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The midfielder is working as an actor, Roberto Mancini is preparing for his Italian job against Belgium

How can Italy, especially a team made up of exceptional footballers, play in such extraordinary football?

Azzurri are unbeaten in 31 games, an Italian record. If there is a secret, it is two midfield players. According to Italian football writer Tommor Pellizzari, Jorginho is an “invisible man” and Marco Verratti a “more spectacular man.”

Watch the game and you might lose Jorginho, but watch Jorginho and you will see the whole game: always available to his defenders, then the ball can move forward. The Italians call his attitude “film director”, A word that also means film director.

Verratti, in front, is the weird star of the film. He believes that giving a safe passage without imagination is a personal humiliation, so no matter how much pressure his opponents have put on him, he will dribble and twist until he sees an interesting line. Especially with this pair, Italy will start as favorites on Friday in the quarter-finals against Belgium.

The story begins with another creative midfielder, Roberto Mancini. When he became director of Italy in 2018 Azzurri He had just failed to qualify for the World Cup: the shock of the proud culture of football led him to reinvent himself.

Mancini also brought personal frustration to the job: Italian football of his time had so little use for a midfield player because he played offside as a striker. As a manager, he wanted to play the attack he wanted to play, he wanted to create an Italian team based on ownership.

But in 2018, no big Italian club played like that. Italy is a football culture based on antiquity. Younger players (and in the Italian game, they still play 25 youngsters) have to go to the pitches samples in the dressing room, and they recommend taking risks on the field.

Look at how Milan knocked out Manuel Locatelli’s imaginative young pass to little Sassuolo. In Italy’s first two Euro 2020 matches, Locatelli brilliantly replaced the injured Verratti.

Mancini has abandoned the old Italian ways. Remembering his debut in Bologna at the age of 16, he believed in the elegant youth of small clubs, some of whom tried to make similar inventions. At Euro 2020 he promised that his team would go to the pitch “when you start playing football you will play recklessly”.

Jorginho and Verratti are emblematic of his team, as no one has played a minute in a huge Italian club. Jorginho grew up in Brazil and returned to the birthplace of his distant ancestors when he was 15 years old. He later left Napoli for Chelsea.

Verratti was born in Pescara and won the second division Serie B championship in 2012 alongside Lorenzo Insigne and Ciro Immobile, now his teammates in the 2020 Euro Cup.

A great Italian club could try to crush its spirit. Instead, he teamed up with Paris Saint-Germain, where the old players would get the ball to the child to pass 40 yards to the fingers of his strikers.

“He came here with a lot of confidence,” said Carlo Ancelotti, the first coach of Paris. “Sometimes too much confidence.” Arsène Wenger, the former Arsenal manager, once saw that he could “do a little too much”, but added: “He combines arrogance, technical quality, short and long vision. I don’t see any weakness in his game.”

Playing two balls in midfield without playing a defensive “break” may seem dangerous, but it’s not. As both men naturally play behind the ball, they double up as defensive midfielders. It’s a house of cards where all the attacks on football are about to fall and Jorginho, who can intuit the probabilities of where the cards will fall, has loose balls.

In the team phase he led Italy to make the shots, catch and pass; these combined categories of Chelsea were victorious in the Champions League campaign.

Above all, Italy defends it through property. Opponents cannot drown their passage by marking a lone creator. There is only one ball, and if Italy has it, the other team cannot score a goal. Azzurri set a new world record by going 19 hours and 28 minutes without a win as Austria were late to beat Italy 2-1 in the second round of Italy.

Opponents are tired and disappointed to go after the passes, which is why Italy often score late goals: seven of the nine came from the 52nd minute.

Nothing beats Azzurri naming a group of two men. Like many other wing-backs in this tournament, Leonardo Spinazzola exploits the space left on the wings as a result of the excessive concentration that modern football has in the middle.

Nicolò Barella and Insigne work in the middle and pressure work in front of the midfield, while Immobil chases and scores. The Italian defenders, who have been taught to back down when their team loses the ball since childhood, have had tactical sophistication to learn to move forward instead. But it all starts with that trio of balls: Jorginho, Verratti and Mancini.


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