Italy v Spain, Thursday night, 10.45pm UAE time, Abu Dhabi Sports 4HD
Early season club form can be a headache for a national team manager.
He spends a long summer formulating his plans, then spends a few days in early September with what he thinks is his best squad, and, by the time of the next October gap in the domestic calendar some five weeks later, all sorts of topsy-turvy things have happened, unexpected slumps and surprises.
Pity Giampiero Ventura in that respect. The most forensic line of questioning when he named his party of Italians to take on Spain on Thursday night in the standout heavyweight encounter in the week’s European cluster of World Cup qualifiers was about Mario Balotelli.
Had the striker's compelling form since joining Nice – Ventura was asked – not made a case for his recall to the Azzurri? Were Super Mario's six goals in five games in Ligue 1 not worth a look?
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To put it bluntly, Balotelli would have been a long way off Ventura’s radar six weeks ago, when he was unloved at Liverpool, having been underwhelming for a season on loan at AC Milan and looking like he might be hard to shift from his Merseyside owners even on a free transfer. No, a few good games at Nice, the French club who took a gamble on Balotelli, have not propelled the enigmatic, erratic striker back into the Italy squad, even if Ventura’s chosen roster of Italian forwards hardly spreads fear.
Nor, even for the most wistful romantics is there a chance that just about the most in-form of Italian attacking players in Serie A – the one with six goals and four assist from his last 352 minutes in action – might be recalled to spread some glitter to the attacking cast. His name is Francesco Totti. And he is 40. Balotelli, meanwhile, is still deemed a little temperamentally faulty.
“He needs to show more consistency,” said Ventura.
Besides, Ventura might reason, Italy comfortably beat Spain only three months ago, dethroning the then European champions, without many glamour names and with what was widely described as the poorest Azzurri squad to go to an international tournament in living memory.
Under Ventura’s predecessor, Antonio Conte, Balotelli was out of bounds, while Totti, who retired from international football nine summers back, belonged to Italy’s distant pass. Conte’s unglamorous national squad were still good enough to reach the quarter-finals of Euro 2016, eliminated only on penalties by Germany.
The Turin meeting Thursday night will be Ventura's second competitive match in charge of the Azzurri. Ditto Julen Lopetegui, the Spain manager who replaced World Cup and European championship winner Vicente del Bosque in July. Lopetegui, too, has largely favoured a continuity of selection, though some icons have been discarded, notably former captain and holder of the record number of Spain caps, goalkeeper Iker Casillas. Cesc Fabregas and Pedro Rodriguez, both of Chelsea, also seem at a distance from selection under the new regime.
And already there seems some distance from the epoch in which Spain held the upper hand in the hierarchy of southern Europe’s behemoth football nations. Spain’s ascent over the last decade was peppered with significant triumphs over an Italy who had become world champions in 2006.
By four years later, when Del Bosque’s Spain raised that trophy in South Africa, Spain had knocked Italy out at the quarter-final stage, via penalties, of a Euro 2008 the Spaniards went on to win; in the final of Euro 2012, Spain crushed Italy 4-1.
But this year they have already met twice, in a drawn friendly and in the 2-0 win Conte’s men achieved in France in July.
“I already seen a different Spain under Lopetegui,” advised Ventura, “and it is a team with more adrenalin and conviction, aware of its strengths.”
It sounded as if he, like many Spaniards, detected complacency in the Spain of four months ago, and that, no longer in possession of the major titles they once monopolised, the Spain who won their first Group G match of these qualifiers 8-0 against Liechtenstein, have a renewed urgency.
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