Italy win Cordoba bore
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:45
Celebration time: Italian replacement Pablo Canavosio
Italy celebrated another triumph over Argentina, when they sneaked a 13-12 win at Estadio Chateau Carreras, Córdoba, on Saturday.
The winning score came from the only try in the match, scored in the 80th minute by replacement Leonardo Ghiraldini and converted by Andrea Marcato.
It is the Azzurri's second successive win over the Pumas in Cordoba, following their one-point (30-29) victory at this venue on June 17, 2005.
The visitors celebrated at the final whistle as if they had won the World Cup. Then again, the team that is 11th on the International Rugby Board (IRB) rankings had beaten the team placed third on those standings.
It is probably something worth celebrating, since there was little else to celebrate in this match.
To call it a 'dour' match would be to pay it a compliment.
If you use degrees of comparison it would be: glum, glummer, Argentina versus Italy!
Yes, you can use a string of adjectives to describe this depressing and spiritless encounter.
The game was a succession of scrums that all went to the deck, free kicks, penalties, shots at goal, heaps of bodies and a referee that lost his breath just blowing the whistle to restart the next phase of heaped bodies.
It moved at a snail's pace and stop-start would have meant speeding up the game.
Italy's scrum was marginally more stable than that of Argentina, while the line-outs were a lottery.
The first-half 'highlights' consisted of a series of penalties kicked into touch or at goal, aimless kicking and very poor skills.
There was also a big setback for the Pumas when ace flyhalf Juan Martín Hernández left the field with a wrist injury inside the first quarter.
The second half was not much better - although tempers started to flare. At least the punch-ups, sometimes also referred to as 'handbags at 20 paces', were marginally more exciting.
But for most part the game progressed from one pile of bodies on the deck to the next, interspersed by penalties or kicks downfield.
Hernández landed two early penalties - in the third and sixth minutes - before leaving the field with that wrist injury. Marcelo Bosch, who took over the goal-kicking, slotted two more penalties in the 19th and 33rd minutes.
Andrea Marcato kicked a penalty for Italy in the 36th minute to make it 12-3 at the break and another in the 48th minute to make it 12-6 in favour of the home side.
It seemed destined to stay that way until a pile of bodies managed to find their way over the Argentina tryline in the 80th minute.
Referee Matt Goddard, whose shrill voice was the only thing that kept us from falling asleep throughout this 80-minute bore, saw a try and awarded it to replacement Leonardo Ghiraldini.
The Italians celebrated his decision, the Pumas disputed it.
Then Marcato slotted the conversion to put the Azzurri in the lead and the final whistle went.
It sent the Italians into wild, rapturous celebrations and the Pumas gathered in a circle of despair.
Man of the match: In this match? You got to be kidding. Nobody was worthy of this award.
Moment of the match: Yes, we could go for the match-winning try, but even that was a confusing heap of bodies crawling over the line. We feel the most exciting part of the day was the spectator wave that started inside the final 10 minutes. It was far more coherent than anything that happened on the field.
Villain: There were 44 villains - the full compliment of players from both Argentina and Italy, as nobody managed to produce anything remotely exciting.
The scorers:
For Argentina:
Pens: Hernández 2, Bosch 2
For Italy:
Try:
Ghiraldini
Con: Marcato
Pens: Marcato 2
Yellow cards: Juan Gómez (Argentina, 38 - foul play, punching), Rodrigo Roncero (Argentina, 74 - foul play, late tackle)
Teams:
Argentina: 15 Bernardo Stortoni, 14 Lucas Borges, 13 Marcelo Bosch, 12 Miguel Avramovic, 11 Horacio Agulla, 10 Juan Martín Hernández, 9 Nicolás Vergallo, 8 Juan Manuel Leguizamón, 7 Álvaro Galindo, 6 Martín Durand, 5 Esteban Lozada, 4 Manuel Carizza, 3 Juan Gómez, 2 Álvaro Tejeda, 1 Rodrigo Roncero.
Replacements: 16 Pablo Gambarini, 17 Pedro Ledesma, 18 James Stuart, 19 Alejandro Campos, 20 Alfredo Lalanne, 21 Federico Martín Aramburu, 22 Hernán Senillosa.
Italy: 15 Andrea Marcato, 14 Kaine Robertson, 13 Mirco Bergamasco, 12 Gonzalo Garcia, 11 Matteo Pratichetti, 10 Luke
McLean, 9 Simon Picone, 8 Sergio Parisse (captain), 7 Mauro Bergamasco, 6 Josh Sole, 5 Carlo Del Fava, 4 Santiago Dellapè, 3 Carlos Nieto, 2 Fabio Ongaro, 1 Ignacio Rouyet.
Replacements: 16 Leonardo Ghiraldini, 17 Alex Moreno, 18 Tommaso Reato, 19 Alessandro Zanni, 20 Pablo Canavosio, 21 Enrico Patrizio, 22 Riccardo Pavan/Jaco Erasmus.
Referee: Matt Goddard (Australia)
Touch judges: Craig Joubert (South Africa), Paul Marks (Australia)
TMO: George Ayoub (Australia)
