It runs the second minute in the World Cup qualification game between Italy and Estonia. Italy’s captain Giovanni di Lorenzo hears a ringing. He looks around, sees a vibrant smartphone on the lawn at the center line and immediately informs the Portuguese referee. He interrupts this important football game for the Squadra Azzurra. Joao Pinheiro picks up the phone and hands it over to the fourth referee on the sidelines. The device apparently fell out of his pants before the game started. Who called there, shortly after the start of the game, in this existential match?
It can actually only have been one of these warning voices from the past. They have been heard in the past few days on Italian TV and in the newspapers. There was talk of “fate game”, “passion”, but also of “failure” and “fear”. For the “Gazzetta Dello Sport”, Italy commuted “between apocalypse and despair” before the match on Friday. In the past, participation was the most important tournament in the world. Italy won the World Cup title four times, most recently in 2006. Since then, the relationship with this competition has been disturbed. It seemed like a national effort to slow things back. So that the former football giant, which is floating into his opponents, gets back to the place at the table of the big ones, which is due to him.
Gennaro Gattuso, 47, got nothing from all the tamtam about the ranging phone. He stood on the sidelines, the black clothes stuck closely on the body that was no longer flawlessly shaped. The Commissario Tecnico, born at the southern end of the Italian boot, rowed with his arms, gave his players instructions on how to stand, how to move and search for the goal. “I didn’t notice anything at all,” said the trainer after the game. “I swear, I didn’t notice anything. I was in competition trance.”
Competition trance, that was what they were looking for. The Wadel biter from Calabria was also known as a player at AC Milan or in the national team, as a world champion in 2006. Aggressive on the edge of unsportsmanlike, biting, penetrating, concentrated, the victory subject to almost all means. So his team should now appear, the debut as a national coach. “In the national team you have to think about winning, whether clean or dirty. Help each other, do not give in to centimeters: Italy’s strength has always been to suffer in the trench.” So stated Gattuso before the game. Something between kicking and little war, that’s his profession.
A new face of hope
It came similar. “I have not seen a national team for a long time that played on attack from the first minute, made pressing and was looking for the goal directly,” says Xavier Jacobelli, commentator of the “Corriere Dello Sport” the day after the game. The 5: 0 against Estonia is primarily a result of the 126. The FIFA world rankings, whose star is the goalkeeper Karl Hein von Werder Bremen that has not yet been used this season. Above all, the Match Italy gave a new face of hope – Gattuso. He has had a moving coaching career, with stations on Crete, Pisa, two years at AC Milan and SSC Naples and shortly at Hajduk Split.
Nowhere did he really convince and for the national team he was only a second candidate to Claudio Ranieri, who canceled. Now, however, Gattuso is the father of the awareness experience that was in the Bergamo stadium on Friday. 24,000 intoxicated Tifosi not only chanted the white stripes song, which had become the soundtrack of Italy at the 2006 World Cup (“Seven Nation Army”), but also the name of the national coach. “This is a fresh start, it’s the first morning in the world,” wrote “La Repubblica”.
Kimmich’s gate as a symbol
With Gattuso, Italy now has a new projection surface on which the country wants to make a glorious football future again. Because not only the younger, but also the recent history of football Italy is so dark that this will seemed lost. The dull present was symbolized by that special goal in the Nations League quarter-finals in March against Germany (3: 3), when goalkeeper Gigi Donnarumma struggled with his defense and Jamal Musiala pushed a lightning-fast corner from Joshua Kimmich into the empty goal.
For a long time it was no longer fun to be the Tifoso of the Italian national team. The fans, disillusioned by two missed World Cup participation, are after the weak performance of the Azzurri in the EM 2024 (0: 2 in the round of 16 against Switzerland) and the previously poorly poor World Cup qualification emotionally far away from the team that should represent the country and did this for decades. The fans have caught up in installments. What happened in the relationship between that fanatical football people and his once so proud country selection? “The Squadra Azzurra is the favorite team of the Italians,” explains commentator Jacobelli, “but only if their way of playing corresponds to this love.”
Prevent the creepy triptych
Italy, certainly due to the lack of quality of its players, has bogged down in the tactical. There are great tactics in the history of Italian football coaches, starting with Arrigo Sacchi up to the predecessor Gattusos, Luciano Spalletti released in June. He is considered a master of his subject, the football miracle made it to win a championship title in Naples. He pressed himself so complicated at the short meeting with the national team that the players simply did not understand his tactical finesse. The result: a 0: 3 defeat in June against Norway, again Italy threatens to miss a World Cup. It would be the third time in a row, a creepy triptych.
On Monday, Italy meets Israel in his fourth group game in Budapest and could go back in second place in the group one behind Norway. However, this only entitles you to participate in the playoffs, where Italy failed in 2017 and 2022. So the path leads back to more primitive primary impulses. “When Gattuso played, there was only blood, sweat and tears on the field,” remembered “La Repubblica”. And no tactical excesses. At the front, the coach offered two strikers, Moise Kean and Mateo Retegui. Kean scored the first goal after 58 minutes, Retegui prepared him and scored two (69th) and three (89th). “I haven’t seen two strikers in the Squadra Azzurra for ages,” said expert Jacobelli.
The wing players DI Marco and Politano slapped tired flanks. Four defenders around goal scorer Alessandro Bastoni (92nd) formed the defense, in the center of aged Nicolò Barella and especially Sandro Tonali. The 25-year-old embodied the soul of the Italian game, a Gattuso of the generation Z. omnipresent, biting, somewhat more elegant than the original. The players also calculated their emotional success for the trainer. Italy now believes in itself, at least a little. “Gattuso gave us the necessary bite,” said Moise Kean. “We were hungry from the coach, it brings us incredible energy,” said Alessandro Bastoni. Now it is important for Gattuso’s team to be hard on that high energy level. Duel for duel, preferably up to the World Cup next summer.
