Italy coach Marcello Lippi is a smart man.

Despite — or even in spite of — all that is raging right now in Italian football, Lippi has managed to forge a team spirit so robust that even excessive moral roasting by the media — Italian and international — failed to dent it.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Yesterday, Italy’s 2-0 win against Ghana was testament to how closely knit this team is. A euphoric Vincenzo Iaquinta, bearing an expression reminiscent of Marco Tardelli from the 1982 World Cup final, fell to the ground after scoring the second goal. But it was the pile-up that ensued after that spoke a thousand words.

It illustrated how much tension the Italian camp has been in and how much of it was relieved with a convincing — not brilliant — 2-0 win. It also proved that this team has a unique bond that can see it do well in the World Cup.

On the eve of the tournament, journalists everywhere, but mostly outside Italy, picked their pens up in perverse glee to almost revel in the Italian football scandal. They inevitably questioned Italian football’s ethical standards but also the Azzurri’s mental state ahead of the World Cup. Fair questions but there was an air of consequence about the inquests, a sort of pre-match post-mortem.

But when Italy took to the pitch against Ghana and played perhaps the second best football thus far — after the irrepressible Czechs — observers were surprised.

Not that they needed to be really. Lippi has always stressed the gruppo (literally meaning group) over the individual and this despite the fact that he has some of the best individuals playing for him. Yesterday’s player pile-up, then, was a logical and emphatic conclusion to Lippi’s philosophy - the scoreline was just a flourish.

Italy would do well, however, to not take their next two games lightly. After all, they started the World Cup in 2002 with a 2-0 win over Ecuador only to ohh-ahh and barely wriggle their way through into the next round.

For now, though, the press mood has dramatically changed (as it so conveniently does). The German press exclaimed that “This is the Italy Lippi wanted” while some British writers described the Italian performance as “stylish.”

But goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon summed the mood up perfectly.

“We showed that we’re in this together. And that makes me very happy,” he said.
“It even makes me feel like talking again.”

-Hasan Saiyid
For more insight, opinion and anything to do with Italy check out Hasan Saiyid’s Italia focus section on his site: http://www.totalsoccer.ca