Croatia - 2, Italy - 1 The talk of protests may have subsided for the time being, but favourites Italy are in a fix. Only a victory against Mexico will make qualification from Group G certain after Saturday's controversial defeat to Croatia.

Yet the furious anger which followed a match which the Italians felt had turned on two poor decisions by the referee, Graham Poll, has now cleared. The Italian Football Federation have abandoned the official complaint to FIFA and the team wants to move on, no one more so than one of the wronged strikers Christian Vieri, who had a perfectly good second-half goal disallowed for offside.

"We all saw what happened and I am sorry that at a World Cup where it is so hard to win we saw two grave errors of this kind," he said. "But we have to move on now.

"Yesterday we lost through (bad) luck. On Thursday against Mexico we have to win."

Asked to rate the performance of the linesman Jens Larssen, on whose advice an Italian "goal" by Filippo Inzaghi was disallowed, the Inter Milan forward was sarcastic.

"I think the linesman did a good job. I'm sorry because we should have had the two goals we scored - I am really very bitter," he said.

"I'm sorry at the World Cup when it is very hard to win anyway that there are two grave errors. I don't think it was bad faith - it was just incompetence but not bad faith."

His reaction straight after the match had also been less than forgiving. "These weren't even first division or second division, they were from the village," he said. "You have to take top level linesmen to a World Cup, not amateurs."

The Italian media's criticism for the defeat has instead turned to the 63-year-old coach Giovanni Trapattoni and his decision to play Francesco Totti in attack with Christian Vieri rather than behind Vieri and Inzaghi, who had his late leveller disallowed for shirt-pulling.

"I have been a coach for 25 years and I don't give much weight to people who say I should go," he said.

"You don't win because you have one striker more or one less. It is the spirit, the approach that counts. We have to take the approach that England showed against Argentina."

If the Italians are to progress, they will need to shed the assumptions they adopted here. For most of this game they played as if they did not believe it worth exerting any sweat. Clearly they had watched too many videos of Croatia losing to Mexico in their first tournament outing.

Yet for 70 minutes of this game, Croatia were just as timid as they had been in last week's opener. And then, when it seemed they had given up hope, the young substitute Ivica Olic decided that the best form of defence was attack, ran at the Italians with power and determination, and levelled up the score after Vieri had headed Italy in front after 56 minutes.

The Italians were befuddled by this new tactic. Marco Materazzi, who had replaced the injured Alessandro Nesta halfway through the first half, was by now having the sort of game that induces paranoia in the world's most defensively minded football nation.

He was shredded by Milan Raipec, who scored the winner with a fortuitous lob.

SUBSTITUTES - Italy: Materazzi for Nesta (23 mins), Inzaghi for Doni (78 mins). Croatia: Olic for Vugrinec (56 mins), Soldo for Vranjes (62 mins), Simic for Raipac (78 mins).

YELLOW CARDS - Italy: Vieri. Croatia: R Kovac.