The 1/8 final stage of the European Football Championship has started in Germany. In the first round of the playoffs, the current winners of the Euro, the Italians, lost to the Swiss team and relinquished their championship powers. Sport takes note of the highlights of the match in Berlin, mourns the crisis of the once-gorgeous «squadra azzurra» and predicts a serious test for the winner in the quarter-finals of Euro 2024.
Euro 2024June 29, 2024 • starts at 19:00Completed
SwitzerlandSwitzerland2 : 0
ItalyItaly
37’ • Remo Freuler (Ruben Vargas)
46’ • Ruben Vargas (Michel Aebischer)
Duel between ex-coaches of Zenit and Spartak It would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago that the bookmakers would open Italy as a slight favorite in the meeting with the Swiss. But at Euro 2024 this is exactly what happened. In the “group of death”, Luciano Spalletti’s team did not make any impression: a hard-fought victory over the Albanians, who scored the fastest goal in the history of the European Championships in that match, a hopeless defeat from Spain (without ideas in attack) and a hard-won draw in a meeting with even more disappointing Croats.
Now look at Switzerland. Murat Yakin's boys never lost in Quartet A and miraculously did not knock the Germans out of first place in the final round. The Italians would have played at the Olympic Stadium (the same arena where they became world champions in 2006) with Germany in the 1/8 finals, but they were lucky — the Azzurra squad had more chances to reach the quarterfinals.< br>
Italy's worst half at the Euro In the first 45 minutes, the champions did not create a single chance in front of Jan Sommer's goal. Stefan El Shaarawy, Federico Chiesa and Gianluca Scamacca were fooling around, as if they had forgotten that the game was a knockout game and there was no room for error.
While the Italian team's attack was trying to set up the navigator and find the opponent's goal, the Swiss began to dismantle the favorite's defense brick by brick. The alarm bell rang for Spalletti in the 25th minute, when Breel Embolo found himself one-on-one with Gianluigi Donnarumma, but the goalkeeper with the captain's armband saved the goal. The Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper was also at his best at the end of the half, when he deflected the ball into the post after a volley from Fabian Rieder.
But in the 37th minute, even Donnarumma couldn't save the game. Ruben Vargas passed the ball to Remo Freuler, who managed to control the ball in the penalty area and send it into the near corner.
Did Spalletti sign the verdict? The second half had barely begun, and the score on the scoreboard became 2:0. The Italians did not recover from the 15-minute rest and this time they conceded a long shot: Vargas received operational space and spun the ball perfectly. A missed blow for the 196cm GiGi.
Besides the fact that the Italians played disgustingly, fortune was not on their side that evening. The own goal, one of the main heroes of the group stage, did not score this time. Although he could: in the 53rd minute, defender Fabian Scher threw the ball to his goalkeeper and caught Sommer by surprise. The barbell came to the rescue… And that was all. Was the pile-up carried out by Italy? Did the European champions try to at least somehow postpone the disaster and go all-in? No, the Azzurra Squadra did not strain the opponent’s defense at all, as if accepting a well-deserved defeat.
< br>The Swiss played one of the best matches in their history (they had not beaten the Squadra Azzurra for 31 years). But the Italians have broken through the bottom. Having become a two-time Russian champion with Zenit, Spalletti completely lost the coaching confrontation with Yakin and is most likely to be fired from the national team.
It seems that the golden Euro 2020 was a pleasant exception in a series of Italian failures. The missed World Cups in Russia and Qatar were complemented by one of the worst performances at a European championship in the 21st century (compared only to Euro 2004, held in the old format, when they did not qualify from the group with Sweden, Denmark and Bulgaria). All that remains is to push off from the bottom and rehabilitate yourself at the 2026 World Cup in the USA.
Interesting fact: since 2016, when the tournament was expanded to 24 participants, the current champion has consistently been eliminated in the 1/8 finals , losing to a clean sheet.
What's next for Switzerland? In the quarterfinals of Euro 2024, it will play with the winner of the England-Slovakia pair (the meeting will take place tomorrow in Gelsenkirchen, and the quarterfinal itself will take place on July 6 in Dusseldorf).< br>If force majeure does not happen, even such dismantled founders of football, mercilessly criticized by the press for unclear football, will remove total underdogs from the path. But they will have a hard time against undefeated Switzerland: The Red Crusaders have already punched the champions in the nose — why not also upset the main favorite of the tournament?
- A few minutes later, the second match of the day awaits us. At 22:00 Moscow time in Dortmund, the hosts of the tournament, the Germans, will try to beat the Danes, the bronze medalist of the last championship..
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