Key Italy midfielder Sando Tonali is expected to be fit, despite missing Newcastle United’s derby loss at home to Sunderland on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Inter Milan defender Alessandro Bastoni remains a doubt, but he played a small role in training, and Gattuso said striker Gianluca Scamacca “is a little further behind”.<\/p>\n
In his press conference, Gattuso – a World Cup winner as a player in 2006 – brought up Northern Ireland’s style of play and said Italy will have to adapt to a “direct approach”.<\/p>\n
In response, O’Neill said “we don’t consider any of that” when it came to setting his team up.<\/p>\n
“They really believe a great deal in what they’re doing, with the second balls and they like to play direct, vertical football,” added Gattuso.<\/p>\n
“They are certainly a team that when they get players into the box, both with crosses and from dead-ball situations, they’re incredible.”<\/p>\n
Gattuso acknowledged the running power and energy of their opponents, but said being direct was “their main skillset” and “where they will cause us the most problems”.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t seen a team that’s necessarily going to be keeping the ball and dragging you out of position in the middle of the park,” he added.<\/p>\n
“They play very direct and everything that they do, they do it in an impressive fashion.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Key Italy midfielder Sando Tonali is expected to be fit, despite missing Newcastle United’s derby loss at home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-547080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}