“ITALY’S weaknesses? I know of none,” Bruce Arena declared in the build-up to this game. The United States coach knows one now; the fallibility in Italy’s make-up that has long been obvious to most.
It is not in their talent or their tactics but their heads. Mental disintegration: the term used in cricket is also relevant to the masters of catenaccio.
Attempts to gauge whether Alberto Gilardino and Luca Toni are the top attack duo at this tournament, or at least, if they are superior to Spain’s David Villa and Fernando Torres; to judge if Francesco Totti, the play-maker in the hole behind them, is better at his job than Juan Roman Riquelme – all were rendered futile by a moment of callous brutality.
Gilardino scored midway through the half with a well-taken header, but Daniele De Rossi was sent off for viciously elbowing Brian McBride in the head barely a minute after Cristian Zaccardo’s own-goal had levelled the scores. So Totti was substituted after 35 minutes, Toni was replaced after an hour. The match was disfigured by Italian self-harm.
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Such senseless petulance was redolent of the Italians’ reaction to defeat and poor refereeing in their 2002 World Cup defeat by South Korea. Histrionics undermine their attempts to make history; the supposed masters of defence are unable to keep their own tempers in check.
Italy were frustrated and forced back into their own half from the off by their opponents’ strident and muscular approach. It was what allowed the United States to dominate the game, and what damaged them so badly in turn.
The US’s tactics were a Faustian pact given Fifa’s clamp-downs on aggressive challenges. This is a World Cup where tackles with the potential to harm are considered to be no less serious than those that actually do.
So by the 47th minute it was ten men against nine as Pablo Mastroeni and Eddie Pope were dismissed by the hyper-correct Uruguayan referee, Jorge Larrionda. Unlike De Rossi, they were not malicious, just reckless. These days, that is enough.
The Italians in the crowd were easily outsung by the Americans.
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When Oguchi Onyewu forcefully dispossessed Gilardino early in the first half, there was a roar as bloodthirsty as if an NFL player had made a bone-jarring tackle on a quarterback. A section of Americans in one corner cheered and sang to drumbeat rhythms familiar from the Barclays Premiership. Rotherham United banners were pinned up next to the Stars and Stripes.
American numbers were surely swelled because Kaiserslautern is adjacent to Ramstein, a military base housing more than 40,000 US soldiers. It means the area has the second-largest number of Americans outside their home country in the world. And it probably explains why touts were asking up to 1,000 Euros for a ticket.
Arena had earlier played down pre-match comments by Eddie Johnson, the US forward, that the game would be like a war. It was a crass suggestion given the proximity of thousands of people who know exactly what real war is like.
In this match’s antagonism, brutishness and aggression both calculated and spontaneous, though, Johnson would not have been wrong if he had predicted an encounter that dripped with conflict.