Antonio Conte is excited about being drawn with Spain
The coach of the Italian national football team, Antonio Conte said that he feels excited and stimulated about being drawn in the same group as Spain for the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers. Spain has recently been going through a downhill road of underwhelming results as they still haven’t appeared to be able to completely bounce back from their early exit in the 2014 World Cup.
Nonetheless, even though Spain is clearly struggling and are not going through their best of times, Vicente del Bosque has at his disposal some of the best players in the world including the likes of: Sergio Ramos, Gerard Pique, David Silva, CescFabregas and Isco just to name a few of their main stars.
With this amount of talented players, Spain still is considered to be a huge threat but Antonio Conte is happy about this challenge.
Italy’s Antonio Conte said: “It is a tough group, however, I prefer to think that Spain could boost us,” Conte said after the draw in St Petersburg.I don’t like the word ‘difficult’. It will be a stimulating challenge against one of the strongest in the world. I am sure that we can do well and we can have good performances.Spain is not the best draw, but Germany would have been worse. On paper, Italy and Spain are the best teams; however, it will be decided on the pitch.”
Italy was pitted in Group G along with: Spain, Albania, Israel, Macedonia and Liechtenstein. In this group, the clear favorites are Spain along Italy but anything can happen in the world of football and unexpected results have been popping up, one of these unexpected events occurred back in 2014 during the FIFA World Cup were unable to make it past the group stages after losing against Chile and Netherlands and in this tournament, Spain as well were the favorites of reaching the finals.