Mancini’s marvels:
NATIONAL STADIUM A KEY STOP IN HIS ROAD TO TOP
roberto Mancini has visited Wembley a few times, and often it has proved to be a turning point. So, sure enough, his latest trip for Tuesday’s shoot-out win over Spain seems to have instigated a large-scale reappraisal of his managerial career.
His preliminary success at Inter Milan was also long overdue. The 2005 Coppa Italia triumph sparked the club’s return to prominence as the following season they won Serie A for the first time since 1989, one of three consecutive league titles during his four-year reign.
But a more seismic change was about to happen the moment he set foot under that giant arch.
Manchester City had waited 35 years for silverware when the Italian led them to Wembley for the 2011 FA Cup final.
Tony Pulis is seldom somebody you would associate with significant regime change at the very top of football.
But despite his best efforts, it was his Stoke City side who could not quite hold back the tide of the Manchester City trophy charge, which started with their 1-0 win
over the Potters and would accumulate another 15 pots in the following decade.
Mancini, though, survived only another two years – sacked on the anniversary of delivering the club’s first title of the Premier League era, having “failed to achieve any of the club’s targets, with the exception of qualification for next season’s Champions League.”
An ill-fated spell with Galatasaray, where the club failed to live up to his ambitions, and a less auspicious return to Inter both ended by mutual consent.
Which is how he came to be at Wembley on the second fateful occasion.
Out of work, he accepted the invitation from the FA to watch England’s home game against Malta in October 2016. It was the first run-out of the team since the departure of Sam Allardyce, and he watched a nervy performance as the Gareth Southgate era stumbled into being.
How things might have been different, eh? As it was, Mancini made his own inroads into international football when Italy came knocking after the shock of failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
He said at his unveiling that he wanted “to be a good coach and take the national team back to the top of the world”.
England were World Cup semifinalists that year but Mancini closed the gap at a speed that caught out even his own compatriots.
He started just as inauspiciously as Southgate, losing lost two of his first five games. But then that was it.
Mancini takes his side to Wembley on Sunday on the back of 33 games unbeaten.
That first time he strode out on to the hallowed turf, absurdly fluffy woollen lucky club scarf knotted around his neck despite the clement May weather, he was the one being brow-beaten into believing he was a winner.
This time, he is having to be the one to drag the belief out of his compatriots.
“Almost nobody believed we could do it,” he said after the history he conjured up this week. “Yet we are in the final.”