Betting tips / Ben Lyttleton / 05 December 2011 / Leave a comment Bet Now View Market

Adrian Mutu's checkered European football career is potentially heading towards its conclusion, but maybe, just maybe, Ben Lyttleton can see Cesena as the place where the Romanian might redeem himself.

This year started with Adrian Mutu banned from training at Fiorentina after skipping sessions in a bid to force through a move to Cesena; that move only happened in the summer, and since then he's had to sit out three games after a red card for elbowing an opponent in the match against, ­you guessed it, ­Fiorentina.

On Sunday, then, Mutu was an interesting part of the build-up before Cesena travelled to Turin to take on title-chasing Juventus. They were the club that took a chance on Mutu after Chelsea had sacked him for failing a drugs test and Mutu won two league titles there, and called his period "18 beautiful months in Turin".

The timing was also relevant because later on Monday, France Football magazine will reveal the shortlist of three names in the running for this year's Ballon D'Or award. Mutu is not among them, but, as he told Corriere dello Sport last week: "If I had made the right decisions in my life, I would have reached the level of a Ballon d'Or contender." He had the chance to move to Roma in 2008, and was encouraged to do so by Francesco Totti, but it never happened, and instead Mutu stuck with Fiorentina until last summer.

When he moved to Cesena, hundreds of fans turned up to greet him, and he compared his arrival, on a salary more than twice that of any other player, to those of Roberto Baggio, Beppe Signori and Marco Di Vaio: "They all achieved great things in smaller cities," he said.

Mutu did not hit the ground running: one goal in his first six games and a missed penalty in the goalless draw against Chievo had fans turning against him. He was excellent in the away win at Bologna and scored twice in the 2-0 win over Genoa, the second a Panenka-style chipped penalty past Sebastien Frey. Cesena faced Juventus with consecutive wins under the belt, and the hope that relegation could yet be avoided.

So, to the game, which Juventus won 2-0, but it was not always comfortable. The goals came late in the game, the second a questionable penalty dispatched by Arturo Vidal. It was the kind of match from which both sides can come out with credit. Juventus, because it was a battling performance, achieved without their key player of the season, Andrea Pirlo, while Alessandro del Piero, in his 500th league appearance for the club, only lasted eight minutes as a substitute: he needed stitches in a head wound and was kept in hospital overnight as a precaution.

Mutu himself was very quiet, but the overall Cesena performance was solid. Coach Daniele Arrigoni felt Vidal's penalty, and the decision to send off goalkeeper Francesco Antonioli in the incident leading up to it, 'took away our chance of fighting back in the final ten minutes'.

It leaves Cesena in the bottom three and five points off safety, where Siena, Bologna and, miraculously, Inter are. Cesena are around [1.3] to go down, but if Mutu can start finding the net, they might be saved.

Juventus are now top, two points clear of AC Milan and Udinese. Juve are ([2.78]) for the title, which still seems a high price given their lack of European distractions this season. Milan are ([1.92]) favourites and Udinese, who beat Inter 1-0 in an astonishing game that saw two missed penalties and two red cards, including a first one in the league for Javier Zanetti, in the last five minutes, ([24.0]) outsiders.

Juventus's next game is against Roma, who have problems of their own: coach
Antonio Conte will want to show them no mercy. Cesena, meanwhile, play at Palermo: once again they will rely on Mutu to score, while the Romanian will
perhaps accept, a the age of 32, that this is not quite the career he had
dreamt of for himself.