LIVE Coppa Italia
ByReuters
Published 17/03/2004 at 16:15 GMT
Juventus will seek to salvage some silverware from a disappointing season on Wednesday when they take on Lazio in the first leg of the Italian Cup final at Rome's Olympic Stadium. A nightmare week saw them knocked out of the Champions League with a 1-0 de
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Last season's scudetto winners are now nine points off the pace with nine games remaining, which prompted coach Marcello Lippi to accept that their championship challenge lay in ruins.
The Cup is treated with barely-concealed disdain by Italy's top teams, who routinely turn out second-string sides until the semi-finals.
With Juve's other hopes dashed, however, the Cup has suddenly assumed a new lustre.
"The Italian Cup is an important trophy for us," Lippi told reporters on Tuesday.
"First, because if we win, it would be the 10th triumph in our history, and second because -- along with second place in Serie A -- it's the only remaining objective this season.
"To put the Cup in our trophy cabinet would round off an exceptional 12 months for us."
Winning won't be easy. Juventus' first-choice strikers Alessandro Del Piero and David Trezeguet are both injured and should be replaced by Fabrizio Miccoli and Marco Di Vaio for the first leg (kickoff 21:00 GMT).
Injuries to Gianluca Zambrotta, Paolo Montero, Mark Iuliano, Alessandro Birindelli and the suspension of Ciro Ferrara have decimated the defence.
Lippi can hardly take comfort from his experiences of recent finals against the Rome-based club either.
As coach of Juventus and then Inter Milan he lost the 1998 and 2000 Italian Supercups and the 2000 Italian Cup to Sven Goran Eriksson's Lazio.
Lazio, meanwhile, would be happy with a repeat of their 2-0 league victory over Juve earlier this season.
They start without Argentine striker Claudio Lopez, who has been granted a leave of absence for personal reasons, but his replacement, Simone Inzaghi, looked sharp when scoring in the 2-2 home draw with Udinese at the weekend.
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