Italy opens Euro 2020 by putting three Turkey with no past ideas

Turkey 0 – Italy 3

Italy came out of the opening match on Friday night of the Euro 2020 football tournament in Rome as plausible candidates for the title. His coordinated press game tired the Turks and bore fruit late with three goals in the second half: the biggest run for the Azzurri in a European Championship match.

A disappointing and overly defensive Turkish team barely had a chance to score. Unfortunately for the rest of the pack, Italy are now unbeaten in 28 games since September 2018.

With only 16,000 spectators in the stands, the Olympic Stadium was not exactly a boiling cauldron and Turkey had not come to improve the atmosphere. His tactic was to keep nine men behind the ball and wait to counterattack with his 35-year-old central captain and captain Burak Yilmaz. Turkey has more to offer than that, but their veteran coach Senol Gunes did not trust them to try it here.

By contrast, Italy in recent years has aligned itself with the orthodoxy of world-leading teams, playing a pressure game attacking the mid-opposition. They have better mastered the pressing aspect, almost always stealing the ball in Turkey within five seconds. But while little Neapolitan Lorenzo Insigne sees the space between the lines, Italy lacked a world-class creative player capable of breaking the Turkish rookie ranks. The first half was anticlimactic, overshadowed, in fact, by the premature performance of tenor Andrea Bocelli of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”, a comeback at the 1990 World Cup in Italy when it was sung unforgettable by Luciano Pavarotti.

Finally, in the 53rd minute, Italian winger Domenico Berardi, who was playing poorly, advanced into the Turkey area and fired into a cross. Central defender Merih Demiral was uncomfortable with the soggy pitch as he couldn’t move the ball around with his usual grace. It was the first European Championship to open with an own goal: a start in line with football so deaf until then.

But then Italy reaped the benefits that are often achieved to a team of pressure and passing: the opposition, tired of chasing the ball, especially on a hot Roman night, and discouraged when lowering it, begins to leave open spaces. In the 66th minute, an Italian movement divided the Turkish defense, the Italian left marathoner Leonardo Spinnazola made a good shot, the goalkeeper Ugurcan Cakir did well to do it outside and the central striker of Lazio, Ciro Immobile, got the rebound.

The Roman crowd chanted his name, recalling the advantage that the nine teams that play games in their own country will have in this tournament with their unprecedented format of using stadiums across the continent.

Once the Italians got the 2-0, they had no difficulty holding possession through their skilled ball players Insigne, Jorginho and the young Sardinian Nicolò Barella. Sometimes, in the second half, Italy looked more like a good Spanish team than the usual azzurri. In the 78th minute, an amateur pass from Cakir was intercepted and Immobile found a completely unmarked Insigne, who achieved the goal he deserved. He was then immediately replaced by coach Roberto Mancini, who knows he has to keep him fresh for the serious end of the tournament.

With home games against Switzerland and Wales, Italy can hardly qualify for the round of 16 as three out of four teams will go beyond four of the six groups.

The Turks were free of ideas and did not have a threatening shot throughout the match. On the rare occasions they advanced, they were silenced by former Juventus center-backs Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci, leaving goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, 22, the softest of initiations in a major tournament. Turkey could still pass easily, but its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an enthusiastic footballer, will have hoped to become more nationalist capital of this team.