Coppa Wrap: No More Milan

By: Martha | January 19th, 2008

Triumphant DDR Like the Copa del Rey in Spain, the Coppa Italia wrapped up its round of 16 last week, losing one massive team in the process. In Spain, it was Real Madrid who crashed out; in Italy, it was AC Milan, whose frankly unsurprising 2-3 aggregate loss to lowly Catania probably left them not entirely disappointed, given the insane fixture list they’ve got over the next few weeks as they struggle to make up the matches they missed while in Japan winning that whole Club World Cup thing.

Among the other big clubs, things went more or less as expected, in frequently thrilling fashion. Both Juventus and Roma went into their home legs trailing smaller clubs on aggregate — Juve were down 1-2 to little Empoli (a club led by Juventus-owned, pint-sized genius Sebastian Giovinco), while Roma trailed Torino 1-3 after a dreadful away display. But both teams turned things around, Juve with an almost comically exciting 5-3 victory, highlighted by wide open attacking and their own awful defending, while defending champions Roma absolutely crushed the team that has been something of a bogey club this season, beating them 4-0 thanks to four second-half goals, magically created by the arrival on the pitch of Francesco Totti, who scored two of them himself.

Less excitingly, last year’s beaten (and that’s putting it nicely) finalists Inter Milan strolled through to the quarterfinals with a 7-1 aggregate win over Reggina. The tie was decided by Inter’s 4-1 win in the first leg, and as a result both teams played a whole lot of youth players in this week’s match. Inter’s squad included coach Roberto Mancini’s 17-year-old son Filippo, who played 10 minutes while looking absolutely terrified, but took advantage of what was probably his first-ever post-game interview to declare his love for Cristiano Ronaldo. So, you know, that was sweet.

Other results from the round of 16:

Sampdoria 4 – 0 Cagliari (4-1 agg.)
Palermo 0 – 1 Udinese (0-1 agg.)
Lazio 1 – 1 Napoli (3-2 agg.)
Ascoli 0 – 2 Fiorentina (1-3 agg.)

The quarterfinals are Wednesday and Thursday of next week:

Roma-Sampdoria: Antonio Cassano gets to play the match that had him in hysterical tears a month ago.
Udinese-Catania
Lazio-Fiorentina
Inter-Juve: Two teams that absolutely hate one another — whether the football will be good is anyone’s guess, but it’s definitely going to be passionate.