Mancini facing domestic strife in bid to get Italy back on track

È UNA festa e non siamo stati invitati. It's a party and we're not invited.

- Malik Ouzia

Taking aside the fact that the most controversial World Cup in history was more of an awkward gathering than jolly knees-up, those words, written in Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport late last year, rather summed up the country's emotion at once again missing out on a tournament they have won almost as often as anyone in history.

By the time the 2026 World Cup comes around, it will have been a dozen years since the Azzurri's last appearance. There will be students at Rome's Sapienza University by then for whom seeing their country at a World Cup is but the faintest of childhood memories.

Viewed through the prism of the Coppa del Mundo, it has been a period as dark as any in Italian footballing history, and yet Roberto Mancini's men, of course, start their European Championship qualifying campaign against England tonight as defending champions.

Set against the context of twin World Cup failures, Italy's success at Euro 2020 looks an almighty fluke, an almost literal bolt from the blue. Anyone who saw it, however, knows it was anything but.