Roberto Mancini has not been persuaded yet to dial back his ambitions. He insisted at his first press conference as Italy manager, back in 2018, that he intended to put the Azzurri back “on top of the world”. On Monday, before a Qatar 2022 qualifying play-off semi-final against North Macedonia, he echoed that sentiment, saying: “The objective is not to go to the World Cup, but to win it.”
In public, at least, Mancini has never wavered in his conviction that Italy will reach November’s tournament. Not all his compatriots are so convinced. The president of the Italian Football Federation, Gabriele Gravina, lamented a national culture of naysaying; the “gufi e gufetti” as he called them – literally, “owls and little owls”, but used in Italian superstition as a symbol for jinxes – “perching on branches of bad luck”.
