentina squad that was lucky enough to remain at normal level this afternoon: the Argentine centre-forward scored with a header from Rui Costa's corner in the 93rd minute, turning the home side's upcoming three points into a one, and allowing Fiorentina to avoid a defeat in the final moments.
In the end, Fiorentina picked up a point with a 1-1 draw with Lecce at the Estadio del Maré.