Allegri's reputation still rising after authoring latest Juventus triumph

Luis Enrique presented it as a stark, binary choice. Insisting that the pressure was all on Juventus ahead of the Champions League quarter-final second leg, the Barcelona manager told reporters: "They are the ones who have qualification in hand. They must decide whether to attack or close themselves up."

Massimiliano Allegri saw things differently.

He did not command his players to throw themselves forward in pursuit of an early away goal, but nor did he invite them to park the bus. With Juventus leading 3-0 from Turin, he instead encouraged them to do the same thing they had been doing all season: to stay the course, to play their game, and to win.

"There won’t be any motto like in [the movie] 'Any Given Sunday'," he had insisted at his own press conference. "No. I will tell the players to do well in the defensive phase and do well in the attacking phase. It's very simple."

It really isn't, actually. Barcelona is a team accustomed to sweeping everyone away at the Camp Nou - a relentless attacking juggernaut featuring the best three-man attack in world football. The Blaugrana had won their four Champions League home games this season by a combined scoreline of 21-1 - taking in a 4-0 rout of Manchester City and that famous six-goal comeback against Paris Saint-Germain.

And yet, Juventus did indeed approach this game like any other. The Italian side attacked Barcelona, but prudently, relying on the acceleration of Juan Cuadrado and invention of Miralem Pjanic rather than overlapping runs from Dani Alves and Alex Sandro. Allegri's men defended, but not excessively, never making their forwards into full-backs as Jose Mourinho did with Samuel Eto’o during Inter’s triumphant rearguard action here in 2010.

All-or- nothing just isn't Allegri’s style. He is football’s arch-pragmatist, a man who insists he never let his parents tell him fairytales at bedtime as a kid because, quite simply, "I didn’t believe them."

His cool talk of "administering" football games might turn off some neutrals, but his habit of relentlessly winning them has certainly endeared him to Juve's fans, who hung a banner at the club’s training ground this week to proclaim how happy he made them.

Allegri did not change a single member of the starting XI that had sunk Barcelona so emphatically at the J-Stadium. There was a time when this "five-star" Juve lineup - with Cuadrado, Pjanic, Paulo Dybala, Gonzalo Higuain and Mario Mandzukic all packed in - was considered recklessly unbalanced.

So much for that thought.

Barcelona had averaged a goal every 32 minutes this season between the Champions League, La Liga and the Copa del Rey, but could not muster a single one in 180 against Juventus.

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True enough, Barca did have chances. Leo Messi, in particular, was guilty of dragging a shot wide in the 19th minute that might have come early enough to cause some jitters. But Juventus also had opportunities. Pjanic's angled chip over the home defence shortly before half-time was perfection. Higuain should have done better than to tap it meekly into Marc-Andre ter Stegen's hands.

And the harsh truth is that by full-time Barcelona had managed only a single shot on target. Although the home side found some success early on getting behind old teammate Dani Alves - who was still greeting old friends on the home bench when the match kicked off - the truth is that Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez never looked half as composed as Juve's defenders.

In a sense, this is nothing new. Allegri's team is still built, as it always has been, on the solid foundations provided by Leonardo Bonucci, Giorgio Chiellini and Gigi Buffon. The two centre-backs were imperious here, but it takes an awful lot more than three players to shut out this Barcelona team.

To truly understand how this result was achieved would require a revisiting of countless tiny battles won: from Pjanic pouncing on Neymar to tap the ball of his toes after Cuadrado had slipped on the edge of the box in the 32nd minute, through to the Colombian himself sliding in to stop Messi from launching a quick counter in the 67th.

You could call this a night of revenge for Juventus, chasing off the ghosts of the Champions League final defeat in Berlin two years ago. But it's a safe bet that Allegri doesn’t believe in ghosts any more than he does fairy tales and motivational slogans. What he does believe in is hard work and a balanced gameplan.

At the Camp Nou, those worked out pretty well.