Italy v USA: Alberto Gilardino may have gone quiet since his move to AC Milan, but Italian coach Marcello Lippi still has faith in the striker. Paddy Agnew reports
Italy striker Alberto Gilardino is a quiet, soft-spoken person. He is the sort of player who, on first meeting, immediately prefers to address you as "tu" rather than the more formal "lei". He is not a footballer cut out for talking Gulf war and troop withdrawls.
Yet, on the eve of today's Italy v USA clash in Kaiserslautern, Gilardino has been called on to do just that. It all started when Kansas Wizard striker Eddie Johnson had the bad idea to compare today's game to "going to war".
Given that Johnson was speaking from the US military base of Ramstein, the largest such base outside the USA with 50,000 military personnel, his words were perhaps less than well chosen.
Inevitably, however, Johnson's "warlike" statements came up when Gilardino met the media in the Italian camp at Duisburg. Immediately, he was asked how he felt about going to "war" and whether Italy should withdraw its troops from Iraq.
Gilardino's answer was typically underspoken: "Look, it's not for me to comment on a question like troop withdrawl, there are plenty of people who understand the situation better than me . . . As for talk of war, I imagine the American player was using a metaphor, talking about a football battle, that's all."
Football battle it is sure to be and one that should prominently feature Gilardino. Two years ago, the AC Milan striker became a caso nazionale (a national issue) when coach Giovanni Trapattoni opted to leave him out of his Euro 2004 squad at the end of a season when Gilardino had scored 23 Serie A goals for Parma.
Gilardino was an uncapped 21-year-old at the time, so Trapattoni's hesitation was understandable.
Trapattoni's successor, Marcello Lippi, had no such qualms. Faced with the need to build a new team, he immediately picked Gilardino, giving him his first cap in Italy's opening World Cup qualifier, a 2-1 win over Norway in Palermo in September 2004.
Since then, Gilardino has been a fixed item in Lippi planning. Asked about that omission from Euro 2004 two years ago, Gilardino struck a typically modest note: "Trapattoni made his choices for the European Championships and I accepted that. Likewise, Lippi has made his choices for Germany and I hope to repay his faith in me."
And there's the rub. A player of obvious talent, capable of scoring hatfuls of goals for a modest Parma side, Gilardino has gone a tad quiet since his 24 million move to AC Milan last summer.
Playing alongside the likes of Ukraine star Andriy Shevchenko and experienced Italy team-mate, Pippo Inzaghi, he has often looked like the new boy, not quite sure where and how to put himself about. To some extent, these World Cup finals offer him a glorious opportunity to confirm the high esteem in which he is held by both his club and country coaches, Carlo Ancelotti and Marcello Lippi.
As he prepared for this evening's meeting with the USA, he was given a helping hand by USA coach Bruce Arena who earlier this week suggested that, even more than Francesco Totti, he was worried by the threat posed by Gilardino and his strike partner Luca Toni.
"I'm grateful to Mr Arena for those words, it's always nice when other coaches pay you compliments. But I would say that Francesco (Totti) is a very special player," commented Gilardino, hitting the modesty button yet again.
How does he rate Italy? After that 2-0 opening win over Ghana, does he realise that the folks back home are getting a little hot and bothered?
"It's great, after all that happened in the build-up to the finals, that people are behind us . . . We have the qualities to do well, we don't need to be afraid of any team. Our greatest strength is our versatility, our ability to change formation, style in the course of a game and this is something that Lippi has really worked on . . . "
Like several of his team-mates, Gilardino is not much impressed if you suggest to him that maybe the corruption scandal back home worked as an unlikely motivating factor: "We talked a lot about that in training back in Italy, but here in Germany we've got away from the scandal and we're just focused on football. Anyway, with or without the scandal, we would have played well here."
Already Italian commentators have been predicting that Italy and the Czech Republic could end up joint-top of their Group, with the winner being decided on goal difference.
Given that premise, does Gilardino feel under big pressure to deliver the goods today for Italy, by way of goals?
"Goals are not an obsession, a goal will come," he answers.
Perhaps this evening against the Czechs.
