Sandro Tonali played a starring role in keeping Italy’s World Cup dream alive as his goal and assist helped them earn a 2-0 win over Northern Ireland at New Balance Arena.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tonali netted a stunning 56th-minute opener before teeing up Moise Kean late on, edging Italy closer to a first appearance at FIFA’s flagship tournament since 2014.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Italy failed to test Pierce Charles in the opening 45 minutes,\u00a0with Mateo Retegui\u00a0shooting straight at the visiting goalkeeper on the stroke of half-time from inside the penalty area.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A deflected shot from\u00a0Riccardo Calafiori was comfortably gathered before\u00a0Terry Devlin’s poor backpass sent Retegui clean through on goal, but a combination of Charles and\u00a0Brodie Spencer were able to thwart the Italy number nine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Moise Kean then forced a brilliant stop from Charles, but\u00a0Italy’s pressure finally told just before the hour, when\u00a0Isaac Price’s headed clearance dropped kindly to Tonali, who rifled the ball into the net from just outside the box.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The win was sealed in the 80th minute by Kean, who brilliantly took down Tonali’s looping cross\u00a0before arrowing a low left-footed strike into the net, with the help of the left post.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Data Debrief: King Kean goes five for five<\/p>\n
Italy understood the importance of this game, and after their performance here, they will go into next Tuesday’s play-off final with confidence, especially with Kean up front.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He has now scored on each of his last five appearances for Italy (seven\u00a0goals), becoming the first player to do so for the Azzurri\u00a0since Salvatore Schillaci in July 1990.<\/p>\n
But Tonali also impressed. The Newcastle United midfielder has now netted twice in his last five outings\u00a0for Italy, as many as in his first 26 matches, while Inter’s\u00a0Federico Dimarco finished with team-high totals for chances created (four) and total crosses (16).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Italy were certainly deserving of their win, having registered an expected goals (xG) total of 1.4 from 19 shots, eight of which were on target, compared to Northern Ireland’s 0.41 from eight attempts.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sandro Tonali played a starring role in keeping Italy’s World Cup dream alive as his goal and assist hel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2800082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[784996],"tags":[133797,12477],"class_list":{"0":"post-2800081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-italy","8":"tag-italy","9":"tag-12477"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2800081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2800081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2800081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2800082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2800081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2800081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wacoca.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2800081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}