IF THIS was not the end of an era, it was something very similar. Italy’s embarrassing first round World Cup elimination in a 3-2 defeat by Slovakia in Johannesburg yesterday afternoon to some extent reflects the overall impoverishment of the Italian game, a steady decline that has been masked first by Italy’s own triumph in Berlin four years ago and more recently by the pyrotechnic wonders of European club champions, Inter Milan.
And there is the first point worth underlining. Even Italian coach Marcello Lippi is forced to admit the mighty Inter of this season simply do not reflect Italian football and for the very good reason that when Inter beat Bayern Munich in Madrid last month, not a single Italian lined out for the Italian club. What is more, of course, the then Inter coach José Mourinho is Portuguese.
Make no mistake, this was a defeat that will rub a barrel load of salt into old wounds. The reigning world champions were eliminated from a first round group (Slovakia, Paraguay and New Zealand) which many would have happily described as the weakest in the entire tournament. Furthermore, they did so recording two highly unconvincing 1-1 draws prior to yesterday’s defeat.
In historical terms, this is the worst Italian World Cup performance since Northern Ireland denied them a place in the 1958 finals.
Furthermore, Italy have never previously finished last in a first round group, even if they did experience the ignominy of a first round elimination at the 1974 West Germany World Cup. Furthermore, you have to go back to 1997 to find the last time that Italy went six games without a win.
Coach Lippi will obviously stand as the number one defendant in the nationwide trial about to break. Last night, he bravely stepped up to the plate to offer a mea culpa worthy of John Paul II but one that is unlikely to reassure Italian fans.
Lippi will now be replaced by the ex-Parma and ex-Fiorentina coach Cesare Prandelli as the next Italian coach. However, the Italian Football Federation had already announced that decision, long before the South African World Cup began. Indeed, there are those willing to suggest this might have been part of the problem in that the Azzurri were playing for a man on his way out.
In reality, there were no signs of such problems. Lippi’s Italy squad seemed anything but mutinous, rather they give off that strong sense of gruppo which Lippi has always claimed to have been fundamental to their triumph four years ago.
Furthermore, unlike the French team in South Africa, there has been no squabbling and no internal tension within the Italian squad.
So what went wrong? The answer is twofold. In the short term, Lippi may have fallen victim of his own gruppo philosophy in that he opted to leave two of the most talented (but wayward) Italians of their generation, namely Sampdoria’s Antonio Cassano and Inter’s Mario Balotelli, at home. Without them, without ageing heroes like Totti and Del Piero and, most crucially, with playmaker Pirlo ruled out of the first two games by injury, this was a dull, pedestrian, unconvincing Italy, painfully short of quality.
No one in Italy expected the reigning champions to win back-to-back World Cups. Yet most of us believed Lippi’s conservative, no-risk selection policy would limit the damages of an expedition surely destined to fail. That Italy so manifestly failed to reach even that modest objective sounds a screeching alarm bell about a country which for much of the last 30 years has been one of the dominant forces in world football.
While such as former World Cup winners Paolo Rossi and Marco Tardelli last night argued that Italy’s failure was largely due to a “psychological” block, linked to the quasi-impossibility of winning two successive World Cups, others tended to attribute more long-term significance to the debacle.
Corriere Della Seracommentator Mario Sconcerti put it this way: "This is what Italian football is right now. This is where we are, we have serious problems."
