Lazio's wing overloads and high line expose Juventus in statement win
A 3-0 victory in Turin put Lazio level with Inter at the top of Serie A, built on overloaded wingers, a six-time offside trap and a squad still searching for the discipline to protect a lead.
Lazio beat Juventus 3-0 at the Allianz Stadium, a result the club had not managed in Turin since October 2017. Oliver Provstgaard headed them in front, Gustav Isaksen doubled the lead, and Fisayo Dele-Bashiru ran the length of the pitch to seal it late on.
The win puts Gennaro Gattuso's side on 19 points after seven rounds, level with Inter at the top and ahead of where Lazio stood at this stage of their 1999/2000 Scudetto season, according to Football Italia.
Overloads on the flanks pulled Juventus apart
Gattuso set his team up to flood the wide areas against Luciano Spalletti's Juventus, committing extra bodies to the wings rather than stacking the centre. That overload forced Juventus's full-backs into decisions they could not consistently win, and it gave Isaksen and the Lazio wide players space to attack in behind.
The same aggression showed up without the ball. Lazio pressed in a man-oriented scheme, picking up opponents individually across the pitch rather than sitting off in zones, and their back line stepped up repeatedly to catch Juventus offside six times. That high line is a high-risk tool: it compresses the space in front of the goalkeeper, but only works if the press ahead of it is synchronised, which on this night it largely was.
Gattuso admits the start was uneven
Gattuso was not entirely satisfied even in victory. He felt Nicolò Romano could have done more to attack Jaka Bijol -- he named Alajbegovic as the defender in question -- and that Reda Belahyane failed to stretch the pitch for the full-backs the way the system demands, he told DAZN Italia.
That detail matters because it is the coach identifying a structural gap rather than a result worth padding himself with. Lazio went in a goal up at half-time, not three, which tells its own story about how the overload took time to fully click.
A pattern of games that stop controlling themselves
Gattuso's bigger concern was control. He pointed to the draws with Milan and Venezia, where Lazio dominated for long spells and then simply stopped applying themselves, as evidence his team has not yet learned to manage a lead. "This is why I feel this is progress, because we are all or nothing, we don't yet have the maturity to control a lead," he said.
That admission frames the Juventus win differently. Three clean, converted chances do not by themselves prove a side has fixed its habit of switching off, and Gattuso's own description of a team that must "push with vehemence" suggests the system is built on sustained intensity rather than game management.
The context behind the result makes it more striking. Lazio reached this point despite an early Coppa Italia exit and a transfer market in which the club, by Gattuso's own account, had little money and had to recruit players determined enough to join regardless.
Albert Gudmundsson, Matteo Cancellieri, Nicolò Rovella, Alessio Furlanetto and Adam Marusic were all unavailable through injury, yet the side still produced six wins in Serie A plus the dramatic 2-2 draw with Milan. Provstgaard said after the match that he had never experienced an atmosphere like the one at Lazio's Formello training ground, and Gattuso traced that spirit to a deliberate shift in how he manages players, listening more and reserving his authority for only two or three non-negotiables.
Lazio's home fans have been boycotting matches at the Stadio Olimpico for months in protest at president Claudio Lotito, so the travelling ultras in Turin gave the squad a rare chance to celebrate a big result together. Gattuso was quick to temper the mood regardless, telling his players to put the table aside and focus only on the next fixture against Parma, insisting that taking it "one game at a time" is what gives this Lazio side the chance to keep surprising people.