Player Focus: Fernando Llorente becoming the player Antonio Conte expected at Juventus

It’s the 76th minute of Juventus’ Champions League group stage encounter with FC København at the Parken Stadion back in mid-September. The champions of Italy have come from behind and are drawing 1-1 in a game they’re expected to win.

Glancing at his bench, coach Antonio Conte considers his options. The question he’s asking himself is as follows: Should I bring on Fernando Llorente or Sebastian Giovinco? From his dug out the Juventus coach had watched his team attempt no fewer than 40 crosses. They’d taken 13 corners too.

Given the pattern of play, victory appears likely to come from one of these game situations. So why not throw on a player capable of maximising your chances at them? Llorente is 6ft 5in. Giovinco is 5ft 5in. He’s nicknamed the Atomic Ant for heaven’s sake. What then does Conte do?

The fourth official holds up his board. No 12 is replacing No 27: Giovinco enters for Fabio Quagliarella. Juventus attempt another nine crosses. They get another four corners. But there’s nothing doing. The game ends 1-1 just like it did against Nordsjælland a year before and as was the case then, their goalkeeper has played a blinder.

This wasn’t supposed to happen to Juventus anymore. Not after the long-awaited signing of a ‘top player’ in Carlos Tevez and a Plan B in Llorente. Much of the post-match reaction focused on Conte’s 76th minute substitution. Why had he gone with Giovinco and not Llorente?

København’s centre-backs Olof Mellberg and Ragnar Sigurdsson are tall, he said, and players of their stature can be put in difficulty by playing small, mobile forwards with a low centre of gravity up against them. It made sense. But not everyone was satisfied.

“Juventus ignore Llorente,” was the headline of El País’ Champions League round-up the following morning. A couple of days later, the front-page of the Turin daily sports paper Tuttosport featured a picture of him and asked: “Is he only good-looking?” And nothing more.

Up until that point, Llorente had played only a minute of Juventus’ five competitive matches. Wasn’t he supposed to be Tevez’s strike partner in their first choice forward line? That appeared to be Conte’s intention at the beginning of pre-season.

On the tour of the United States, however, his minutes diminished. Llorente featured from the kick-off against Everton and played 71 minutes. He then started on the bench against LA Galaxy, coming on for the entire second half, and did so again when Juventus met Inter but only for the final 20 minutes.

By some people’s reckoning, Conte was becoming less and less convinced. Llorente was already a flop, they said. There were reports that Valencia had inquired about him. Arsenal too. He’d be gone when the transfer window opened again, another name on the list of Spanish players to have failed in Italy.

Writing him off, though, seemed hasty, a bit knee jerk and Juventus weren’t about to do so.

Asked to reflect on what happened in his first few months in Turin by La Gazzetta dello Sport, Llorente cited: “The normal problems of adaptation owing to a change in country, teammates, club and city as well as the workload which I had never experienced in my life. I got to pre-season in good condition. I felt strong but my body wasn’t used to working so hard and at a certain point on the tour of the US I felt empty, totally out of power. If your body isn’t working, your head starts to find things hard as well. And I started to have doubts. About the decision. About myself. About everything.”

When it was announced in the spring that Llorente would be joining Juventus from Athletic Bilbao in the summer, the snap judgement was that the transition, at least in terms of playing style, would be fairly straightforward. Marcelo Bielsa’s football was the perfect preparation for Conte’s with its high pressing game and its intensity, right? Wrong. That analysis was a touch reductive.

“It was different,” Llorente explained. “Bielsa is obsessed with football and we had double sessions, but it was an intensity that was more mental than physical. We concentrated for hours at a time on a single move. There were then long pauses. Bielsa tired you out mentally… Here it’s all direct, without stopping ever and my body couldn’t take it.”

Don’t forget, Llorente had been marginalised in his final year at San Mames after expressing his desire to leave in the summer of 2012. It got ugly. Graffiti sprayed on the window of the club shop read: “Death to Llorente, the bastard Spaniard.” Aduriz was signed as his replacement. Llorente was a stranger in his own home. He went from playing 3171 and 2248 minutes in 2010-11 and 2011-12 to just 865 last season. His fitness and instincts must have been dulled.

Imagine then joining up with a squad where you are one of five strikers. There’s ferocious competition for places. You need to learn new movements and perform tasks that are different from what you’re used to and you’re playing against three centre-backs rather than two. The defenders are rougher, tougher and more cunning as well. They give you nothing. It was going to be hard, really hard. “I didn’t even recognise myself,” Llorente admitted. “But I always had the confidence of those around me.”

Conte reassured him. He told him to have patience. Michel Platini and Zinedine Zidane had taken time to adjust. “He expected exactly what happened to happen in good and in bad,” Llorente revealed. Then one day things began to fall into place. “Evidently my body also made the switch, the necessary change. Let’s say it accepted the radical change of habits and reset. The games did the rest.”

Llorente has scored in each of his last three matches. He now has five in 13, the exact same goal-to-game ratio as David Trezeguet had in his debut season at Juventus. His performances have picked up. Of all the players to have started more than 3 of the last 5 Serie A games – when excluding substitutes’ appearances – only 10 have a better rating than his 7.72. Incidentally five are his Juventus teammates.

What’s really generating excitement, though, is the development and potential of his understanding with Tevez. Named alongside him in the starting line-up for seven of Juventus’ last eight games, Llorente set up his fellow summer arrival to score against Livorno at the weekend.

The Lion King and the Apache is not your average big man-little man partnership. “Llorente is a complete and modern player,” Conte said yesterday evening, “He is not your typical penalty box centre-forward. We see in him all the qualities that convinced us to bring him to Turin. If he continues to improve he definitely has to go to the World Cup in Brazil. Tevez has surprised us. It’s a partnership that is doing really, really well.”

Expected to start against FC København in Turin tonight, if Juve earn as many corners and rain in as many crosses as they did in Denmark a couple of months ago, then Llorente will provide a target for them. Of all the strikers to contest at least 50 aerial duels in Serie A this season, his success rate of 49.1% is the best.

Aim then for Il Gigante Buono: the Gentle Giant – Juventus’ 21st century equivalent of John Charles. Do that and the Old Lady should get the win she needs to keep her hopes of qualifying for the knockout stages alive.