Italy Defeated and Booed; Roberto Mancini Agrees with the Olimpico Crowd
Roberto Mancini made no secret of his anger over the national team’s performance as soon as Belgium scored its second goal against Italy. After the match in Rome ended 0-2—marking the worst possible start to Italy’s Nations League campaign and the debut of his second stint as head coach—the Azzurri coach didn’t hold back in his postgame comments; in fact, he sided with the fans who had booed the team at the Olimpico. “The boos are understandable. When you lose, they seem like a pretty normal reaction to me,” he admitted to ‘Sky Sport’.
“That’s it,” was his terse comment on the national team’s current form. Mancini then dismissed any excuses based on Belgium’s strength: “We just have to work harder. We know we’ll face more difficult matches like tonight’s, but we have to keep working without letting it get us down. In the first half, Belgium played better than us and made us suffer; at the start of the second half, we played well for 25 minutes and then conceded the second goal. That’s when the game was over. There’s still time; we have five games left to play, and we’ll try to win them. We’ll see how it goes.”
The match unfolded exactly the same way in both halves, with two individual errors handing Belgium the two decisive counterattacks. The visitors’ opening goal in the 21st minute came after Kevin De Bruyne stole the ball from Alessandro Romano’s feet and played a through ball to Mika Godts. Dodi Lukebakio’s second goal in the 69th minute, on the other hand, capitalized on a lapse by Nicolò Barella in the opponent’s attacking third and his teammates’ failure to track back. In between, the Azzurri had squandered three clear chances to equalize through Kean, Gianluca Mancini, and Pio Esposito, before the head coach made a triple substitution, bringing on Scalvini, Frattesi, and Maldini for Coppola, Romano, and Pio Esposito.
It was a particularly bitter evening for Romano, on whom the head coach had confidently bet as the linchpin of the midfield. The Cagliari midfielder, born in Winterthur on June 17, 2006, to a family with roots in Naples and Puglia, had come up through the Swiss youth ranks before being scouted by Roma in 2022, before joining Cagliari following a loan stint at Spezia in Serie B. FIFA had approved his change of sporting nationality, paving the way for his call-up to the Italian national team—a decision that did not go unnoticed in Switzerland: “If someone has come up through the ranks here and then prefers to play for Italy, let him play for Italy. The Swiss national team doesn’t have to beg anyone,” former Swiss international Alberto Regazzoni commented with a touch of bitterness.
The result carries even more weight in light of the goals Mancini set out when he returned to the Azzurri bench. “Given the choice made years ago, I’ll have to do well to win back the Azzurri fans who got angry or felt betrayed,” the head coach himself admitted at a press conference. That goal became immediately harder to achieve following the match at the Olimpico, as part of the Rome crowd began leaving the stands as early as a quarter of an hour before the final whistle. Now the schedule leaves no room for maneuver: following this defeat, Italy will face Turkey twice before wrapping up the first block of matches with a challenging away game in Saint-Denis against Zinedine Zidane’s France. In League A Group 1, the minimum goal remains securing one of the top two spots to advance to the quarterfinals scheduled for March 2027, but the road has already become an uphill battle after just ninety minutes.
