What if former Italy coach Luciano Spalletti had not given up on the national team in its FIFA World Cup qualification bid, and inadvertently brought Gennaro Gattuso into the mix?
It is very well to say that the Spalletti ship has sailed – it sailed straight into an iceberg of Erling Haaland proportions in the sorry 3-0 loss to Norway, after which the professorial tactician was so dismayed he declared his own departure. Italy play to plans, under geeky coaches marshalling gorgeous technicians at World Cups. Flair tends to be optional, at the discretion of the personnel; parked buses once second nature. But now, they go rumbling under buses like Jack in Speed. Unlike Jack of Titanic, they are mystifyingly alive still, hovering around jagged edges of icebergs, scoring an uncharacteristic 18-goal glut under Gattuso. But no guarantees it won’t sink against Wales and Northern Ireland, like they did to Sweden in 2018 and North Macedonia in 2022.
Gattuso keeps press conferences entertaining, flagellates self and his players with equal gusto, has spurred them on in a ridiculous 5-4 comeback against Israel and gotten them going 2-0 against Moldova after early bottling. Ridiculous, because the team was so scattered defensively, that scrambles were a default and solidity left behind in some museum. The 2006 WC winner though has backed their creative flair, pushed two forwards up front. It will all look like a chaotic freefall if they don’t score all those goals. Because they canter about like beautiful wild horses, the doughty work of mules, has slipped out of the Italian football DNA – and postmortems of a third WC miss will become that much more tough to figure.
Spalletti could’ve enforced those tactical patterns given the paucity of technical geniuses. Instead, they have Gattuso who keeps the swinging trapeze-artists in the qualification circus going, with nobody really sure of a safety net to break the falls.
Italy are playing with two strikers and scoring goals alright; whether they give themselves a World Cup stage for everyone to notice this, cannot be assured.
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