If you were to ask me to describe in simple terms Italy’s performance in their round of 16 match against Switzerland on Saturday, my answer would be Not Good. In fact, it was very nearly verging on Bad.
All jokes aside, Italy abjectly sucked on Saturday on the same pitch where their calcio forebears won the World Cup 18 (Jesus Christ 18???) years ago.
If you had told any one the day after that magical night at the Olympiastadion that it would be the last World Cup knockout game Italy would play for 20 years (please God let it only be 20 years), you would’ve been laughed at. But if you watched today’s match, you can clearly see why it’s the case.
This Italy team looked completely disjointed. It looked like, as a friend of mine in my supporters club group chat said in the aftermath of the match, like none of the players on the pitch were having any fun playing with each other. The hell with having any ideas about creating chances to score, this team was devoid of ideas for how to get out of their own half for the vast majority of the game.
Luciano Spalletti, whose possession-based, foreward-thinking tactics had become the toast of Italian football after he won the scudetto with Napoli last year, spent most of this match standing on the sideline ashen-faced, looking completely clueless as to what he could possibly do to change something.
It was the same look he’d spent much of the second half sporting against Croatia. It seemed like he had never considered the possibility that an opponent might press him as opposed to the other way around, and never thought to drill his players in how to deal with it.
So Italy simply flailed, giving the ball back to the Swiss almost immediately. When they then had to defend they were everywhere except the right place, whether it be leaving Remo Frueler completely unmarked to score Switzerland’s first goal or not even beginning to close down Ruben Vargas to give him time to hit a beautiful shot and double the lead 27 seconds into the second half.
It took until the 73rd minute for them to register a shot on target when Mateo Retegui finally managed to loose a tame effort from range into Yann Sommer’s hands. The best chance to score that Italy fashioned up to that point was an errant pass from Nicolo Fagioli that airmailed his targets only to nearly be turned into an own goal save for the post. When they did manage to get a dangerous ball in less than a minute later, Gianluca Scamacca—the top Italian scorer in Serie A this year with a whopping 12 goals—somehow failed to tap the ball into the Swiss net from a yard away and hit the post instead.
While the players (mostly) certainly deserve their share of blame for their lack of drive in this game, it’s Spalletti that deserves most of the blame for the fiasco that this tournament turned into. After the opener against Albania he made the wrong decision every single time. He stayed with the 4-2-3-1 he’d beaten Albania with against Spain and got overrun in midfield. He changed to a 3-5-2 against Croatia and ended up getting pinned in his own half most of the game.
He made six changes to the team that squeaked into the knockout phase against Croatia, but none of them was putting the dude who actually scored the goal, Mattia Zaccagni, on the field. Instead he went with Stephan El Sharaawy, who hadn’t played a minute this tournament and was promptly hauled off for Zaccagni at the break. He didn’t make his next change until the hour mark when it was clear that more needed to be done.
So many things can be said about how this tournament was played by Spalletti, and none of them are good. One would hope that a tournament like this, and particularly the exit thereof, would turn into an inflection point that sees the right changes made in the Italian game to turn things around. But if that hadn’t happened with two failed World Cup qualifying campaigns, it’s hard to have any confidence that it would here.
RANDOM THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS
- How did Luciano Spalletti win a scudetto? Seriously. The way he coached the last three weeks shows absolutely none of what Napoli did well last year.
- Spalletti’s post-match remarks didn’t inspire much confidence. While he claimed to accept responsibility for the way things went, he then proceeded to reel off a half dozen excuses for why things happened the way they did, from the players—that he picked—not having the right characteristics to not having a lot of time in the job after Roberto Mancini left late last year.
- Spalletti really should resign. Failing that, Gabirele Gravina should fire him. The two have a joint press conference scheduled for Sunday, and I get the sinking feeling that he’s gonna stick around.
- Missing the suspended Riccardo Calafiori and his ability to pass out of the back definitely hurt, but it also didn’t help that Spalletti chose to replace him with Gianluca Mancini when Alessandro Buongiorno and Federico Gatti are both better on the ball.
- This game was summed up nicely in the waning seconds of normal time when Federico Chiesa ran into the Swiss half, looked up, and threw up his hands in exasperation mid-stride because there was no one there to support him at all.
- Chiesa was really the only outfield player amongst the starting XI who looked anything worth a damn. He wormed his way into a good shooting opportunity in the first half but had it blocked, but otherwise he was one of the few guys running hard and trying to do something.
- Starting Nicolo Fagioli was probably the right move given how ineffectual Jorginho had been in the group stage, but one got the feeling he wasn’t quite ready for a start like this. He dropped a few dimes early in the first half but looked panicky as the game went on. His set piece deliveries were all over the place. My large adult son is very much capable of having a productive career with the national team, but given how little game time he’s had coming off his suspension this was probably too big an ask.
- Kudos to Retegui for being one of the only guys on the field to play hard and make runs after he came on.
- I had one of the obligatory debates over naturalized citizens playing with the national team with someone earlier this week, and it’s ironic that the only oriundo who saw the field today was one of the only ones that looked like he cared at all.
- Thanks to Swiss keeper Yann Sommer, who when asked post-match insisted that Italian football isn’t in crisis. It’s nice to have someone try to keep your spirits up.
- That said, all is not lost for Italy—or at least it doesn’t have to be. There is talent coming up. Both the U19 and U17 teams won their respective European Championships, and the U20 team made the final of the U20 World Cup. Players like Cesare Cassadei and Francesco Camarda, who won the Golden Ball awards at their respective tournaments, could finally bring this team the goalscoring punch it has needed since Francesco Totti and Alessandro Del Piero retired—if they don’t get their careers snowed under the way it so often happens to promising youngsters in Italy.