Our long unbeaten run in Champions League group games came to an end as we suffered a narrow 1-0 defeat away at Juventus, our first loss at this stage since Valencia beat us by the same score at Stamford Bridge in September 2019.

Our opponents in Turin last night were content to sit deep and frustrate our forwards on home soil while trying to hit us on the counter-attack, and struck with a goal by Federico Chiesa that Ben Chilwell described as a ‘sucker punch’ just seconds into the second half.

Deserved more?

Despite the 1-0 scoreline in Juventus’ favour, it was the Blues who came out on top in pretty much every statistic in Italy. That includes controlling a massive 73.2 per cent of possession over the 90 minutes, our biggest share of possession in any match so far this season.

That owes much to another game where we rarely misplaced a pass, with a 90 per cent pass completion rate across the whole team, completing 697 of our 771 passes, compared to 214 out of 287 for Juventus. We were also showing attacking intent, as demonstrated by the 14 key passes we played, to the home team’s four.

We also attempted a much higher number of shots than our opponents, 16 compared to six, while winning eight corners and conceding just one.

Knocking on a locked door

However, for all our dominance, we were unable to find the goal we needed to continue our 12-match unbeaten run in the Champions League group stage.

Digging a little deeper into those shot statistics reveals we were lacking a cutting edge when we got into shooting positions, as shown by the fact that despite having 10 more shots overall than Juve, we each registered only a single effort on target, and unfortunately the home team’s found the net.

Our own shot on target came from Romelu Lukaku, but the Belgian will be disappointed the other three of his four shots failed to test Wojciech Szczesny in the Bianconeri goal, contributing three of our eight shots off target.

Szczesny may have only had one real save to make, but the Juve defenders certainly played a big part in stopping us converting those shots into goals, ensuring those opportunities were far from clear chances.

Seven of our 16 efforts were blocked by a Juventus player before they could reach the keeper, Thiago Silva suffering the most from this as all three of his efforts were blocked, the most of any player on the pitch.