Once again, there is only one topic of conversation here in Italy and the word you will hear most often today is “vergogna” [“shame”] for yesterday afternoon the national football team suffered a humiliating 3 - 2 World Cup defeat at the hands – or rather the feet – of Slovakia. The streets of Italy were eerily quiet last night and the mood today can only be described as “sombre”.
Now, as La Gazzetta dello Sport’s headline says, it is “A casa con vergogna” [“home in shame”] for the team.
Other main newspaper headlines in Italy this morning make sad reading: Corriere della Sera has “Addio al Mondiale” [“Goodbye to the World Cup”], Il Giornale has “Piccola Italia è eliminata” [“Small Italy is eliminated”], Corriere dello Sport leads with “Italia, che vergogna” [“Italy, what Shame”] while Tuttosport has decided where the blame lies with “Lippi, è colpa tua!” [“Lippi, it’s your fault!”].
La Stampa calls the defeat a “naufragio” [shipwreck], the Naples daily Il Mattino says the team have been humiliated and La Repubblica says the Azzurri have never played so badly.
As if this were not enough, fans are criticising the team for having “no will to win” and its coach, 62-year-old Marcello Lippi, for selecting a team of “geriatrics”. Comments on Corriere della Sera’s website, where readers are invited to leave comments on the defeat in 200 characters, range from the despairing to criticisms of the amount of money the players earn. “Their stomachs were full of money”, writes one reader, rather cruelly. “They were selected for being handsome and for the way they strut around”, says another angry commenter, continuing, “They forgot they were there to play football”. “What can you expect when there was not one player from the Italian Serie A Championship team [Inter] in the national squad?” reasons another, referring to the fact that the Inter team is entirely made up of foreign players. One commenter is more economical with language and says one word – “osceni” [awful] will suffice.
It was sad to see Italy’s captain Fabio Cannavaro having to be coaxed away from the pitch as he remonstrated with the British referee and perhaps midfielder Gennaro Gattuso summed the situation up best, saying that the team had “touched rock bottom”. Injured goalkeeper GianLuigi Buffon told RAI that it was time for the team to come home and reflect upon what went wrong.
Meanwhile coach Marcello Lippi has taken full responsibility for the defeat, telling the Telegraph that the team had “terror in their legs, heads and hearts” and were not ready for such an important game. He said that he had not expected his team to win the tournament but neither had he expected them to be eliminated at such an early stage.
Despite their disappointment, Italian football fans, as the BBC points out, take defeat rather well. They may cry in the streets but they do not go out and get drunk or become destructive and aggressive as the supporters of another well-known footballing nation sometimes used to. They are upset but they are also philosophical: Pazienza, the Azzurri will be back.
What did you think of the match as a whole?
What do you think are the reasons for Italy’s defeat?
