Out of the shadows and into the light, the Azzurri quest to compete will one day bear fruit
FOR all the talk of a wide open contest in this season’s Six Nations Championship there hasn’t been too much talk of an Italian challenge. And rightly so.
After 11 seasons as the sixth nation in European rugby’s battle of wills, there is little to suggest the Romans have done anything to suggest they have earned their place at the top table.
Just seven wins have gone the way of the Azzurri in those 11 seasons, just one of those campaigns garnering two victories and as Ireland prepare to open with what should be a hard-fought but ultimately successful trip to the Stadio Flaminio tomorrow afternoon, even Italy coach Nick Mallett is realistic enough not to throw his team’s name into the hat.
“When you talk about the five teams we have to play, I think this is going to be closest competition, the hardest,” Mallett says. “It’s already complicated. Three years ago Wales won the championship, two years ago Ireland, last year France.
“Scotland and England are the two most improved teams over the short-term, the last tours in June and the November Tests, so it’s really difficult and that’s the beauty of the competition. You just don’t know who is going to be the winner and it’s very exciting.
“It could swing on the very first game on Friday night between Wales and England. You never know. If England beat Wales, they’ve three home games and they go to Ireland to win the Grand Slam. If Wales win, they’ve turned the corner and could start winning again. It’s a great competition. But there isn’t a single game that is easy for us.”
This will be South African Mallett’s fourth Six Nations as Italy’s head coach and, as always, he is fighting an uphill struggle to get his players on a competitive footing with their European rivals. Last year saw his side lose four of the five games, a victory over the Scots momentarily giving cheer and Mallett only his third win in the championship.
A losing summer in South Africa was followed by defeats to Argentina and Australia on home soil and there is further woe with the loss through injury of veteran flanker Mauro Bergamasco and fly-half Craig Gower.
YET Italy’s development is progressing, says Mallett. Since he arrived in Italy three years ago, the underage system has been developed from just one U19 academy in its infancy to that and three U17 academies while a revamped Top-10 competition is a semi-professional league emphasising homegrown talent rather than expensive imports which, since the dawn of the professional era, had been flooding into Italy at the expense of the national team.
The new Top-10, known as Excellenza, now acts as a feeder to the professional franchises of Aironi and Treviso, who last September joined the Celts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales by making their debuts in the Magners League.
“The two franchises, Treviso and Aironi, give the top Italian players exposure to professional rugby at a top level and from which I can then pick the national team. None of those structures were in place when I arrived three years ago,” Mallett said.
Declan Kidney, his opponent tomorrow in Rome, certainly believes the arrival into the Magners League will pay dividends for the Italians, just not immediately.
“In terms of their fitness, that’s where you’ll see the improvement,” Kidney says. “I don’t have the stats but if you look at the previous matches the number of scores they might have conceded in the last 10 minutes, that’s because half their team would have played in their domestic league. So you can get an instant improvement on that aspect. But for 70 minutes it was always dog-eat-dog with them.
“Skill-wise and experience-wise, that will be a slower settle in but the match fitness impact will be immediate.”
Mallett is equally realistic but understandably more enthusiastic.
“Now we’ve got all the systems in place, it’s not going to happen overnight but the players have already felt the benefits of competing every week.
“We’re going into the Six Nations with the players probably a little bit weary because the competition has been very tough, but they are at least used to playing rugby for 40 minutes of real time.
“We timed the Top-10 championship last year in Italy and there was only 20-25 minutes of real game time. You get 40-45 in an international game, so the guys were having to almost play two games of rugby when they played internationally.
“So the players by the end of the Six Nations were completely smashed. By the last two games they had hardly any energy left. So all these are things that in the future will really benefit the Italian Rugby Federation and the Italian national team.
“In the immediate sense, it’s the first year and clearly there haven’t been fantastic results. Treviso have done pretty well in the Celtic League but in the European Cup we haven’t seen Italian teams get close to qualification for the quarter-finals. But, it’s a start, a very positive start for the future of Italian rugby. I’m convinced, without it, Italian rugby would never ever become a competitive force in the Six Nations.”
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