Azzurri v South Africa, Or: So Many Players!

By: Martha | October 17th, 2007

Azzurri love To sum up: Total domination; Lucarelli brace; several dozen players and nearly that many debutants.

Really, that’s all you need to know. Italy’s B-team, AKA Lucarelli and the Kids, dominated South Africa, threatening to run them off the pitch in the first 10 minutes until SA settled down and hung in there, pulling out a counter now and then and putting together the odd pretty move (all of which ended with Benni McCarthy running really fast). The Azzurri should have gone ahead long before they did, but last second interventions, lively goal-keeping, and plain bad luck stymied them to such a degree that the natives got restless and dared to engage in a bit of irritated whistling with about 15 minutes left.

Cristiano Lucarelli — one of only a handful of Italians to play the whole match — shut them up shortly thereafter, though, heading a cross from debutant Andrea Dossena into what was essentially an open net. It was a deserved goal for Lucarelli, who worked his ass off the entire match but couldn’t get the ball to fall kindly for him until that moment, and really looked seconds from exploding with frustration. Lucarelli got his second just a few minutes later when Franco Semioli, who was completely screwed and got only about four minutes on the pitch, played in a perfect cross with practically his first touch, making the scoreline more approriate to Italy’s control of the match. Though Semioli’s garbage time barely counts, everyone who was on the bench got into the game apart from little Cannavaro and Gianluca Curci, both of whom are going to have to wait a bit longer for their Azzurri debuts.

What this means for the last two qualifiers is unclear, but realistically the answer is probably very little. South Africa are ranked 73rd in the world and ought to have been dominated by the top-ranked team (second-string or not), and apart from Lucarelli, the players who shone today probably won’t even be in the team for the Faroe Islands and Scotland matches. Really, the result that matters today is Scotland’s loss to Georgia: They’re now second in the group and only a point ahead of Italy, having played one game more. Suddenly, through no fault of their own, qualification is looking quite attainable for the Azzurri.