Gianluigi Buffon couldn’t sit down. He chewed his knuckle and watched Italy play through flared fingers. Gabriele Gravina, the president of the Italian Football Federation, got up too and paced outside the box at the BayArena.
Gianluca Scamacca was drifting and Luciano Spalletti kept haranguing him from the sidelines. The striker’s attitude prevented Italy from staying compact and Ukraine were beginning to play through them. Federico Chiesa tracked back deep into his own half to lend a hand in defence. But when Italy recovered the ball and tried to play out, the winger twice gave it away. He was exhausted and fouled an opponent off the ball, conceding a free kick in a dangerous position.
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All of a sudden, a cross came into Gianluigi Donnarumma’s penalty area; Italy’s goalkeeper and captain thought Giovanni Di Lorenzo had it covered. Di Lorenzo was under the impression it was Donnarumma’s. However, the ball bounced across the six-yard box and became Mykhailo Mudryk’s, whose shot Donnarumma smothered.
Anxiety grew. Italy stopped playing football. “That’s why I put the big lads on,” Spalletti said. Scamacca, Bryan Cristante and Matteo Darmian. He reasoned that the game was becoming a fight instead of a game. A measure of physical but also mental toughness.
In the final stages, only Donnarumma, Di Lorenzo, Cristante and Nicolo Barella could draw on the experience of the Euro 2020 final. There was no Leonardo Bonucci or Giorgio Chiellini to man the defence. No Marco Verratti to take the pressure on his shoulders and hide the ball from Italy’s opponents.
This is a relatively new group.
Davide Frattesi, the hero of the reverse fixture, missed a one-v-one in the first half. Radio Audizioni Italiane’s pundits thought he should have dinked Ukraine goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin, but the pair had faced one another when Inter Milan played Benfica in the Champions League and Frattesi had noticed in that game how Trubin tends to spread himself when leaving his line. It’s why he attempted the nutmeg.
However, Trubin — outstanding whenever he faces Italian opposition — made the right adjustment and was up to anything Italy threw at him, such as Barella’s shot from distance and the six corners they won in the opening 20 minutes.
Despite Chiesa’s through balls and his ability to burst past his man, reach the byline and create chances for Giacomo Raspadori, the breakthrough didn’t come. The longer the game wore on, the greater the jeopardy became. One false step is all it would have taken. Creditably, Alessandro Buongiorno didn’t make one. The Torino centre-back was booked early on but didn’t allow it to affect him and was one of Italy’s best performers, especially when Ukraine dialled up the pressure.
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Cristante, on the other hand, very nearly did put his foot in it.
“It was a penalty,” Ukraine coach Sergei Rebrov said of Cristante’s 95th-minute challenge on Mudryk. The Roma midfielder motioned to go for the ball and stopped. But it was too late. Mudryk’s blurring speed made the incident look like a spot kick. As did stills from other angles. But one camera from behind the Chelsea winger suggested he jumped in anticipation of a collision and no contact was made.
“Cristante places his foot next to Mudryk’s. He doesn’t stand on it,” Spalletti said.
The VAR evidently did not see a clear and obvious error, and Italy breathed a sigh of relief. Before kick-off, Francesco Acerbi, one of five Inter players who make up the national team’s core, said bluntly: “Not going to the Euros would be a total failure.” Chiesa, in particular, felt: “Many people were thinking about our failure. But we made it.”
There was no schadenfreude in this part of Germany. There was, however, some expectation that Italy might play in Spalletti’s image for longer than they did in Leverkusen. “But it’s clear that our recent past and the importance of tonight for our game meant it was always going to be full of tension,” Spalletti observed.
The occasion undoubtedly affected the psychology of the game.
This team continue to make life difficult for themselves in second halves. England blew Italy away after the interval at Wembley last month. North Macedonia scored twice in Rome on Friday, coming back from 3-0 down to 3-2. Yesterday, Ukraine could have sent Italy to another major tournament play-off too.
How to explain it? Some of it can be put down to the quality of the opposition (England), the changes Spalletti keeps making, the game state (being 3-0 up at the Olimpico) and the stakes (last night).
Tension has also been a factor throughout his brief time in charge. Spalletti and the federation needed careful legal advice to see if they could free him from his Napoli contract. He took over in the middle of a qualifying campaign in which Italy had already lost to England in Naples. By then, winning the group was no longer realistic. He also picked up the psychological baggage of a national team scarred by missing out on the World Cup in Qatar and had to protect it from a media projecting anxiety over another prospective failure to qualify for a major tournament.
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This has been no easy job. Spalletti resisted calls to drop Donnarumma after a mistake in North Macedonia in September and made him captain instead. He was without Chiesa in that international break and the October one. He lost Sandro Tonali to a 10-month ban for betting on football and had a training session disrupted by police.
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In the grand scheme of things, how Italy qualified for Euro 2024 didn’t matter. But there were still “shafts of light” in Leverkusen.
Federico Dimarco’s role as the most extreme inverted full-back in international football is fun and his form more generally suggests Italy have a successor to Leonardo Spinazzola, who has never hit the same heights since the Achilles tear he suffered at the last Euros two years ago. Raspadori continues to make a quietly compelling claim to be Italy’s No 9 and is very Spalletti in style. Chiesa, when fit, is Italy’s difference-maker and has already matched his father’s (Enrico) goal tally for the national team.
This goalless draw against Ukraine likely leaves Italy as a fourth seed for the group draw on December 2. It is hardly ideal but still favourable to not being in it at all.
“We’re really happy,” Donnarumma said. “We’re where we deserve to be. We’re back and it’s only right that we go into next summer’s tournament looking to win it because we go there as holders.”
(Top photo: Joris Verwijst/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
