The World Cup 2026 qualifying playoff match between Bosnia and Italy witnessed an unprecedented event, as a 14-year-old Bosnian child played a crucial role in eliminating the Azzurri from the tournament, marking Italy’s absence from the global event for the third consecutive time.<\/p>\n
English press reports have revealed the identity of the teenager, Avan Cizmecic, a youth player at the Bosnian club NK Celik, who was working as a ball boy during the match. He cleverly managed to strip the Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma of his most important notes on penalty kick takers just moments before a crucial point in the game.<\/p>\n
Chesmitz proudly said, “I saw the paper that Donnarumma placed inside his towel and immediately knew what it was. It contained a detailed study of the penalty takers, so I seized the opportunity, grabbed it, and hid it completely.”<\/p>\n
The report added that the Italian goalkeeper was stunned and angry upon discovering the disappearance of the paper, and had to rely solely on his intuition for the Bosnian players’ shots. This led to Italy’s failure to execute penalty kicks correctly, allowing Bosnia to historically qualify for the World Cup.<\/p>\n
Afan Cizmic concluded his remarks by noting that he still holds onto the valuable paper and intends to auction it off soon for a charity. This paper will transform from technical instructions into a historical document that tells the story of a teenager who ended the pride of the Italian national team on a night that changed the course of the qualifiers.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The World Cup 2026 qualifying playoff match between Bosnia and Italy witnessed an unprecedented event, as a 14-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[32,5,34,36,35,33,31],"class_list":["post-4635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-football","tag-italy","tag-matches","tag-news","tag-results","tag-score","tag-yalla-shoot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}