Italy v England

The EPL may be reducing the effectiveness of England in international football.

Most big tournaments are played in the summer months. Sometimes the weather can be too comfortably hot for the English to play the very fast style of football they would like to.

The EPL as we all know, is played at a very fast pace. It is frenetic. Some players, like Mertesacker, who was in a team who came third in the last World Cup, struggled to keep up with the speed of play in the EPL, when he first played with Arsenal.

Many punters would argue he is too slow. Wrong. The EPL needs to have teams who play more rhythm changes. That is slow the play down, then speed it up, slow it down, speed it up. This was identified by a FIFA technical Committee a few years ago as one of Australian national teams' weakness.

Today England were forced to play at a much slower tempo in a very even game against Italy. The heat caused the tempo of the game to be much slower than the English players were used to. On the continent, and South America, teams change the rhythm from fast to slow, and back to fast and slow again.

I haven't been able to watch much Italian football over the last few years, but when I did see it, it was slower than than La Liga, and much, much slower than the EPL. Italy are well equipped for big tournaments to play in hot conditions.

Alexander Pirlo appears to have incredible handling speed, passing accuracy and vision. Every time he receives the ball, no matter how little time and space he has, he seems to know where every teammate on the pitch is, and quickly passes it to the player in the best position, with quickly executed long and short passes. There is so little time for the opposition to close him down.

Pirlo constantly, successfully deploys killer passes. They are passes that break one or two lines and take a number of opposition players out of the game. I only saw him mishit one pass. I haven't seen a player as good in this facet of the game as he is. However, I cannot remember seeing him win any hard balls, or even making intercepts.

The other excellent player on the pitch was the English number 9, from Liverpool. Was it Sturridge, or another name? Whenever he had the ball at his feet he was phenomenal at ball carrying and dribbling with his head up. He also was able to shoulder feint on both sides of the body, change the rhythm from slow to fast, and back again, with amazing balance and close ball control. Whenever he was on the ball he worried Italy.


Italy seem to have changed their style from setting half presses and sitting back in Ball Possession Opposition, then launching fast, accelerated attacks in Attacking Transitions. Now they are playing the ball from defence to attack through more patient build ups, then they try to increase the tempo in bursts. They are becoming more Proactive.