Mancini's Italy
Despite going unbeaten over more than 25 games, the Italian national team wasn’t seen as a favourite in the lead up to Euro 2020. This is likely because this team, unlike some of the great Italian sides of yore, do not have any obvious stars: there is no Franco Baresi, Paolo Maldini or Fabio Cannavaro at the back; there is no iconic midfielder in the squad in the mould of Andrea Pirlo. And, most notably, the team is almost entirely devoid of a classical play-maker.
Italy is so renowned for valuing the play-maker that the country has a special name for the position: trequartista, which literally means three-quarters, a player who operates between the lines of the opposition’s midfield and defence, who can flit across the pitch and go where the ball takes him. The great Italian trequartistas of the past were just as capable of dribbling through the opposition as they were at carving open a defence with a single through ball. Consider some of the names: Sandro Mazzola, Gianni Rivera, Francesco Totti, Alessandro Del Piero, and the greatest of them all, Roberto Baggio.
Indeed, Italy’s present head-coach, Roberto Mancini, was himself a trequartista for both his club, Sampdoria, and for the national team. He was so captivated by the role’s importance that he devoted his master’s thesis at Coverciano—Italy’s illustrious coaching school—on a subject titled “Il Trequartista”. “The magic of the number 10 comes from the trequartista’s feet, the player of inventiveness, the one who is capable of wrong-footing everyone with a piece of skill perhaps he is not even fully aware of,” Mancini wrote.
But the game has since moved on. Coaches can longer assign a designated play-maker in the final third of the pitch. Attacking patterns have to now be built through different structures. Mancini understands this better than most. His team is built not just on a strong defensive foundation—Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci are exceptional centre-backs, if not as celebrated as Maldini and Baresi—but also on clearly organised attacking patterns.
As Michael Cox observes in The Athletic, Italy’s forward play is influenced by a set of five players: a marauding left back, in Leonardo Spinazzola; an inside forward in Lorenzo Insigne, who’s ability to tuck-in, gives Spinazzola space on the wing; a classical number 9 in Ciro Immobile; a wide player on the right, in either Federico Chiesa or Domenico Berardi, who in sticking to the wings, allow the fifth of the lot, Nicolo Barella—a player of rare intelligence—to move forward and back, almost like a shuttler in a midfield diamond.
This attacking quintet is aided by the midfield’s ability to keep the ball ticking. Jorginho, who plays at the base, has an underrated passing range, and Marco Verratti, who contributes just as much with his pressing in midfield as he does with his ability to move the ball across the pitch with pace and precision. Against Belgium in the quarterfinal, the Italian team functioned in a manner that national teams rarely do—there was a carefully planned structure to everything they did, and when that structure faltered, one or the other of their defenders, or their giant goalkeeper, Gianluigi Donnarumma, came to the rescue. That Mancini has achieved this level of organisation with such limited training is to his great credit.
The worry for Italy now is that they’ll be without Spinazzola for the rest of the tournament. He’s been such a key cog in how they play that there just isn’t another player available in the squad who can effectively replace him. It’s possible, therefore, that in the semi-final, and in the final should they reach it, Italy will be nowhere near the fluid force that they’ve been in the tournament so far. Footballing systems are built on the personnel available. How Mancini changes things is going to be fascinating to watch.