It is late Friday afternoon at the old Stadio Communale in Turin. Team training ended more than an hour ago. Notwithstanding the chilly wind and setting sun, about 200 fans are crowded up against crash barriers near the press entrance hoping to get a glimpse of their heroes.

Zinedine Zidane emerges from a side door leading to the dressingroom. As soon as he appears, a roar goes up from the fans. Some of them want his autograph, some want him to look their way and many of them are just content to clap their hands in a round of applause for the latest foreign "maestro" to grace the Juventus shirt.

In the day that is in it, the fans have even more reason than usual to applaud Zidane. Two nights previously, Juventus had grasped a late qualification for next Wednesday's Champions League semi-final tie against Manchester United at Old Trafford when drawing 1-1 away to Greek side Olympiakos, thanks to an 85th-minute goal from midfielder Antonio Conte.

Zidane is limping badly, having twisted his knee against Olympiakos. Normally, there is nothing that so completely upsets a footballer as an injury. Rather than being in a foul mood, however, the usually taciturn Zidane seems positively loquacious and upbeat. Three hours earlier, he and the rest of the team had heard that Juventus had drawn Manchester United for the third consecutive time in the Champions League. What was the dressingroom reaction?

"We're just glad to be in the semi-finals. . . At this stage, there are no easy ties and it's an advantage for us to play the first leg at Old Trafford. . . even if I get the impression that United might be a bit stronger this season, certainly they've done very well this year. . ."

Zidane is the first to concede that this has, until now at least, been a poor season both for him and Juventus. The side that has ridden high in Italian and European soccer for the last four seasons, winning three Italian titles and reaching three consecutive Champions League finals, has looked a spent force for much of the winter.

Zidane himself, World Cup winner and European Player of the Year, has at times looked burnt out, occasionally being completely bypassed in important Serie A games. Zidane is the first to admit that it was difficult to recover from the emotional strain and stress prompted by France's World Cup win and the extended partying that followed.

"It was a bit difficult all right, especially in my head. One problem was that we had very little time to recuperate and recover from it all. . . It's been a difficult year for me and for the team. . . but we're on the way back now and I'm hoping we're going to finish the season well."

It is the recurrent emphasis on "finishing the season well" that should give Manchester United pause for thought. One senses that Zidane and his team-mates believe that, having ridden out the worst patch of their season (December to early February), they are now ready for a grandstand finish.

For example, try and suggest to Zidane that Juventus have been "lucky" in this season's Champions League and he interrupts your correspondent's question to defiantly respond: "The fact that we seemed to struggle into the semi-finals doesn't mean much. Juventus are always like that, when things get difficult, Juventus is a team that knows how to play, a team that can always pull out some extra reserve strengths.

"Against Olympiakos, we played well, make no mistake. We believed we could qualify, we knew only too well that all it required was one goal and we got it and here we are in the semi-final, despite all our problems."

On the word "problems", Zidane stops to smile and is about to continue when we are rudely and noisily interrupted by Dutch midfielder Edgar Davids, driving by in a very large, very new Mercedes. The ebullient Dutchman screeches to a halt, blares his very loud horn, flashes a lunatic grin at "ZouZou" and blasts off again. Your reporter can only conclude that the team mood at Juventus is very "positive", Manchester United notwithstanding.

Having to overcome difficulties is nothing new for Zidane. There is an old dusty photo in the family album that shows him as an 11-year-old at a schoolboy summer training camp in Cannes, a camp at which the chief coach was none other than Michel Platini, at the time at the height of his playing career. Platini failed to notice anything special about the youngster.

"I remember that training camp well, Michel doesn't. One day I showed him the photo, but he couldn't remember anything about it. It was logical enough, however, because I was too small."

Since those childhood days in Cannes, though, Platini has more than made up for his oversight, constantly defending Zidane especially during his first difficult months at Juventus in the autumn of 1996, after moving from Bordeaux.

Born in the working class Marseilles district of La Castellane to Smail and Malika, both Algerian, Zidane's climb to fame has occasionally been halted by racial prejudice. One club director at Cannes took a long look at the 16-year-old Zidane and then rounded on Jean Varraud, the club scout who had discovered him, saying: "What are you thinking of? Putting an Arab in the team? Are you mad?"

Now one of the most famous sportsmen on earth and the unofficial world number one footballer (given the current decline of Ronaldo), Zidane tends to play down problems of racism.

"I've never really had many problems of that type. . . but I am very proud of my Algerian origins. . . even if I was born in France and consider myself, above all, to be a Frenchman."

When Zidane says that he has "never really had problems", what he really means is that his La Castellane background taught him to be streetwise and street-tough at an early age. Varraud, the Cannes scout, recalls the teenage Zidane trotting calmly all the way across the pitch to head butt an opponent. In those days, too, Varraud instructed Zidane not to defend because otherwise he would just hack down whoever tried to get past him.

Millions of fans saw for themselves something of the streetfighter's gut reaction during France '98 when Zidane, needlessly and viciously, stamped on Saudi defender Al-Shahrani during France's 4-0 first-round win against Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for France, Zidane at least picked his moment right, having to sit out the games against Denmark and Paraguay, but being back in time to play Italy in the quarterfinals, Croatia in the semi-finals and, of course, score those two winning goals against Brazil in the final itself.

With a view to Wednesday night, the street-fighter is sounding optimistic. That optimism stems not from the fact that Juventus have won three of their previous four Champions League games against United ("soccer is not history") but rather from the team mood.

"It's not that we're playing as well now as in previous seasons but that's what we're working back to. All we needed was the stimulus of a semi-final and we've got that now. . .

"For us winning the cup means a lot of things, it means not having to finish in the top four in Serie A to qualify for the Champions League and, above all, it means saving the season, not to mention changing our luck in the final since we've lost the last two."

And now, it's over to Old Trafford. . .