For once, Italy’s doctor will not have to slip Rino Gattuso a sleeping pill. Gattuso was allergic to them as a player. Since becoming coach of the national team, however, he has needed all the help he can get for 40 winks. “Otherwise I open my eyes at three or four o’clock in the morning and look like a bat.”
A voice inside Gattuso’s head has asked him the same question for seven months. The first thing he has heard in the morning and the last thing at night has been: “Get us to the World Cup.”
Gattuso is no stranger to pressure. He was up until the crack of dawn before the World Cup final in 2006. From dinner until breakfast, he played cards with Francesco Totti to pass the time. “It was another world,” Gattuso reflected.
Twenty years later, that world has been turned upside down. Italy have gone from winning a fourth World Cup, a feat matched only by Germany in Europe, to contemplating a third consecutive failure to even qualify.
“I have a nation on my back,” Gattuso said. The weight of 60m people.
The papers in the team hotel on Thursday morning used powerful imagery of school children and teenagers. Generations too young to have ever seen Italy play at a World Cup. “Make them dream,” was Gazzetta dello Sport’s appeal. “Do it for them,” pleaded Corriere dello Sport. Don’t make them cry. Don’t give them a reason to give up on football.
“I’ve been a coach for a while now,” Gattuso said. “But this is the biggest game of my career.”
Gattuso said the Northern Ireland game was the biggest of his managerial career (Stefano Rellandini/Getty Images)
A play-off semi-final against Northern Ireland. A nation of less than 2m people. A team ranked 69th in the world without a player of George Best’s talent, without two of the squad’s four Premier League footballers. A team, in the words of their part-time coach Michael O’Neill, “with everything to gain from this match.”
North Macedonia shocked Italy at this stage four years ago. Why not Northern Ireland? Why not a repeat of 1958, when Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup after defeat in Belfast?
“I don’t think there’s a single player who scares us,” O’Neill said. “This team does not have a Del Piero or a Totti.”
But it isn’t as bad a team as people make out, either. Gigio Donnarumma was a top-10 finisher in the Ballon d’Or vote after winning the treble with PSG last season. Three of his Italy teammates, the Interisti, played against him in the Champions League final. If Donnarumma doesn’t lift the Premier League with Man City in May, Riccardo Calafiori will with Arsenal. Sandro Tonali can have his pick of the Premier League elite in the summer. Up front, Italy started a striker who fetched €70m only six months ago.
In qualifying, all of Gattuso’s forwards were prolific too. The squad he took to Bergamo was also a reminder of Atalanta’s contribution to youth development, as Marco Carnesecchi and Giorgio Scalvini sat on the bench. Marco Palestra, a revelation on loan at Cagliari this season, came on for his debut as well. Honest Ahanor will no doubt join them once he becomes an Italian citizen.
“Enough with this Italian negativity that always resurfaces when the stakes are high,” Gattuso’s old teammate and fellow World Cup winner, Daniele De Rossi, said at the weekend.
Beating that negativity promised to be harder than overcoming Northern Ireland. The decision to play at the New Balance Arena in Bergamo said as much. One-nil up against Norway at San Siro in November, Italy caved psychologically amid the boos and whistles that followed Antonio Nusa’s equaliser. They then collapsed and lost 4-1. It worried Gattuso. The crowd at San Siro can be as punishing as Erling Haaland and so it proved.
The boys needed encouragement. “Can we sing a song for you?” the Northern Ireland fans chanted in the first half on Thursday.
A tense silence reigned in Bergamo, while Italy laboured to open their opponents up in the first half. But the fans were much more patient and understanding than the hard-to-please Milanese.
The Bergamo crowd celebrate Tonali’s opener (Stefano Rellandini/Getty Images)
Italy confronted their demons. “We saw monsters,” Tonali told RAI. Ghosts of play-offs past.
The Newcastle midfielder, outstanding on the night, banished them. After winning the ball in Northern Ireland’s half and playing Moise Kean through, only for his shot to be saved, Tonali smashed a low shot from the edge of the box past Pierce Charles. He called it “the most important goal I’ve ever scored together with the one away to Lazio” when he won the league with Milan in 2022. “Once we got in front, it freed our minds.”
Italy then relaxed. The ball began to move quicker. Angles appeared. They were no longer flat.
Pio Esposito had a header cleared off the line. Kean tried an acrobatic bicycle kick and finally doubled Italy’s lead, jinking inside the box and squeezing a shot inside the far post after Tonali, once again, found him with a curling ball in behind.
It was Kean’s fifth game in a row on the scoresheet for Italy, a feat last achieved by Toto Schillaci at Italia 90. “It was beautiful,” Kean told Sky Italia. “I hope to keep giving the team a hand. We’re a good team and a good group.”
Italy just have to believe. After all, it wasn’t long ago, less than five years to be precise, that they were European champions in the midst of a record 37-game unbeaten run.
“If we win the play-off final, I’ll have come full circle,” Manuel Locatelli, a member of that Euros-winning side, explained to RAI. “We’ve done nothing yet. It’s only a step. But winning today was big. We all felt the pressure, particularly from the kids who are yet to see Italy play at a World Cup.”
Should they qualify, Italy will fancy their chances of topping a group featuring Canada, Qatar and Switzerland.
But Gattuso isn’t getting ahead of himself. He is taking it one game at a time. The 48-year-old did not emerge for the press conference until after the penalty shoot-out between Wales and Bosnia concluded in Cardiff.
Gattuso thanked his players, particularly the ones who played through pain. “(Alessandro) Bastoni should 99 per cent not have played tonight. (Gianluca) Mancini trained with pain.” Tonali also missed the Tyne-Wear derby after picking up a knock.
They showed the kind of commitment to the cause he respects. As did players who couldn’t make the squad through injury. “(Guglielmo) Vicario was at the game tonight, as was (Giovanni) Di Lorenzo and (Mattia) Zaccagni.”
More than tactics, Gattuso has tried to instil a togetherness that seemed lost at Euro 2024. “I’ve spoken more to Gattuso these past few months than my mum,” Calafiori said.
“Enjoy it,” was the recommendation Gattuso made to his players after Thursday’s win. Too often recently, they haven’t had moments to savour.
Bosnia are next in Zenica. At least for one night, Gattuso can sleep a little easier.
