Hello and welcome to the second episode of The Totally Football Show presents Zonal Marking.

This is a six-part summer series to coincide with the release of Zonal Marking,

The Making of Modern European Football, a book written by our very own Michael Cox. Hello,

Coxie. Hello, Ian. Just in case you didn't hear last week's episode about the IAC side of

1995, and you're completely confused about what's going on. Tell us about the book, Michael.

It's a book about the history of modern European football, taking into account the seven major footballing nations,

looking at each of them in turn, a period of dominance where they're particularly strong.

And yeah, today we're looking at Syria in the late 1990s, which I think was probably the

strongest league at this point of any that I look at in the book.

And today we're looking at Juventus, their period of dominance in the mid to late 1990s,

and so the natural choice as our second panelist was James Horncastle.

Hello, Ian.

Michael, only one European Cup victory for Juventus during this period, and that was on penalties

against IACs, so why on earth we're talking about them?

And because I think they were just very, very feared feared at the time they weren't revered in the way that say van house iax or course barcelona or later guadiole's barcelona were but they were the team you just didn't want to get drawn against it wasn't heroic to lose tiv enters in the same way it was if if you lose to a bit of messy magic or something it was they will grind you down they will nullify your best players and more often than not they would

get past you especially in two-legged games in the finals they didn't really perform to their

capabilities but they were very feared now i came of age watching this team i lost my innocence

too uh i would say i said said innocence, not virginity.

The two go together.

But I think if there's a kid kind of growing up in England at the time, you know, the best team here was Manchester United.

And I find it really quite interesting that if you read Ferguson's book or the diaries that he kind of published at the time,

he doesn't really seem to be all that influenced by the great Van Hal Ayaks team.

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