“grosso had a lackluster first half to go with his abysmal season so far.

plus, midfield wasn’t even the main problem. quaglirella has lost all confidence and he can’t even beat georgian defenders one v one in open space, his passes go nowhere and his shots are much further off target than even the worst oddo cross. di natale als had a lackluster, which combined with some bad luck, like toni hitting the post, etc., led to a 2-0 scoreline. if the azzurri had players behind toni who were high on confidence and could do their job at a high level consistently, then it wouldn’t have been much of a problem, as the game would have been a 4-0 victory. plus, even if the stye hasn’t been that great, the results haven’t been that bad. i mean he could get 27 points in a tough group and not qualify, which let’ be honest, is shocking. if you qould have told me that you’d give italy 27 points and the tiebreaker over everyone but france, then i would have taken it in a heartbeat. unfortnately, it will probably end up that teams like portugal could qualfiy on 26 points in 14 matches, whereas italy could go home on 27 points in 12 matches. that is tough luck, but sometimes that is how it goes in qualifying. in almost every other group italy’s performance would qualify them if not win the group.

again, you can criticize the style, but then again, italy ain’t brazil, since when did fans get upset over winning “ugly.” hell, joga onita is more a myth anyway than fact, even brazil has had some teams grind out ugly results, a la 1994 and this past copa america. donadoni is not and was not the best man for the job, but given some of the injuries, tough breaks with calciopoli, being in the “group of death,” etc. he hasn’t done that badly, imho. nobody thought scotland would possibly get 28 points especially if they took only 1 point off italy, as that would have meant 27 out of the remaining 30 points, yet it looks like they will do just that barring a minor miracle tomorrow.

gattuso and ambrosini did well in winning balls back and passing it off to pirlo, but he had no forward passed because di natale and quagliarella weren’t mobile enough.

italy played some amazing football in the world cup, stats prove it too. we had the second highest goal per game ratio, the highest were the germans (on their home turf..).

lippi’s italy set the bar of the italian version of beautiful football; donadoni’s italy is still a little bit confused… (the front 3 atleast).