Sunday of this upcoming week-end will be a very important day for Siena, when rivals Fiorentina arrive to battle the home team in one of the biggest Tuscany derbies in Serie A. Meanwhile however, the Stadio Artemio Franchi will see a different kind of action, as the Azzurri face South Africa in a sold-out international friendly midweek fixture.

It could be easy to label the 19 Azzurri called up by Donadoni for this match as a ‘Reserve’ team, despite what the coach of South Africa (Carlos Alberto Parreira) may think (“You are the World Champions, there is no Italy nº2” said the Brazilian coach). But the truth of the matter is, most of them are indeed reserve players, or at least they are for now: new names, new faces, new experiments, and the opportunity to try out new schemes & tactics.

A full match report will follow after the game Wednesday, but in the meantime, Chris of the Roma.TheOffside blog has just gone into Azzurri mode, and made a very thorough presentation of the 19 latest additions to Donadoni’s squad. His comments have a slight Giallorossi bias, but you can expect nothing less from a die-hard Roma fan such as Chris.

Have a look at his article, it’s well-written and fairly entertaining.

Posted in Azzurri |

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 4:17 am and is filed under Azzurri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.