Italy arrive in Bursa with a patched-up left flank: Ruggeri and Ricci step into the final session

The training ground in Bursa switched its floodlights on at 19:00 local time. The press room opened forty-five minutes earlier. The plane carrying the Italy delegation had landed that morning, yet almost the entire schedule was pushed into the evening: press conference at 18:15, training at 19:00.

The first session on foreign soil is always the most readable one. Players walk out, you note who stands near whom, who starts warming up half a beat late, and at which minute the coach stops the drill. The Hongkou corridor taught me one thing: news has a breath of its own. And the breath of a squad missing men is usually easier to hear than the breath of a full one.

Three names out, two names in

Italy's list for the trip to Turkey changed just before departure. Federico Dimarco was removed because of injury. Bryan Cristante was left out because of a physical problem. Nicolò Zaniolo has a right thigh injury and is not part of the plan for this match.

Roberto Mancini — in Italy his title is Commissario Tecnico, the head coach of the national team, rather than technical director in the club sense — added Matteo Ruggeri and Samuele Ricci.

Anyone who follows Serie A knows the three departures are not alike. Dimarco is a left-back who also takes set pieces. Cristante is a central midfielder who wins second balls and screens. Zaniolo is the type who carries the ball straight into the opposing back line.

They occupy three different zones of the pitch. Losing all three at once is not like losing three players. It is like losing three habits.

The small intestine of the left flank

This is where misreading comes easiest. People count the absentees and conclude the team is weaker. Football does not run on addition.

Dimarco is not merely a left-back. Watch him at Inter and it is plain: he is the trigger for left-sided moves, the long diagonal passer, the man who whips a left-footed cross in with an awkward trajectory. Italy's left flank plays one way with Dimarco and a different way without him.

Ruggeri is the natural positional replacement. He is younger, has fewer elite minutes, and is used to a different system at club level. The interesting part is not whether Ruggeri is good enough; it is that his team-mates are used to Dimarco appearing in specific pockets.

A like-for-like swap on a flank always slows the pre-programmed combinations by half a beat, because the receiver is used to running into the space where he trusts the ball will arrive. When the passer changes, that familiar destination becomes empty ground.

In a narrower sense: free kicks and corners. Dimarco is one of the best dead-ball deliverers Italy currently have. The set-piece taker decides the tempo of a match at the moments when the match cannot run. Losing him costs Italy part of its grip on rhythm.

Midfield and the Ricci question

Cristante's exit takes away something that stat sheets struggle to record: the experience of standing in the right place. A good central midfielder is not the one who runs the most, but the one who knows when running is unnecessary.

Samuele Ricci was added. He belongs to the organising type, comfortable carrying the ball and distributing from deeper. One possibility is worth tracking: if Turkey press high in Bursa, Ricci could be used as a regista — dropping deep, receiving from the centre-backs, slowing the game exactly when it needs slowing.

That sounds sensible. It also means Italy's midfield will be thinner in international caps, on an evening when the opposing crowd will grant nobody time to think.

Zaniolo's sore spot

Zaniolo is a case of his own. He suffered two anterior cruciate ligament tears in 2026 while at Roma — the first in January, the second in September of the same year. After two events like that, every leg problem is viewed differently, both by the player and by the coaching staff.

For Italy, Zaniolo is the direct breach option. Without him the team loses a way of breaking a back line that does not require many passes. That method matters in stalemates, when opponents sit deep and deny space.

The counter-view

Outside commentary will call this a squad crisis. That label is easy, and also easy to get wrong.

Three absentees do not produce a weak team. They produce a different team. For Italy, the worry in Bursa does not lie in the quality of Ruggeri or Ricci. The worry is time.

Mancini has exactly one final session, at 19:00, to test a new left flank and a new midfield. In national-team football that is close to an impossible condition. Players arrive from many clubs carrying many habits, and normally need several sessions to find a common language again.

In a dressing room, people leave behind boots, the smell of sweat and unfinished sentences. Those unfinished sentences are usually the truest ones. And in a single session, a coach can only fix what he sees, never what the players have already grown used to doing together.

What I learned in Volgograd — when Harry Kane stopped for forty seconds at the end of the mixed zone and said his first goal belonged to his team-mates, moments after missing a penalty himself — is that pressure never shows up where people point. It shows up where nobody looks.

In Bursa, nobody is looking at the left flank.

Signals to track

The 19:00 session will answer a few concrete questions. Who plays left in the opposition drills. Who stands beside Ricci in midfield. And whether Mancini splits the squad into two clear blocks or keeps mixing until the last minute.

Waiting is not doing nothing. Waiting is listening to what the grass whispers.

A team missing three men can still win. What matters is not the result, but how they arrive at it — through a system prepared in advance, or through an individual moment on an evening nobody had time to prepare for.