Few countries such as Italy know the pressure of World Cup competitions – the Azzurri have gone to 18 of them and won 4. Two of those World Cup wins came during troublesome times in Italian football history what with their 1982 World Cup win amidst the infamous ‘Totonero Scandal of 1980‘ and the 2006 victory during the Calciopoli scandal that involved serious match fixing.
In the Totonero Scandal seven clubs (five in Serie A and two in Serie B), 2 managers, and 20 players were found guilty for their involvement in the scandal. One of the most important players involved was Perugia’s Paolo Rossi, he was given a three-year ban from Italian Football which was later appealed and reduced to two years so that he could play in the 1982 World Cup. Paolo Rossi returned to the Italian squad and scored six goals in the World Cup and finished as the tournament’s top scorer and World Cup champion. Italy showed that they were able to come back from scandal and distraction in order to win big tournaments.
This happened again in 2006 when Italy won the World Cup in less than month after the big ‘Calciopoli’ scandal with many of the players in the Italian squad coming from Juventus, the team most heavily harmed by the scandal. This just more heavily strengthens my claim that when Italy are ignored as favorites and just play their games silently, they can do big things, real “Dark Horses”. Now I am not saying that Italy are having a huge scandal right now that will help them win this World Cup, but they are having a tough time winning games, just like in their recent tie against Luxembourg.
Italy recently played a game against Fluminese, a simple friendly match to help players get fit for the World Cup and used to the climate of Brazil. Italy won the game 5-3 and their two strikers, Ciro Immobile and Lorenzo Insigne scored a hattrick and a brace respectively. Also Immobile managed to assist both of Insigne’s goals. Will Serie A’s “capocannoniere” (top-scorer) help the “Fab Four” lead the Azzurri to World Cup glory? (For more on Immobile, Insigne and Verratti, stay on the lookout for an article entitled “The Pescara Connection” arriving in the next few days)
Italy have the perfect combination of experience and youth with the average age of the team being 27.9 – the eldest being ‘Gigi’ Buffon at 36 years of age. Buffon is also their most capped player in Azzurri history with 139 caps. Other veterans include the never-aging Andrea Pirlo, Antonio Cassano and Daniele De Rossi. There is youth in every position of the pitch with names such as Mattia Perin (age 21) between the posts, Mattia De Sciglio (21) and Matteo Darmian (24) in defense, Marco Verratti (21) in the middle of the pitch, while Lorenzo Insigne, Mario Balotelli (both 23) and Ciro Immobile (24) all having good odds to lead the line. In the last few pre-World Cup games Verratti has done a magnificent job in pairing up with Pirlo in midfield and he could very easily make everybody forget the injury to Riccardo Montolivo.
Mario Balotelli may not have had the grandest season on a personal level this year, but he is known for big moments – he’s a big game player and if he can regain the form he possessed in the latter half of the Euro 2012 campaign, there will be no match for him on the pitch. Unlike at AC Milan, Mario will now have tremendous distributors of the ball available to assist him, the aforementioned Pirlo, De Rossi, Verratti and Insigne as well as his occasional Azzurri striker partner Antonio Cassano whom chemistry exists between. That’s right, the two most notorious bad-boys of Italian football leading the front line together is indeed a possibility come June 14 against the Three Lions. If Super Mario can keep a cool head in the searing Brazilian heat Italy might come away with their 5th World Cup victory and the first by a European team in South America.
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