Italy's top soap opera returns with Juventus and Lazio in leading roles

Italy’s favourite soap opera returns on Saturday. After three and a half months away, Serie A’s unlikely yarn of sporting feuds, family dynasties, and awkward sex talk will finally be back on our screens. Viewers have been tantalised with the possibility of a major plot shift on the horizon.

A fearsome Old Lady has dominated the past eight seasons but rarely has she looked more vulnerable than she does right now. Juventus sit only one point clear of Lazio at the top of the table with 12 games left to play, and were beaten by Napoli in the Coppa Italia on Wednesday night.

Related: How Mario Balotelli's Brescia homecoming turned into a nightmare | Nicky Bandini

The knives are out for the Juventus manager, Maurizio Sarri. His appointment last summer divided opinion from the start. The decision to fire his predecessor, Massimiliano Allegri, was supposed to reflect a sense of urgency at a club that is desperate to win the Champions League while it has Cristiano Ronaldo on the books. Yet the only major trophy in Sarri’s collection was the Europa League he picked up with Chelsea last May.

He is at risk of becoming the first Juventus manager to finish a season empty-handed since Luigi Delneri bumbled to seventh in 2011. Sarri’s team had already lost the Supercoppa to Lazio and their Champions League hopes hang by a thread following a 1-0 defeat in the first leg of their last-16 tie at Lyon.

There was little to reassure their supporters in their two Cup showings over the past week. Juve drew 0-0 with Milan in the second leg of their semi-final – progressing on away goals – then laboured to another stalemate against Napoli before losing the penalty shootout. Some rust is to be expected as teams return from an unplanned mid-season break, but an attack featuring Ronaldo, Paulo Dybala and Douglas Costa scarcely carved out a chance on either occasion.

If Lazio can recapture the form they were showing prior to the pause, they will have every chance to overtake Juve. Simone Inzaghi’s side are unbeaten in 21 league games, and have dropped a total of four points in the last 18. Between Serie A and the Supercoppa they have won both head-to-heads against Juventus so far, by identical 3-1 margins.

Ciro Immobile is on track to break Serie A’s single-season scoring record with 27 goals in 26 appearances, but theirs is no one-man crusade. Luis Alberto’s 12 assists lead the division, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic has recaptured the form that earned him a €100m price tag and Joaquín Correa has provided a different option behind the attack. Felipe Caicedo, with eight goals, might be Serie A’s most super sub.

Only time will tell us whether that group can withstand the intensity of an abbreviated schedule, with two games a week through to 2 August. The original calendar would have granted more rest days to Lazio than Juventus – who had been alternating between league and cups.

This is not yet a two-horse race, however. Gigi Buffon predicted this week that Internazionale, managed by his former Juventus manager Antonio Conte, would stay in the running right to the end. “I know him very well,” the goalkeeper told the subscription sports streaming service Dazn. “I know he will be playing for it through to the 38th game.”

For now, Inter sit nine points back – though they can trim that to six by winning their game in hand, against Sampdoria on Sunday. That is one of four games to be played this weekend, completing a round of fixtures that was interrupted by the coronavirus outbreak. The next round begins on Monday night.

Conte believes his team may benefit from the pause. Inter had been joint-top in mid-February but after losing the first leg of their Coppa Italia semi-final at home to Napoli, suffered consecutive league defeats to Juventus and Lazio. The forced stoppage has given the manager space to pause and reflect on what went wrong.

Related: Suspension of Lazio's scudetto charge reveals scars of century-old dispute

“If I have to find a positive side to this emergency, it was the time to focus and look for the ways to improve Inter,” he said this week. “I had the opportunity to look back over the first seven months [of the season], to look in a detailed way at our squad, the negatives and the positives.”

He will have more options available to him than before. Christian Eriksen had featured only sparingly after signing in January but now has had time to integrate properly. Conte tweaked his formation to make space behind the attack for the second leg of that cup semi-final against Napoli on Saturday. Eriksen started and scored in the second minute, straight from a corner, though his team would ultimately draw the game and consequently lose the tie.

Stefano Sensi and Alexis Sánchez will also be available after recovering from injuries. The rest of Conte’s squad might likewise benefit from their rest. Inter’s players have covered more ground than those from any other team in Serie A this season – all while giving the fewest minutes to substitutes.

Related: A night at Eibar, where the best seats are, well, in the house | Sid Lowe

Serie A’s best storylines, though, have never belonged exclusively to the title contenders. Can Atalanta recreate the spectacular attacking football that carried them through to a Champions League quarter-final, with Papu Gómez and Josip Ilicic to the fore? Will we see them score seven goals in a game again, as they have already this season against Udinese, Torino and Lecce?

Is fourth place theirs to lose, or might one of Roma or Napoli come back stronger? The return of Nicolò Zaniolo, whose season was presumed to be over when he tore a cruciate ligament in January, could be a huge boost to the Giallorossi.

Napoli have more ground to make up, but look like a group transformed under Gennaro Gattuso. In November the club’s owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis, was threatening to sue his own players after they refused to go into a ritiro training camp. On Wednesday night, those same players threw him up in the air as they celebrated their Cup triumph.

The relegation battle, meanwhile, could be said to extend all the way up to Cagliari in 12th place. The Sardinian club are without a win in 11 matches, though Saturday’s game against Verona will be their first under Walter Zenga, who was hired on 3 March – six days before the start of Italy’s national lockdown.

Most crucially, there is renewed optimism that this season will be completed, with both the president of the Italian football federation, Gabriele Gravina, and Italy’s minister for sport, Vincenzo Spadafora, expressing confidence that quarantine rules would imminently be tweaked so that entire teams no longer need to go into isolation if a single player tests positive for Covid-19.

What a relief it would be in these next two months if Serie A’s biggest storylines could revolve simply around what happens on the pitch.