Italy custodian and captain Gianluigi Donnarumma has given an honest assessment of his national team following their elimination at the ongoing UEFA Euro 2024 in Germany.
The defending champions were dominated and defeated 2-0 by Switzerland in a Round of 16 match on Saturday.
The PSG goalkeeper lighted the 2024 European Football Championship with his series of saves and heroics. Donnarumma was voted player of the tournament of the last Euro won by his country.
The lanky goalkeeper stood a good chance of picking this year’s award again if his team had reached the deeper stages of the tournament.
“The elimination is deserved”, Gianluigi Donnarumma told RaiSport.
“And the way it came out is very hard to digest. The first half went terribly, then we had to react in the second and instead we immediately conceded the second goal. If it’s lack of courage? Everything was missing, the quality, the courage…”, he added.
Donnarumma, who is by far Italy’s best player of the tournament, continued to discuss The Blues’ style of play:
“Building from the bottom? When you kick two or three long balls and they always catch them, without being able to manage them, then it’s better to start from the bottom, you make less effort, otherwise there’s a huge hole when they recover the ball”
“We need the strength to manage the balls better and make the team go up, we miss too many simple balls and they always had it on board, it killed us, we weren’t very aggressive disappointed. We all have to take responsibility and move forward.
I tried to shake things up, we lacked the desire to react, to help each other, it was all missing today , it was unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, Matteo Darmian’s disappointment is also great:
“At this moment, disappointment and regret prevail. It’s difficult to give explanations. Because we need to apologize to everyone for what we did,” Darmian told Sky after the defeat against Switzerland.
“Losing is never pleasant, it’s hard when you suffer defeats like this,” concluded the defender.
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