Our next game saw us take on the league leaders and if we could take anything from the game at all, I'd be pleased. And we actually performed really well and were good value for our point!
A point that guarantees us a place in European football again next season.
If Inter do go on to secure the Serie A title this season, a lot of it will be down to Timo Werner, who has an incredible 41 league goals in 32 appearances!!
We head off to Spain next for the first leg of our Europa Conference League Semi Final with Athletic Bilbao. I'd gone into this one with the attitude that if we got a draw out there, we could win the home leg to get to the final. As it turned out, we will HAVE to win the home leg now after losing out in Bilbao...the second half sending off of Lorenzo Libutti didn't help our cause!
Before that 2nd leg though, we had a tough league game against Juventus and I had no choice but to rest some first team players, with the Bilbao game in mind and following only 3 days later! However, my second string pulled an outstanding performance out the bag as we thrashed Pep Guardiola's team on their own turf...unbelievable stuff! 17 year old Benjamin Perrot scored the pick of the goals with a wonderful strike from 25 yards out that flew into the top corner!
It was a win that brought us level with Juve on points, guarantees us at least Europa League football next year and puts us in pole position to finish in the top 4 and get ourselves back into the Champions League.
Now our attentions turned back to this year's European competition. We needed a win against Athletic Bilbao to get to our first European final...Two goals in 3 minutes in the first half from our main man up front turned this tie on it's head and put the advantage very much back in our hands! With the way we've been playing recently, I had no doubt from there that we would go on to get the job done and a second half goal from Luquinha (a beautiful free kick) ensured our passage through to the Final!
The Final will be played at Valencia's Nuevo Mestalla and awaiting us there are one of the richest clubs in the world....Newcastle United!
Throughout the course of my Palermo career, Newcastle have spent a whopping £1.31 billion (in comparison I have spent a total of £97 million)!!! Despite that, their highest league finish is only 5th and they still haven't bought their way into Champions League football. On top of that, they haven't won a single trophy either...hopefully that won't change in the final.
Newcastle's most valuable player is Ukranian goalkeeper, Anatolii Trubin who is valued in the region of £99-142 million!! The Magpies paid £70 million to bring him to the North East of England 4 seasons ago!
Back to domestic action and we knew that a win from any of our last 3 games would secure us Champions League football for next season...However, we failed at the first attempt as we are beaten at home by Bologna.
Although I did have a 15 year old playing in that game....maybe I underestimated our opponent slightly.
I really didn't want it to go down to the final day with us having to get a result, so I put out a very strong side against Parma with the view that we would get the job done in our penultimate game of the season. And we did!
With the Final of the Europa Conference League looming, I fielded a second string against Empoli in the final game of the season and both sides provided an entertaining spectacle for the fans in a game that finished all square.
And so it's 73 points and a 4th placed finish for us. We'll be back amongst Europe's elite next season and that is more than was expected of us at the start of the campaign...a successful year in Serie A! The biggest shock of the season is the relegation of Atalanta who were originally predicted a top 6 finish!