Italy opens Euro 2020 by putting Turkey with three ideas from the past

Turkey 0 – Italy 3

Italy came out of the opening match of the Euro 2020 football tournament in Rome on Friday night as a credible candidate for the title. Their coordinated pressure game tired the Turks and they were late with three goals in the second half – the biggest shot for Azzurri in the European Championship match.

A high-defense and high-defense Turkish team has had almost no choice. As for the rest of the package, Italy are now unbeaten in 28 games since September 2018.

With only 16,000 spectators in the stands, the Olympic Stadium was not heated by the cauldron and Turkey did not come to bolster the atmosphere. Their tactic was to keep nine men behind the ball and counterattack through 35-year-old midfielder and Burak captain Yilmaz. Turkey has more to offer than that, but veteran coach Senol Gunes didn’t trust him to try here.

In contrast, Italy has in recent years joined the orthodoxy of the world’s leading teams by playing a pressure game in the counter-attack. They dominated the pressure side well, almost always stealing the ball from Turkey within five seconds. The little Neapolitan Lorenzo Insigne is as good as he sees the space between the lines, he was not a creative player in the world in Italy, able to open serious levels in Turkey. The first part was air conditioning. It was the shadow, in fact, that was given by the forerunner of the tenor Andrea Bocelli in Puccini’s film “Nessun Dorma”, which he sang the unforgettable when Luciano Pavarotti returned to the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

Finally, in the 53rd minute, Italian winger Domenico Berardi, who was playing a bad game, entered the area of ​​Turkey and made a cross. Central defender Merih Demiral was not skilled enough to get out of the way, and bounced the ball from his chest into the net. It was the first European Championship to open with an own goal – it was the start of dirty football until then.

But then he took advantage of the pressing team that often passes through Italy: the opponent, tired of chasing the ball, especially on a hot Roman night, and disappointed to drop one, begins to leave the spaces open. In the 66th minute, an Italian play split the Turkish defense, Italian left marathon defender Leonardo Spinnazola fired a good shot, goalkeeper Ugurcan Cakir fired well and Lazio midfielder Cazio Immobile bounced back.

The Roman crowd shouted his name, reminding them of the unprecedented format for using the stadiums on the continent to remind them of the advantage that the nine teams playing in their country will have in this tournament.

Once the Italians were 2-0 up, they had no trouble with the young Sardinian Insigne, Jorginho and Nicolò Barella. In the second half, Italy looked like a better Spanish team than the old Azzurri. In the 78th minute they caught an amateur passion from Cakir, and Immobil found the completely unmarked Insigne, who scored the goal he deserved. He was then replaced by coach Roberto Mancini immediately. He knows he needs to keep the tournament fresh.

With home games against Switzerland and Wales coming up, Italy will hardly be able to qualify for the quarter-finals as three of the four teams will get four of the six teams.

The Turks were free from the idea and did not threaten to shoot throughout the match. In the rare cases that progressed, Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci were silenced by former Italian central defenders of Italy, and 22-year-old goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma left the most honest start in a major tournament. Turkey could still easily pass, but their president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a keen footballer, hopes to become more patriotic capital from this group.