Despite not knowing how the next few months are going to work themselves out or in what club's colours they'll be playing their football six weeks from now, mostly the Italian players shrug off questions about the match-fixing scandal engulfing Serie A as if they are being asked about what they had for breakfast.

As Gennaro Gattuso left a good-hearted and upbeat press conference in Duisburg on Friday afternoon, he was asked mischievously if he'd be having a bet on the final.

"Please, " he laughed. "I don't want to get a call from Mr Rossi."

Mr Rossi is Guido Rossi, the new commissioner of the Italian FA and the man whose job it will be to spend the next few years cleaning up after the mess. A determined, spiky character, he's already stood up strong in the face of some admittedly laughable political pressure.

When, on Wednesday, Maurizio Paniz, a member of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, called for a dismissal of all charges if Italy win the final, Rossi was having none of it. "Sporting justice must be done and Italy must change, " he said. When Gattuso was told of Paniz's suggestion, he came down firmly on Rossi's side. "There shouldn't be an amnesty, " he said. "Those who have committed crimes ought to be punished."

In the easy, shorthand way of these things, many wrote off Italy's chances before the World Cup on the basis of the brewing storm. It was the straightest of roads to walk down. The clubs are in turmoil, the players' futures are in doubt . . . ipso facto, an early exit. It's been shown to be the laziest of thinking.

Even though it's a serious business . . . and it's certain that few will understand just how serious until Juventus are lining up against such giants of the game as Spezia and Prato . . . there is still an air of unreality about it all whenever it has been brought up in Germany. You know how it is. You're hearing news from home, getting regular updates and all but because you're not there, there's a sense that it's not really happening. If it has been on the players' minds . . .

and with 13 of the squad employed by the four clubs looking to be on their way down a division or two, it may have come up in conversation around the supper table . . . it's likely to have been in the manner of an unpaid bill or some such. Something annoying that has to be attended to but not just yet.

It turns out that those who thought the scandal would be the bad apple whose influence would spread through Italy's tournament were looking at the situation from the wrong angle. Being at the World Cup has been the perfect release for the squad and their manager. If this had broken last summer, they'd have been stuck in Italy, hounded everywhere by a voracious press, chased here and there for their thoughts on the subject. As it is, not only do they have a tournament to focus the minds and take their attention away from the scandal, the media do as well. Where questions relating to the scandal came thick and fast in the first few days of the tournament, now they're raised almost as afterthoughts. Everybody knows what the answers will be before they ask. So, in general, they don't.

"We'll talk about these things after the World Cup, " Gianluigi Buffon said during the week. "We're not affected by what's going on in Italy.

I think Juventus's directors should be proud of having so many players in the World Cup final."

In this, the players have taken their lead from their manager. Marcello Lippi is on the cusp of coronation as one of the all-time great coaches and his influence in handling the situation has been apparent throughout.

"I don't know whether the players have talked about it among themselves, " he said coyly on Friday. "I've just been talking to them about the games and their opponents. But certainly since the start of this tournament the scandal has provoked a reaction. It's made us stronger.

Before we left I warned them that we might face a bad atmosphere, but that's not how it has been and we have shown the world that Italian football is alive and beautiful, even on the moral plane."

And perhaps he's right.

Whatever happens tonight, whatever happens in the coming months and years, the sport will still be played.

Football will out. At the height of the hooligan years in England, when Margaret Thatcher was berating the English FA and telling it to put its house in order and sort this problem out, an exasperated official finally broke and told her what was what. "Prime Minister, " he said, "it would be better for all concerned if you took the problems of your society out of our sport." When the news came through on Friday night that Berlusconi is to stand trial next November on tax fraud charges, it was impossible not to get the feeling a similar situation might be on the way to figuring itself out in Italy.

This is a country where corruption has long been taken to be the equivalent in conversation terms of the Irish weather. Everyone talks about, everyone complains about it but nobody ever contemplates the idea that anything can be done about it.

That Berlusconi . . . for so long utterly untouchable before being bounced out of office in the spring elections . . . will now have to take to the dock could well be the harbinger of a newer, cleaner era. In a country where there are still those who claim it was Italians rather than Englishmen who invented football, a World Cup win tonight would be seen as the perfect springboard.

When you come from a country where underhandedness is taken for granted, it inevitably colours your judgement. Hence the Italian conviction that they were engineered out of the last World Cup as opposed to being beaten out of it by South Korea. Hence also the suspicion held by some within the country that the 2-2 draw between Sweden and Denmark played out in their final group game at Euro 2004 was a Scandinavian pact designed to see them off. Anyone who'd been at the match could have informed them the idea was complete nonsense but sometimes there are none so deaf as those who refuse to hear.

"We've accumulated a lot of anger after two major disappointments, " Fabio Cannavaro said yesterday. "We put that rage to good use on the pitch and you can see that at the World Cup . . . we are turning that anger into something positive." Cannavaro . . . a jovial, self-effacing soul . . . would insist that the anger he referred to was selfdirected and not a hint at conspiracy theories but there are plenty back home who'd take their own meaning from what he had to say.

Tomorrow morning, they go back home and reality inveigles its way back into their lives. Within a fortnight, Italy will have to nominate the clubs that are to take part in European competition in the coming season so by then, the fates of Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio will have been decided and with them, those of the players. Tonight, then, is the last sliver of certainty they're going to have for a while, the last time they'll stand on solid ground before the seemingly inevitable spate of transcontinental transfers.

It's hard to see them wasting it.