Wednesday, June 30, 2021
1-0 to the Azzurri, Part 1
Perhaps the most significant event in the history of the Italian national football team was the living nightmare of the 1-0 loss to North Korea at the 1966 World Cup.
It wasn't just that they were beaten by an unknown Asian side, and thereby eliminated from the tournament. They had been reduced to ten men for most of the match, after all. It was that they had only just exorcised an existing World Cup demon by beating Chile in their opening match - the team that had defeated them in a notorious game at the previous tournament - only to give life to an even more horrendous one. The players and the ill-fated coach, Edmondo Fabbri, were pelted with rotten tomatoes at the airport when they arrived home. "Ugly. Very ugly," recalled the legendary Sandro Mazzola in an interview many years afterwards.
Although the Azzurri then triumphed at the Nations Cup on home turf two years later, largely thanks to the goalscoring exploits of the powerful Luigi Riva of Cagliari, the World Cup was still haunted ground. And it was in a haunted spirit that they approached the next tournament, in Mexico.
The dominant Inter Milan team of the mid-sixties, of catenaccio fame, had made it their habit to sit deep and defend their lead after scoring an early goal in important ties. And increasingly, the Italian national team began to adopt this approach at the World Cup in key matches. Tight man-to-man marking at the back, a sweeper to pick up the pieces, a couple of water-carriers in midfield, and a lonely, battling figure up front who rarely saw much of the ball.
The template for this approach was set in their first game of the 1970 tournament. Their opponents, Sweden, were a semi-professional side, although their star player Ove Kindvall had just helped Feyenoord to win the European Cup. But the hardened Serie A professionals, with the celebrated Riva leading the line, should have been firm favourites to win. In the game, however, you would have thought that the Azzurri were the underdogs who had gotten an early, lucky break and were desperately holding on to it in the hope of an upset.
The Korean curse was still very much alive and well. "The Italians...played in a lather of foreboding, as if defeat would result in execution," wrote Brian Glanville in his World Cup history. And poor Riva was the man who suffered. Heralded as one of the likely stars of the tournament, he was barely sighted against the Swedes.
Italy began well enough, with the busy, constructive Giancarlo De Sisti looking good in midfield, and the right-winger Angelo Domenghini put them ahead with a somewhat fortuitous goal. But from then on, rigid catenaccio was the order of the day. Sweden's one-paced midfield anchorman Tommy Svensson - later to coach Sweden to third place at the 1994 tournament - was given acres of space in midfield, as the Italians trusted in their ferocious man-marking to snuff out any danger. And there was very little danger, for an important reason: the Swedes posed very little threat when it came to shots from distance.
At the other end of the field, to say that Riva received little service would be an understatement. The prolific scorer of Cagliari's recent Serie A triumph and Italy's Nations Cup qualifiers was reduced to battling vainly for long, hopeful balls forward, while being shadowed very ably by Jan Olsson. But Italy survived until the final whistle, and at least had an opening win to show for their efforts.
Perhaps dismayed by his enforced cameo role against Sweden, Riva seemed to lose confidence and sharpness for the rest of the opening phase; against the minnows Israel, in particular, he missed two very easy chances which a striker of his stature would normally have gobbled up. (In fairness, he also scored what looked to be a perfectly good headed goal, which was harshly ruled out for offside.) There were no more Italian goals in these two games, but their opponents also failed to score. Through to the quarter-finals, mission accomplished. It was Inter in the mid-60s, to the life.
Continued in Part 2.
