Pio Esposito heads new-look Italy past Luxembourg on a night of 15 debuts
While most of Europe's big names spent the week fine-tuning for the World Cup, Italy began the painful business of starting again. The shootout defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina in March condemned them to a third straight tournament missed, Gennaro Gattuso left by mutual consent at the start of April, and on Wednesday night in Luxembourg a barely recognisable Azzurri side took the field.
Interim coach Silvio Baldini picked a 24-man squad containing 19 players called up for the first time. Only Gianluigi Donnarumma, Marco Palestra, Niccolo Pisilli and Francesco Pio Esposito arrived with senior caps. By full time at the Stade de Luxembourg, 15 of the newcomers had made their debuts.
One moment of quality settles it
Games like this are rarely pretty, and this one wasn't. The difference came shortly after the break, when Pisilli swung in a corner and Pio Esposito got across his marker to glance a header in at the near post. The striker is one of the few in this group with international experience, and it showed.
Esposito said afterwards that he was happy to help guide the newcomers, and that this young group has to prove itself one game at a time. That is a fair summary of where Italy are. Nobody in Coverciano is pretending a 1-0 win over Luxembourg fixes anything.
A rebuild with no shortcuts
The federation has lost a World Cup, a head coach and its president inside a few months, and the playoff scars now stretch back through Sweden in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2022. What Baldini's experiment offers is a clean break: a generation with no baggage from those nights, given the shirt early. The results will matter less than who takes the chance.
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