‘We should not be here’: Mancini targets World Cup win before Italy play-off

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”.

Some anxiety is understandable in a country desperate to see its football team back at the World Cup after failing to qualify for the previous edition – the first time Italy had missed out for 60 years. Yet the context is very different this time.

Italy never found an identity under Mancini’s predecessor, Giampiero Ventura, changing tactics constantly and suffering a 3-0 humiliation by Spain when they showed up at the Santiago Bernabéu for a key qualifier with an untested 4-2-4. Disaffection with the manager was illustrated vividly when Daniele De Rossi refused to come off the bench in the play-off second leg against Sweden.

Mancini’s Italy arrive as European champions. True, their 37-game unbeaten run was ended in the Nations League semi-final by Spain but, even then, they rebounded to beat Belgium in the third-place play-off. Italy are yet to lose a game in this World Cup qualifying run – dropping into the