"Italy, this is the apocalypse"
13th November 2017: Italian football stood in ruins at the Giuseppe Meazza.
In a stadium steeped in football history, named after Italy's greatest ever footballer in fact, a once proud Gli Azzurri had been decimated.
The apocalypse had come.
The four time champions of the world had been unable to qualify for a FIFA World Cup for the first time since the actual dawn of time...well, since 1958.
Unable to beat a Sweden team made up of: Robin Olsen; Mikael Lustig, Victor Lindelof (who was seven years old at the time), Andreas Granqvist (who was 300 years old at the time), Ludwig Augustinsson; Viktor Claesson, Sebastian Larsson (yeah, the one that hit free kicks for Sunderland for a while), Jakob Johansson, Emil Forsberg; Marcus Berg, Ola Toivonen.