In Euro 2024, Inter Milan has 13 players to attack (Zielinski, who has not yet been officially announced), and so far, in addition to Asllani's Albania, 11 have confirmed to advance to the knockout round, and there is a high probability of advancing (Calhanoglu).
Specifically, Dumfries and De Vrij advanced with the Dutch team.
Thuram and Pavard followed the French team to advance. Arnautovic followed Austria to advance.
So far, there have been a lot of "Inter players' civil wars", such as Asllani vs. Italy, Arnautovic vs. De Vrij and so on. There is also such a big drama in the knockout round, with Swiss goalkeeper Sommer and his club team-mates, Italy internationals Bastoni, Barella, Frattesi, Dimarco and Darmian becoming opponents.
When Italy and Switzerland met in a narrow way, the Italian media focused on discussing the "death half" of the European Championship (the upper half of Spain, Germany, Portugal, and France), focusing on the discussion of Italy's quarter-final against England, and seemed to think that Spalletti led the team to run over Switzerland There was not much problem.
The Italian media despises Switzerland, and the starting point of its argument is that Italy knows Switzerland very, very well in any way.
First of all, FIFA introduced that since the establishment of the Italian team, it has played more than 20 international A-level matches with 13 countries (regions), including Spain (41), France (39), Germany (37), England (32), Portugal (27), the Netherlands (24), Belgium (24) and other giants. However, the most meetings with the Italian team in history are precisely Switzerland, the two teams have fought 61 times, Italy 29 wins, 24 draws and 8 losses, scoring 111 goals and conceding 68 goals, occupying an overwhelming advantage.
In addition, nearly half of the players in the Swiss team play in Serie A or have played in Serie A, represented by Sommer, Ronaldo (Ricardo Rodriguez), Zakaria, Shaqiri, Ndoye, etc. Human fear often comes from the unknown, and the more you know, the less fear you usually have.
However, the Swiss media reminded people that one cannot ignore the fact that Italy did win less and lost more in the fierce battle against Switzerland, but 90% of the victories occurred 20 years ago in the "antiquity". In fact, after the improvement of Swiss football in the past 20 years, the two teams have met 6 times, and the Swiss team is unbeaten in 5 games, which also makes the Swiss team confident enough to deal with the Italian team.
The Swiss media also stressed that the focus of the battle between Italy and Sweden was Sommer, not only because of the weakness of the opponent, the crucial performance of the goalkeeper, but also the historical factors and psychological impact of saving the penalty.
In the knockout round of the competition, penalty kicks are a problem that must be faced, especially in Italy - from the miracle of Toldo in the millennium to the showdown between Italy and Spain and Italy and Britain in the last European Cup, half of Italy's European Cup knockout matches have been played in penalty shootouts since the new century!
As we all know, Sommer has not been a goalkeeper who has been good at saving penalties in his career.
In club and national team competitions, he faced 95 penalty kicks, conceded 79 times, and had a mere 16% save probability, which is not among the top among contemporary goalkeepers, which is not unrelated to Sommer's height of only 1.83 meters, his limited ability to create pressure on the shooter, and the small range of control.
However, the Swiss media stressed that Sommer, who does not use penalty kicks as his signature, has created a nightmare for the Italian general.
The first was on March 14, 2013, in the knockout round of the Europa League, when Sommer played for Basel eliminated Spalletti's Zenit St. Petersburg, when Sommer saved Schrokov's penalty.
As we all know, Spalletti's European results are very poor, with a total of 96 games in the Champions League (67), Europa League (36), and European Cup (3), with a record of 50 wins, 22 draws and 34 losses, which is lackluster. According to the Italian media, the two periods with the highest European victory rate in his life were Napoli last season (70% winning rate) and the other was when he coached Zenit in the Europa League (72.7% winning rate), so the nightmare that Sommer created for Spalletti is of historical significance for the bald boss.
The other was the qualifiers for the Qatar World Cup, with Switzerland and Italy in the same group, and Switzerland won the top spot in the group with 18 points, forcing Italy into a brutal play-off, and finally Italy missed the World Cup for the second time in a row. One of the most pivotal moments came when Switzerland pressed against Italy, when Sommer saved Jorginho's penalty.
Because of this, when Sommer knew that his opponent in the first round of the knockout round was Italy, the goalkeeper smiled and said: "It's good, isn't it!" I like a lot of Italian players and it's a lot of fun to play with. ”
So Bergomi reminded Barrera, Bastoni and his partners: don't think about the death half, the Anglo-Italian war, think about the Swiss level, you need to face a hard battle.