Napoli and North Macedonia midfielder Eljif Elmas ‘was ready’ for Luciano Spalletti’s Italy tactics, but also wanted to ‘apologise to everyone for the state of the pitch.’
The EURO 2024 qualifier was played in Skopje this evening and ended 1-1, as Ciro Immobile saw his opener cancelled out by a fantastic Enis Bardhi free kick.
Luciano Spalletti, Immobile and others tried to be diplomatic and not use the state of the turf as an “alibi” for the stalemate, but Elmas was fully aware of how bad it was.
“It is a great result, because we played on a frankly shameful pitch,” Elmas told RAI Sport.
“I can only apologise to all Italians, to all of Europe. You cannot play football on a pitch like this. It was a problem for us just as much as it was for Italy.”
As a Napoli player, Elmas is very familiar with Scudetto-winner Spalletti and therefore knew the coach would bring a 4-3-3 formation and different concepts to the Italy team after replacing Roberto Mancini.
“I saw many of the things that Spalletti did with us at Napoli, so we were ready. I was with him for two years, so I do know some things.”
The group is increasingly tight after today’s results, which also saw Ukraine hold England to a 1-1 draw.
Both Italy and North Macedonia now have four points, although the Azzurri still have a game in hand.
England are top on 13 points after five fixtures, followed by Ukraine with seven points in four matches.
The top two go through automatically to EURO 2024 and third place goes into the play-offs.
the pitch the referee var what else is their how about the quality of the we cant finish a game
Italy has no desire to win. They only played the last 5 minutes of the game. I understand the pitch was very bad and some players were getting hurt. This is Italy and they have to show better.
Enrico ….it was farmers field! Next everyone will blame Immobile , he scored , he can’t win it on his own.
@dal1900
Cry me a river, ooooo cry me a riveeeer
i did not blame imobille the quality of the team some way below average players these games should be easy englad spain france potugal other teams would have won these games pitch or not