Passive attitude
Italy must score as many goals as possible to avoid surprises but the attitude to the game is soft, dull, with little malice and even less quality. The request of the coach on the eve to take the field “without worries” and “without anxiety” goes unnoticed, because Bonucci and his team mates are struggling during the construction phase.
Di Lorenzo, one of the few to save himself in the first half, creates the first scoring ball in the 7th minute with a cross shot by the goalkeeper. The Azzurri are unable to put the small trident in a position to hurt one-on-one, the guests thus cling to individual initiatives such as the diagonal, weak, of Chiesa, and the unpretentious attempt by Insigne, primed by Berardi after a mistake by the Northern Irish in the withdrawal phase.
Little, very little, for a team condemned to win to get the pass for Qatar. Mancini tries to give the shock at the beginning of the second half by inserting Cristante for Tonali, already booked, and above all, after twenty minutes of nothing cosmic, with the addition of Belotti for Barella, with relative passage to 4-2-3-1.
More confusion than anything else
Italy, however, attacks if possible in an even more confusing way, also because bad news arrives from Switzerland, with the trio (which will later become a poker) of the Swiss that puts even more pressure on the Azzurri, forced to score several goals in an evening in which even only the opportunities are missing.
Chiesa tries to sound the alarm with some personal gust, but he too wastes a good opportunity with a left-footed shot on the outside of the net. The coach tries all in all with ten from the end throwing even the giant Scamacca into the fray instead of a defender, Emerson Palmieri, but it is the hosts who take advantage of an unbalanced Italy, with a diagonal from outside Dallas that ends a couple of meters on the bottom.