THE Italian footballer believes in good fortune and loves a lucky coach.

Marcello Lippi has always tried to play up his reputation as a manager who enjoys regular smiles form the sporting gods.

He has a ''lucky'' story that he tells at most coaching sessions. It goes something like this . . .

The Italian squad are staying in a hotel in Duisburg during the 2006 World Cup. There is a lake behind the hotel which Lippi declares ''smelly and dirty''. The players fish and swim in it. They constantly urge the coach to join them. The players all declare he is so lucky, he would come up with a fish.

Lippi demurs until the day before the final. As tensions should be rising in the team, he strides down to the water and plunges in, swimming strongly towards a pole 250 metres away. Suddenly, he disappears under water. There is a collective gasp from his squad. And then the coach resurfaces. A 20lb salmon is clutched in his hand. The Italian team shout with joy. Lippi recalls: ''There were huge cries. One player summed it up with the comment: 'The lucky so-and-so has caught a massive fish'."

Lippi, the lucky manager, had found fortune in the dank depths of an unprepossessing stretch of water. His luck, however, owed something to a nocturnal swim by the hotel chef. The night before Lippi's plunge into the loch, the Italian manager approached the chef and asked for some help. Could he swim out to the pole with a large fish and attach it there with some wire? The hotel worker duly obliged, placing the fish in a plastic bag and weighing it down to the bottom of the pole.

It was an easy task for the manager the next day to retrieve the fish, free it from its bag and emerge triumphantly with it in his fist.

It was a more decorous jape than the one he contrived on the day of the semi-final. Training in the stadium in Dortmund before the meeting with Germany, Lippi became convinced that the flashes from what appeared to be empty stands were caused by journalists taking photographs on a spying mission for the home side.

He stopped his players, who were practising set pieces, and told them to turn to the stand, drop their shorts and reveal their posteriors. ''The resulting photographs were not used anywhere,'' said Lippi. ''Maybe the photographers were not journalists after all . . .''

The Italian manager's luck held. His team defeated the Germans 2-0 after extra time. And the fish worked a treat, too. Italy beat France in a penalty shoot out in the final, after Lippi watched Zinedine Zidane, the best player he ever managed, being sent off after an uncharacteristic moment of madness.