Star Man Chiellini Exorcises Personal Demons as Italy Overcome Spain

“Giorgio! GIORGIO!” shouted Antonio Conte from the sidelines. “Get over there!” he pointed. Before following his coach’s instruction, Chiellini turned to Graziano Pellé and said: “Watch this! I’m going to follow up the rebound and score.” Pellé laughed as he told the anecdote on Sky Italia. “I must admit I was a little perplexed. I said: ‘Alright then, Giorgio’.”  

Éder’s stinging free-kick was too hot for David de Gea to handle. Before he could smother it, Emanuele Giaccherini nicked in and flicked it across goal. All Chiellini had to do was tap it in. “He was right!” Pellé smiled. It was Chiellini’s seventh goal for his country. The third under Conte. For a long time in qualifying, he was Italy’s top scorer.  

It wasn’t until the final group game against Norway that Pellé, his ‘strike partner’ overtook him. Chiellini even scored a hat-trick of sorts when Azerbaijan were over for a match in Palermo. You might recall he got the opener, their equaliser and the winner. None felt better than the one at the Stade de France.  

There were a number of stand-out performers for Italy against Spain. Captain Gigi Buffon made a couple of big saves from Aduriz and Gerard Pique to keep the score 1-0. Mattia de Sciglio, liberated from the confusion at Milan, produced his best display of the season. His positioning, particularly every time Spain attempted to switch the play and get one of their full-backs in at the far post, was impeccable.  

Emanuele Giaccherini, the symbol of this team’s collective endeavour, was Italy’s marathon man. He covered 12.97km, the most by a player at the tournament so far as Italy out-ran Spain by a full 7.8km. Daniele De Rossi’s return to form continued until injury forced him off at the interval.  

Pellé gave a complete performance as a centre-forward. For the second time at Euro 2016, he put the game to bed in injury-time, which offered further confirmation of this team’s fitness, its ability to go the distance and stay lucid late in games. Without the ball, Pellé was just as impressive, disrupting Spain’s passing game and cutting it off at source by hustling Sergio Busquets. 

For WhoScored, however, the man of the match was Chiellini. He was aggressive not only in his defending as you might expect, he also read the game extremely well as the five interceptions he made would indicate. Chiellini was on the ball more than we’ve become accustomed to.  

He made more touches than any other player (65) for Italy and attempted the most passes as well (48). He frequently surged forward, adding numbers in midfield, compressing the space to help make Italy extraordinarily compact and difficult to play through. The impression given was of a player seizing the initiative and taking responsibility, not that any of his teammates were found wanting in that regard.  

With Chiellini, however, this seemed personal.  

“I knew,” he said, “I hoped that sooner or later I would get my revenge on a team that has made me suffer a lot down the years,” an exhausted but contented Chiellini said afterwards. He was in the team that lost on penalties to Spain in the quarter-finals of this competition in 2008. An injury then ruled him out of the final four years ago when a fatigued Italy, which had one rest day fewer and considerably more travelling to do, lost 4-0. Two of the goals came in the final half hour when the team found itself down to 10 men after Thiago Motta, their final substitute, also got hurt. Defeat on penalties in the Confederations Cup semi-final also hurt.  

“Let’s say we were able to remove a sassone that was lodged in our shoe.” A bloody great piece of gravel that has caused Chiellini and his teammates discomfort ever since those nights in Vienna, Kiev and Fortaleza. The win was thoroughly deserved. “We should have doubled our lead earlier. That way we would have avoided a tough 15 minutes.”  

But it had been coming. There was a bullishness around Italy before this game that corresponded little with the odds, which were firmly stacked against them. “I’ve got to admit it,” Chiellini revealed. “I expected it.” Italy had frightened Spain in a friendly in Udine in March. “I had a good feeling about it before going out on the pitch.”    

Prior to Monday’s game, Conte had told the players “we have got to have fire in our bellies.” Spain got burned. “You could see there was something inside of us,” Chiellini added. “We wanted it more.” Hailed as a tactical masterclass, what Conte is doing on a motivational level is, to some extent, being overlooked. Privately, he has made a lot of the coverage of this Italy team as the worst in living memory. He has evoked the pain of going out at the group stages in back-to-back World Cups. He has used Spain and everything they have come to represent to the squad’s more experienced players like Chiellini to get the desired reaction.  

Their reign at the Euros opened against Italy in 2008. On Monday it closed. For players like Chiellini their inner demons have been exorcised. The gravel is gone from his shoes. Now it’s time to walk all over Germany.

How big a role does Giorgio Chiellini have to play in Italy's pursuit of European Championship glory? Let us know in the comments below