Building an Azzurri squad for 2022

I knew you were joking, but a bunch of people on this site and Football Italia are definitely acting like Mancini is no better than Ventura...its disgraceful. Let's remember that out of 55 European countries, only four have ever won more than one trophy in their whole history, something Mancini did this summer.

 

Who cares what the English say. Maybe because I live in the USA, it's not really a factor. Italy is mostly respected here, while pundits always snicker at England's mediocre record internationally. But yeah we have 6 trophies, they have 1. That should end every discussion frankly....

 

They have one trophy with a questionable goal at home.

 

Which four? You are undercounting. Germany , Italy , France , Spain, … Portugal buddy. You are forgetting us. We have two trophies . Euro and Uefa nations league (2) .

 

Don’t worry about us. Santos is a complete moron and our defense is trash. None of those guys you see in the premier league show any quality for us.

 

Nobody cares about the Nations League. Major trophies are the WC and the Euro's.
If you guys would of beat Greece (like you should have) at home in 04, it would be 5 teams.

 

Italy put together its worst performance of the year. Simply disgusting. We have like 9 or 10 injured players... so we were left with the likes of Bernardeschi, Cristante, Acerbi... people who should be nowhere near a national team. But not even our good players played well today. Less bad than the rest, Di Lorenzo, Chiesa, and Berardi who at least tried. Even Jorginho and Tonali didn't play well. Donnarumma did make one save but almost lost the game on his own. We went 95 minutes with very rare scoring opportunities, except for Emerson, Insigne, and Chiesa who all three had one nice shot each, but all three went wide.

Meanwhile Switzerland beat Bulgaria 4-0 and deservedly won the group. Congratulations to the Swiss. For Italy, no creativity, no soul, no display of skills or talent, no sense of urgency, no nothing. The Champions of Europe were absent today. That wasn't the Italy we got used to seeing this summer.

Italy will go to the playoff, but the thing is, if we continue to play like we're playing, we won't qualify. There are some very strong teams in the playoffs, and we are playing like s..t. So, the weirdest thing may happen: The Champions of Europe will miss the Qatar World Cup.

So, we didn't have several players, injured: Immobile, Verratti, Chiellini, Calabria, Toloi, Pellegrini, Spinazzola of course, Bastoni, Florenzi, Zaniolo...

And I'd say, we didn't have Donnarumma. Because that guy there manning our goal, Dollarumma, ain't Donnarumma. Donnarumma used to be a good goalie. That guy there, Dollarumma who looks like him, sucks. Hey, goalie, who are you, and what did you do with Donnarumma?

But again, this doesn't excuse how poorly the players who were there, played.

With the latest performances (or I should say, lack thereof), I'd say that we definitely did not deserve to win our group, so playoffs for us is correct. I just hope we get two of the weakest teams for our playoff games and survive, but if we get the big dogs, we won't be in Qatar.

 

Nah, I'd rather move you to the Ignore list. You and any other iteration of a trolling new member (I suspect it's all the same person).

 

4 months for Italy to get their crap together, will it be enough time? We'll see.

 

I still can't believe that we ********ed up so royally in two successive World Cup qualifying campaigns--and the problem remains the same: we haven't developed reliable attackers since the Del Piero, Totti, Inzaghi, Vieri, Toni generation. So sad.

For all of the deserved praise Mancini got for the Euros, the criticism is absolutely deserved this time around. There is simply no excuse for not winning this group.

 

Capello is right! Italy has no forwards. You can't score without a forward.

When Giovanni Di Lorenzo a right back is your best attacking option, you know something is wrong.

Sooner or later, even the most novice fan will tell you that without an attacking line, it will catch up to you....

 

Cappello is not wrong but hes a part of the problem too. Should call up Jeao Pedro from Cagliari, he's uncapped from Brazil and actually scores quite a bit of goals. Italy's is behind nations like Norway and Serbia for producing forwards, how I wish Halaand was Italian.

 

France seemed to celebrate it pretty hard.

 

Yes, Capello is right, but what he said is only applicable to euro2020, not this qualifying group.

Immobile might not be top quality, but he should be good enough alongside Insigne, Berardi and Chiesa to score enough goals to have won this group.

Look at the forwards in the Swiss squad for these last two qualifiers and you will see what can be accomplished with a non-top quality striker.

I think Mancini is partly responsible for this situation, but the truth is that - while the teams is very good in defence and midfield - the attack is relatively poor and that makes winning games convincingly extremely difficult. As I said before, until this situation is resolved Italy will struggle to turn its overall superiority over opponents into convincing victories.

 

When it comes to the playoffs in March, next week's draw - particularly whether the final is played at home or away - and the condition of the players at that stage of the season will be of critical importance.

 

Actually, both Capello and Mancini are right to complain but they were the initial part of the problem. As I recall at Inter, Roberto Mancini was the first to field 11 different foreigners on a weekly basis.

Capello did the same thing at his clubs!

Ok that was a long time ago but that mentality stuck and today, we find ourselves looking at clubs with maybe only 3-4 Italian players each.

I'm all for foreign players and all but where do you draw the line?

First it was 2, then 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7-11?

Italians’ strength was in defenders and GK’s and now we can’t even find a few of those.

Another reason why we are still picking Bonucci and Chiellini. Most players their age have bene retired from club ball much less the national team.

 

Nation's League is like The Confederation's Cup. Not a major trophy. A strictly secondary accomplishment. It's nice to win I guess, but will have no historical significance. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets replaced in a few years when UEFA figures out another way to squeeze out a few more dollars.

 

Nations League is nowhere near the World Cup or Euros. I don't understand how this is even a discussion or why it's relevant here.

 

Agree 100% with you. Players' attitude: we won a tournament, we are hot sh&t, we don't have to prove ourselves or win anything else.......

 

Even the central defenders are average besides chiellini and bonucci. Who's next???

 

Agree with you 1000%.

Finding an Italian club starting 4 Italians is a rarity; most cases it's 2-3. Unfortunately, this is a reflection on the national obsession to disparage/ignore anything domestic and over glorify anything foreign.

The inconsistency of the NT is nothing new; it has been going on since the WC 2006 victory. There's always one area lacking because once the first option is gone, for whatever reason, option 2, 3, 4, etc is dramatically worse. It's been a case of having a solid defense but lacking in midfield, having an attack but an aging defense, or having a solid midfield but no attacking options, etc.

There should be a way to compel clubs to start, at least, 6 Italians on a regular basis. I find it a bad joke that, for example, there are 4 Gambians playing in Serie A; they account for one fourth the population of their country and yet they are starting for Serie A clubs. The same goes for Albanians, Kosovars, etc; and, apparently, there's some sort of rule that each club must have, at least, 2 Spaniards in the starting lineup.

I don't even bother watching Serie A anymore because if I wanted to watch a bunch on non-Italians kick a ball around, I'd watch the German/French/English league.

 

Well we played like 45 games under Mancini and only failed to score in 5 of them. So I disagree about the forward thing.

But it certainly helps to have a reliable one and that's been missing for years.

 

Italy scored only 13 goals in the 8 group games, too few.

 

I can't imagine that the players wouldn't care for qualifying for the World Cup. After all, the World Cup is more important than the Euro, and the trauma of 2018 was a deep wound in the nation's soul. This generation of players wouldn't want this to be their legacy. Great, won the Euro, but couldn't qualify for the more important World Cup. I think our players tried, but lacked the quality. Also, we had 10 guys injured. It could have been different with the injured guys being healthy. And also, we did create the two PKs that Jorginho missed against Switzerland... either one of these, if in, we'd have qualified.

 

don't forget to count your futsal and playing with friends at the park trophies too.