Spalletti's thoughts: 'A lesson from Spain. Now the men will change, not the idea of football'

Gelsenkirchen - His gaze is resigned, wounded; the pen snapped nervously in his hands over and over again while he is speaking, as if while reviewing the (horror) film of this Spain-Italy, Luciano Spalletti wanted to rewrite the plot, the development, the ending at every frame. But this is where we must start again, because our European Championship has already given us (so to speak) a final, that of Monday in Leipzig against Croatia. All to be played, with an Italian group that will now have to prove it knows how to get up from this black night, where what hurts (and it is the worst thing), more than the result, is the performance.

A player, by conviction and vocation, Luciano Spalletti is and will continue to be. Even on Monday in Leipzig, when something (and someone) will change, by force and necessity. But the main road of the game (perhaps with a 3-5-2 more suited to the men at his disposal and son of the championship) will not change. "Convincing the players becomes easy. We have probably recovered badly from what was the weightiness in terms of the importance of the tournament. There was too much difference from a brilliance point of view,' the coach explains with a prostrate look. It's not that you can go on about other things, it's the basis. If you don't have the same leg as the others, you can't make the choices with the same reaction time. If you don't have this brilliance and you are compassed in front of an opponent that has technical quality like them you lose lucidity, any possibility of reaction. The basis was this, that they had a leg as well as the technical qualities of Williams and Yamal who have above average speed. The reaction times were different and this leads you to be the victim of attacks, to miss countless easy passes that we missed but they have the same denominator which is the freshness of leg.

But where do these cadenced steps and empty lungs come from? Here begin the doubts and regrets, the worst companions on the journey to Leipzig. "Maybe I should have let them recover more, give them more days of recovery because we gave them a day and a half - Spalletti tries to argue -. And it turned out that it was the right choice as evaluations in monitoring with the gps, but the difference was clear, we were always long, we never shortened the spaces inside and they created problems for us even beyond the result, it's useless to turn around. On the verticalisations we did more, but there was too much frenzy. We were never short or played fluid football. When we got the ball back we struggled to play it, when we got it back we immediately put it back on the line. And we missed easy passes that cannot be missed".

He wanted to see the level of this Italy, the technical commissioner, who seems to almost disappear now in that jacket whose elegance and style he had magnified on the eve of the match. To see this Spain is a bit of the Italy he would like to see in the future, which however seems far, too far for what was seen on the Schalke Arena pitch. "Spain would like everyone to copy it as a way of playing. I have to be able to make them understand the importance of playing on equal terms. If you put yourself there against these teams it becomes very difficult in the long run,' he adds laconically. You have to overturn the team concept, the mentality. You could make a running team that doesn't dribble and give the ball to others, but it's not football I like to do and it's also difficult for me to teach it, because I don't know how to do it. I'm the least suitable person to do that. We have to go back to playing the ball like we did in the last two games. And to try to take the ball from us. We were long as a team, not very responsive, not able to make early choices about where we should take this ball. I expected us to try to do something more, but then the fact that our legs are going less goes a long way. And that is the reason to put it right, everything else comes as a consequence".

Now we must immediately put the pieces back together, reinventing without destroying the good things that have been done in these ten games (we must not forget) under the management of Spalletti, who was catapulted onto the Azzurri bench after the phenomenal year of the tricolour in Naples, but above all after the traumatic divorce between the FIGC and Roberto Mancini. "The match said that they were a team and we failed. It was a match that they deserved to win regardless of the goal difference,' the coach openly acknowledged. 'We were never inside the game and we never created the right situations to go up against football of this level.