ROME, June 22 (Xinhua) -- Italy is rallying around its national football team, winners of three consecutive European Championship victories and gaining buzz as one of the favorites for the tournament coming out of the group stage.
Analysts said the team is also giving fans a welcome distraction after more than a year of struggles in one of the countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.
In the group stage of the European Championship, Italy won its first two games against Turkey and Switzerland comfortably, both 3-0. The third game, against Wales, was closer -- the Italians won 1-0 -- but since Italy had already qualified for the next round by virtue of the first two wins, manager Roberto Mancini rested his starters against Wales, letting reserves play most of the minutes.
With the three victories, the Italian side has now won 30 consecutive matches -- a welcome redemption for a team that failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, the first time Italy was ever left outside the World Cup field. After that game, the national team sunk to 18th in the world, according to FIFA, the world's football governing body.
The long victory streak has moved Italy up 7th in the FIFA rankings heading into the European Cup, and, according to Marco Bellinazzo, a football journalist for the newspaper Il Sole/24 Ore who has authored various books about the sport, they'd be ranked even higher now if the classification were updated.
"The Italian side would have to be considered one of the favorites of the tournament now," Bellinazzo told Xinhua. "They are playing well at the right time and they feel like they have something to prove after not qualifying for the World Cup in 2018."
Bellinazzo said that under Mancini, the team is playing differently than top Italian teams of the past. It has no real star, he said, noting that its top player so far, midfielder Manuel Locatelli, was a relatively unknown outside of Italy heading into the tournament. Locatelli plays professionally for Sassuolo, a middle-of-the-pack Italian team based in a town of just 40,000 residents near the central Italian city of Bologna.
"There are two ways to be a great team," Bellinazzo said. "A team can have a big, talented star who rises to the occasion and carries everyone to victory, or it can have a group of good-but-not-great players who work together. This team is clearly in that second category."
Credit much of the team's success and the change in playing style to Mancini, the manager hired just after the 2018 World Cup. Mancini played on Italy's national team for a decade ending in 1994, and under his management, the Italian team has won around 75 percent of its games, better than any other Italian manager in history.
The success has been good news for Italians - whether they are die-hard football fans or not.
"The last year and a half have been very difficult for Italians," Giovanna Russo, a sociologist focusing on sports and communication at the University of Bologna, said in an interview with Xinhua. "The country now appears to be emerging from the worst of the pandemic and the economy is starting to recover. A big sporting event like the European Championship already creates a lot of anticipation and in these circumstances, it has an even bigger impact."
Bellinazzo said the enthusiasm for the team will bode well for the future, with more sponsorship money and a greater emphasis on player development that will help the next generation of national team players.
Italy's next game in the European Championship will take place Saturday in London against an Austrian team that came out of the group stage with two wins and a loss. Enditem
