Mancini: “Sooner or later we will lose the unbeaten run, but maybe after the 2022 World Cup final”
If winning helps you win, not losing thirty-seven games, what effect can it have? The Italy that has built a row like no one ever knows that sooner or later the spell will end, but by dint of saying it we have come this far and we have also put the load of eleven on it, the European title. Now let’s get on this Nations League carousel, hit and run finals, all in four days.
We start tonight Italy-Spain at San Siro (thirty-seven thousand tickets sold, all those available) and we immediately come to terms with one of the national teams we have sown along the way to Wembley. July 7, London: we win on penalties with Jorginho’s pocketed lemme lemme after closing 1-1 in extra time. A bestial effort that night, stunned by the Spanish ball possession, Verratti cornered, Jorginho asphyxiated. It seems the beginning of the end and instead we come out and see the light. Magic Nights.
Tonight Luis Enrique is counting the absences, he has his troubles with the Spanish press that asks him for an account for not calling Luis Alberto, Brahim Diaz and Fabian Ruiz (“I don’t care, I don’t read anything, I know more than journalists”) and uses a handful of rookies but Mancini is not better off: we especially lack the Eurocenters (Belotti and Immobile injured) and the squad has lost petals in no particular order (Florenzi, Toloi, Pessina) because it is normal that if you enter a tournament in in the midst of the championships, the national teams are suffering. We like Spain.
Mancini is left with Raspadori and Kean, but he blows the air from a light trident with Insigne in the middle of Chiesa and probably Pellegrini. Without nine we also played a segment of the match with Spain in the semifinals but it is up to a certain point. For this reason the coach does not throw away the idea of a center forward, in the case of Raspadori more than Kean. It is the game of three cards and the only one destined not to come out seems to be that of the center forward Chiesa that the coach sees only and in any case not immediately.
“We know that sooner or later it will happen to lose, it’s a mathematical question, but perhaps after the 2022 World Cup final”: Mancini throws the gamble over the obstacle, but since he was the only one who believed he could win the European Championship , it is not the case to fleas the prophecy. The Nations League knows fresh, it was the first approach from inside and outside at the dawn of its management, an experimental phase where the foundations were laid for what we later saw. Now things have changed, beating Italy has become one of the favorite sports, Mancini knows it and so do the players. The blue identity is defined, the coach hopes to see more young players in Serie A but the trend is now too consolidated to be interrupted. There is no time or even intention on the part of the clubs, we will never be France in this sense, however, and now we can say it, no goal is forbidden to us. Starting with this unripe fruit but also as tasty as the Nations League. –