The Italy national football team and the entire country it represents experienced a real catastrophe in the spring of this year. It would seem that missing the World Cup should have become customary for one of the planet's most titled national teams. However a third such fiasco in a row brought a lot of pain to Italian football fans. In the group stage of the qualifying round, Italy lost to Norway twice and ceded to the Scandinavians a direct ticket to North America. In the playoff stage of the qualifiers, Gennaro Gattuso's team reached the final, but there in a penalty shootout they lost to Bosnia and Herzegovina. After another failure, the leadership of the Italian Football Federation took a long time to choose the coaching staff. Settling on Andrea Pirlo, it was forced to abandon this candidacy because of the ties of a former Italy national team player with a Russian bookmaker. This decision also led to the dismissal of dissenters within the federation's own structure. After the described torments and wanderings of the local federation, the position of head coach was given to Roberto Mancini. The 61-year-old specialist is tasked with returning Italy to leading roles in European and world football, as well as pulling the national football out of the mud. The new phase of the national team will begin on Friday with a match against Belgium. In this squad there is a generational shift underway. Under the guidance of Rudi Garcia, the Belgians not without effort reached the quarterfinals of the World Cup. It would seem that a decent result led to the dismissal of the coach and the appointment of Mark van Bommel. A relatively young but already experienced specialist should form a squad of young and very promising players. Of the eleven most expensive players on the Belgian national team, only three are aged 25 or older. Perhaps this is the long-awaited birth of a championship-winning team, something that De Bruyne and his teammates have not achieved in the last 10-15 years. By the way, Kevin De Bruyne and a couple of other experienced players in the Belgian starting lineup can provide that very blend of experience and youth that is considered the key to success for a football team. We'll bet that the guests will not be inferior to the Italian squad in any respect.