2017 - 2018 Football Thread - Page 120

On November 14 2017 20:23 Pandemona wrote:
This is the worst Swedish team i can ever think of. There best player is Linedlof who doesn't even get on Yanited's bench now because he is actually awful. Other than its Forsberg who is average at best!

Italian team has Belotti/Immobile/ElSharaway and the best defenders consistancy wise in the last decade! To round it off they have Buffon who is just sheer class. Oh and Veratti plus DeRossi midfield isn't exactly medicore is it! Main issue is they played like trash in Sweden and lost 1-0 then at home they had like 27 shots! 27! Not one goal, that is madness. The manager is bad, he is the reason for this. Like said Conte had a weaker forward line (was literally just Eder!) in euro 2016 and beat Spain, and took world champions Germany to the brink. This guy Venture took Italy to being unable to score in a 2 legged tie vs Sweden who take away there 8-0 win were also poor in a group which has the worst Netherlands team in decades xD

On November 14 2017 21:24 Ysellian wrote:


Yeah that is why I am quite surprised Sweden made it if I'm honest. They weren't really good against us in either match, their home match we should have won (weird ref call aside, we had plenty of chances to win that game) and our second they obviously didn't try but we got past a wall of eleven men pretty easily nonetheless.

It's safe to say Venture is a worse coach than even Blind.

On November 14 2017 22:02 lprk wrote:

Ventura really only achievement is getting to Europa League with Torino,main reason he got that job is becuase he is close friend with Italian Football Federation president Tavecchio. I don't recall Blind having as ridiculous ideas as playing 4-2-4 with two holding midfielders.

On November 14 2017 22:28 Rebs wrote:


is this 4-2-4 they ended up shaping up like yesterday after half time ? Because that one seemed quite justified at the time..

On November 14 2017 23:35 lprk wrote:

Nah it was against Spain and Italy was completly overrun in miefield and forwards barely touched the ball.

Apocalypse, how? The Italian Football Federation’s president, Carlo Tavecchio, had defined the prospect of missing out on the 2018 World Cup as a disaster of biblical proportions. Now the worst has come to pass, the Azzurri failing to qualify for the first time in 60 years after losing their playoff with Sweden. All that remains for a proud football nation is to analyse where it went wrong.

A partial answer could be found on the pitch at San Siro. Italy dominated Sweden with more than 75% of possession, yet lacked the subtlety to unpick a packed defence: pumping endless crosses into a penalty area where their opponents held a clear height advantage. A lack of nuance in the final third has been an ongoing problem for a team that has scored just three times in its last six competitive fixtures.

More revealing scenes, though, were playing out on the bench. Midway through the second half, a member of Italy’s coaching staff asked Daniele De Rossi to warm up. The midfielder reacted angrily, appearing to reply: “Why should I go on? We don’t need a draw, we need a win.”

His words were accompanied by a gesture in the direction of Lorenzo Insigne. De Rossi would later explain that he was making a broader point about the need for attackers, rather than seeking to single any individual out, yet many will wonder how the Napoli forward could be overlooked by manager Gian Piero Ventura.

Insigne is a man in the prime of his career, one who scored 18 league goals from the left wing for Napoli last season and almost reached double-digits for assists as well. He is the only Italian valued at over €100m by the CIES football observatory, and yet never made it onto the pitch on Monday – after making only the briefest of cameos in the first leg.

Nobody who has followed Ventura’s career could even be all that surprised. It is not that he underrates Insigne so much as that the manager is extraordinarily rigid in his selection process: a man fixated on square pegs and square holes. Insigne is a wide forward, and Italy were lined up in a 3-5-2. Therefore, there was no space available.

Ventura had sought to make room earlier in the qualifying campaign, sending his team out in a 4-2-4 and later a 3-4-3. The first formation was made to look wildly naive during a 3-0 thrashing by Spain in Madrid, while the latter yielded only a 1-1 draw at home to Macedonia.

It might actually have been player power that provoked a retreat, with veteran stars arranging a team meeting independent of the coaching staff after the latter result. Reports at the time suggested they were agitating for a return to the more familiar 3-5-2.

That formation had been used to great effect by Antonio Conte at Euro 2016, but the truth is that all these numbers become meaningless without a coherent plan. Italy were fluid under the now Chelsea manager, a dynamic shape-shifting collective. Under Ventura, the connections between defence, midfield and attack have all but disappeared.

The fact that players felt compelled to meet without him might itself offer evidence – supplemented by De Rossi’s pitchside rebellion – of a lack of faith in his ability to lead them. Ventura’s coaching CV was always a modest one, when compared to his predecessors in the role. The biggest club he ever coached was Torino, whom he took to the Europa League in 2014.

In some sense, that was a part of his appeal. Prior to Euro 2016, Conte had always seemed restless as Italy manager – too young and too brilliant not to miss the week-to-week intensity of club football. Ventura was 68 when he took the job, and knew it was likely to be the greatest he ever held. He was perceived to have the right temperament to hang around and bring through the next generation of talent, and for a substantially lower salary, too.