Lazio's Supercoppa triumph means a damp end to Juventus's golden decade | Nicky Bandini

The 2010s will be remembered, in Italian football, as a decade dominated by Juventus: winners of eight out of 10 Scudetti, four Coppe Italia and four Supercoppe as well. Yet they began with a different team – Inter – winning the treble. They end amidst suggestions that the Old Lady’s crown might once again be starting to slip.

Perhaps such talk is premature. Juventus will end 2019 sitting joint-top of Serie A. Alongside them, however, are an Inter team coached by Antonio Conte, the man who led their own charge back to the summit eight seasons ago. The Nerazzurri have scored more goals while conceding fewer, and rounded out the year with a 4-0 demolition of Genoa.

Juventus finished the year on a very different note. They also won their final league game, Cristiano Ronaldo sealing victory over Sampdoria with a gravity-defying header on Wednesday, but still had one more commitment to fulfil. This year’s Supercoppa – officially rebranded as the Coca-Cola Supercup – would be played in Saudi Arabia on Sunday.

Their opponents were Lazio. Or, to put it another way, a team that beat them 3-1 in the league just two weeks ago. Juventus had evolved since: Maurizio Sarri experimenting for the first time with a front three of Ronaldo, Gonzalo Higuaín and Paulo Dybala.

He dared to start them all together in Riyadh. The outcome was exactly the same as it had been in Rome. If anything, Juventus looked worse. They had at least started brightly against Lazio in their league fixture, grabbing an early lead only to falter after Rodrigo Bentancur exited with a knee injury and Juan Cuadrado was shown a red card.

There were no such mitigating factors this time around. Lazio scored first on Sunday, Luis Alberto side-footing home from 10 yards out. Despite yielding possession to Juventus, and an equaliser to Paulo Dybala on the stroke of half-time, they continued to look by far the more dangerous side.

Sarri’s gamble up front yielded mixed results. Dybala and Ronaldo sparkled intermittently, which was more than could be said for the rest of the team. The Portuguese forward came closest to giving Juventus an undeserved lead when he flashed a shot over the bar from the edge of the box.

To accommodate bold selections at the top of his formation, however, Sarri felt compelled to make more cautious choices elsewhere. Mattia De Sciglio started in place of Juan Cuadrado at right-back, presumably because he could be trusted not to stray too far upfield.

Tactical discipline alone, however, does not a defender make. De Sciglio was turned inside out by Senad Lulic in the build-up to Lazio’s opener, lunging clumsily after the ball and gifting his opponent time and space to pick out Sergej Milinkovic-Savic at the back post. The Serbian cut it back for Luis Alberto to finish.

Where Sarri’s choices backfired, Simone Inzaghi made all the right calls. Eyebrows were raised at his decision to withdraw Luis Alberto – arguably Lazio’s best performer – in the 67th minute. The Spaniard’s replacement, Marco Parolo, provided the flick-on from which Lulic buried a brilliant volley to make it 2-1 moments later.

Danilo Cataldi, another second-half substitute, sealed the win with a free-kick off the underside of the bar. This, after Bentancur received his second yellow card for bringing down Parolo in injury time.

Sarri went easy on the excuses. He did suggest that his team had looked tired, and it is true that they came into this game on a shorter rest than Lazio, who had not played in midweek. Yet the Juventus manager also insisted that his team had put together their best training session of the season immediately beforehand, and depicted the result primarily as a testament to Lazio’s excellence.

“They are experiencing a moment of total self-belief, a magic moment,” Sarri offered during a TV interview. “If they carry on like this, there’s not much for anyone else to do.” Later, in the mixed zone, he went further, stating that: “For me, right now, physically and mentally, they are the best team in Europe.”

An admirably magnanimous response, but not one that is likely to go down well in Turin. Juventus are a club whose entire ethos is winning, and who outspend Lazio on player wages by a ratio of more than four to one. If the message here was, “You can’t win them all”, then the response from the boardroom might be: “Why the hell not?”

The Supercopppa is the least important of the four trophies that Juventus were targeting this season. Yet the manner of defeat is significant, against opponents who had beaten them so recently and are threatening to muscle in on the Serie A title race. Lazio sit just six points behind Juventus and Inter, with a game in hand.

Gazzetta dello Sport’s match report on Monday contended that it would be “easier for an elephant to hide behind a lamp post” than for Inzaghi to carry on pretending that his team is not a contender. The decade belongs to Juventus, but for the Lazio players who ended Sunday night trying to smuggle their latest trophy through an airport metal detector, this has been one heck of a year.

Talking points

• Romelu Lukaku finishes the year second on Serie A’s scoring charts after adding a brace in that win over Genoa, but it might have been three if he had not ceded to Sebastiano Esposito’s request to take the penalty Inter won at 2-0. The 17-year-old academy graduate duly buried his spot-kick, becoming the youngest player ever to score for the Nerazzurri at San Siro. If your heart didn’t meltat the sight of him sharing a hug and a happy cry with his mum at full-time then we may need to book you in with visits from those Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

• Milan began this decade as Serie A’s reigning champions. They end it on a 5-0 defeat to Atalanta. This was an astonishing – and grim – result for a team that had seemed to be heading in a better direction under Stefano Pioli. Atalanta were scintillating, but that cannot excuse the meekness of the Rossoneri.

• Vincenzo Montella got to eat his panettone – but only in the literal sense. Fiorentina parted ways with their manager following a 4-1 defeat to Roma on Friday, and the optimism that greeted the arrival of Franck Ribery in the summer feels like a very distant memory. ‘Eating one’s panettone’ is often used as journalistic shorthand in Italy for managers hanging on to their jobs at Christmas. Montella said on Thursday, though, that “I like panettone, so I will eat it either way.”

• Gennaro Gattuso got his first win as Napoli manager, though it took a 93rd minute own goal from Sassuolo’s Pedro Obiang to get his team across the line. “We’re not healed yet,” he said afterward. “This is a strong team but you can’t make miracles in 10 days.”

• Buon Natale e buon anno a tutti! Thanks for reading this year and see you again in 2020. I’m off for some panettone.