One of the most hotly debated topics in Italian football is the concept of the Oriundi. Some of you guys might not be familiar with the word, though the most famous Oriundo around today is probably Camoranesi. So what is an Oriundo and why is it such a contested topic?

Let’s get things out of the way. Spain is obviously a heavy favorite for the trophy. If they weren’t before, after seeing them today, they definitely are now. Sure they played a pretty easy team but scoring 5 is nevertheless impressive. I hope for nothing more than us to meet them and get our revenge [...]

Lotsa things filled up recently: squads, coaches, my glass of chocolate milk. Let’s discuss them!

Lippicakes was very busy today, and released not one but two lists of call ups. The first is for the players to participate in a friendly against North Ireland on June 6th. Those players are:

The little Azzurrinis today beat France 2-1 in the U-17 European Championships, putting them through to the semi-finals. UEFA.com has a good writeup on the game here.

Whew, it’s been a long while. I’ve missed you guys and blogging like crazy. Since I’ve been gone for so long, I feel like I owe you guys. As repayment for my absence, this post is gonna be pretty big. I’ll start it off with an explanation of my hiatus.

Posts like these are so hard to do. They’re extremely speculative in nature, and calling something over a year in advance when footy changes so quickly means that this list is very, very tentative at best. I mean, it’s possible that all of these players could start to suck and be dropped from the roster [...]

The entire game- excluding of course the parts I didn’t get to see, which may have been different, reminded me of how my PS3 FIFA 09 games go when I play on legendary. We rarely had the ball, were bossed in number of shots and number of corners, but we still scored first and it [...]

In a lot of ways, this game tomorrow will tell us much about the Azzurri. For one, if we win it, it will tell us that there’s a near certainty that we will be going to South Africa next year as group winners. For another, even moreso than the Brazil game, this game should show [...]

I didn’t get to watch the entire game. I started from about the 60th and from what I saw, we played basically how we’ve been playing the whole qualifying campaign. Not looking all that motivated, but not disinterested either; the guys look like they’re out there because it’s their job, and while they do want [...]