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Last night i sat and watched Match of the day in my bedroom on which they showed the highlights of Manchester City vs. Chelsea at the City of Manchester stadium a game where City went on to win 1-0 which afterwards prompted Gary Linkers opening gambit to be "a typical Italian game of football, very defensive and not wanting to give anything away" or words to that effect

How long will these old fashioned prejudices be carried on for? It now seems to be an easy thing to say for all "pundits" when talking about Calcio, if these masters of the game even cared to sit down and do a little research before speaking they would realise that Calcio is no longer all defence, catenaccio and tactical master classes.

Chelsea lined up with a 4-3-3 formation, a formation used often by those total football crazy Dutch, yes i know very Italian and defensive! and Man City with a 4-5-1, probably because they did not want to sacrifice the midfield as they knew that’s where the game would be won or lost for them, not negative just smart tactics from Mancini i feel.

If we look away from the Premiershit and to our very own Serie A we will see that many teams do not line up with the 5-4-1 formation and grind out nil-nil after nil-nil, Udinese and Genoa been two who come straight to my mind who try to play an open attractive brand of football lining up with the audacity to start a 3-4-3 formation, something you rarely see in the modern day game to my knowledge, Milan lining up with the 4-3-3 formation with a plethora of Brazilian samba stars throughout the team then we have Inter who with the help of Jose Mourinho went on to win the treble last season usually lining up again with a 4-3-3 formation with a front line of Eto'o, Pandev and Milito that’s not a team who look like they are going to play for the draw, Roma with their 4-2-3-1 Formation when all players are fit and healthy signals intent to go out and win games granted with varying results but the intent is there all the same, not forgetting the Palermo’s, Napoli’s, Sampdoria's who between them on more than one occasion have taken 6 points from the big boys of the league would also say that the that the teams who are relegated each season sometimes succumb to the drop because of the quality of players they posses not because of tactical ineptness on the coaches part sometimes managing to scrape the draws from the big boys, playing for a draw against Milan, Inter, Roma and Juventus does not make a league dull and defensive it’s just common sense to do such a thing in my opinion.

These are just my thoughts at the end of it all and I’ve probably said things we already knew, maybe the English press and punditry feel the need to pull down and bad mouth a "rival" league to make their own brand of football look that much more attractive to the viewer, only if more people would be willing to give Calcio a chance, you never know they might just like it!

One of the problems is that stereotypes and cliches are very hard to root out once they've become established since they require only a very little nourishment to be kept alive: that is, it only takes one dour game in 10, say, to allow the cliche to be trotted out and so kept current. On the other hand, it requires quite a lot of energy for them to be overturned: an improbable 8 end-to-end, attack-focused crackers every weekend for a year, say. And so even if there are objectively fewer dull, defensive games in Serie A than in the Premiershite (let's say), the difference is unlikely to be enough to overturn the cliche. Another problem, of course, is that it suits the English pundits to propagate the cliche: it suits both themselves and their viewers to be able to continue to believe in the myths the Premiershite has constructed about itself.

On the other hand, I do tend to think that Serie A as a whole produces more tactically careful games and games which are played at a slower pace than the Premiershite does (Italian teams are more inclined to press only within their half rather than higher up the pitch). This is one of the reasons I find Serie A more interesting to watch - because relentless hustle and bustle is, for me, at least, rather more boring and unimaginative in its own way.

i agree with everything you said in the first paragraph and with regards to the second paragraph its an unavoidable fact that Serie A is a slower paced game, but i kept track for a few weeks last season and on average out of 10 weeks Serie A had a higher goals per game and goals socred in total compared to the EPL, unless chelsea had a stormer and battered somebody 7-0!

while i agree about the cliche of footballing cliches, i think yesterday's game between chelsea and citeh would be a bad example to exploit the argument because it was, from most of the match reports, not an open game. apparently, chelsea took only 1 shot in the first half.

Very nice blog entry SP. Like yourself I feel quite strong about this topic and its annoying as feck when you hear and see things like that. I'd imagine it annoys the hell out of most calcio fans, but particularly those like yourself and myself who are surrounded by the hype and glory of the all-powerful and mighty Premierleague. Like Tom says, stereotypes and cliches will always exist and are very hard to lose, but even more so because of the subject at hand in this case. Another important factor to remember is that pundits in the UK – not just on Sky Sports but also on ITV and even BBC – are, quite simply, idiots. I don't know about you but I have little time for the likes of Shearer, Dixon and Lineker and rarely listen to them, at least not for their footballing insight. That would apply to a lot of pundits I guess. I also believe that a lot of people continue with the old "Italian football is boring" for the most obvious of reasons, in that they simply don't watch it. The likes of Sky Sports never bothered showing Italian football even though it easily could have, and so it did not get aired or highlighted in the UK for a long time, but now with Setanta and ESPN showing lots of calcio weekly that is changing, and so hopefully in time the most annoying of calcio cliches may change too.

says alot for Shearer that he was calling David Silva, Villa all the way through his analysis until Lineker corrected him!

good insight, sp, although when maro says slower pace, i don't think he means lower scoring. in terms of score, i do believe serie a outscored the other two big leagues on a per-game basis in each of the last two seasons. to my mind, however, that is an indicator of decreasing quality as italian teams are weaker these days, and certainly, in a team like milan, the quality of defenders is nowhere near what it was even ten years ago, much less twenty.

tom is also right that clichés become entrenched in peoples' cultures and are more difficult to remove than ticks. along with the defensive italian game, another one that persists is that of the diving italian, which isn't about to go away any time soon. this is why i want to strangle players like de rossi in the world cup or gilardino in the champions league who, in the end, do their team no good and further set their country back in the world's eyes with their theatrics. this is a stereotype that can easily be reversed by consistent fair play, but so long as players continue to flop, even if it's one out of every thousand, it will continue to be viewed as something of a rule rather than the exception.

The commentators should watch Udinese. (although Spalletti's Roma should have shown them that things have changed in calcio)