The whole world can see that Egyptian football is reaching its peak. There are many factors that played their part in enabling our team to match and defeat the world's best sides but I have neither the time nor the will to talk about all of them.

Like millions of Egyptians, I'd rather sit back, forget all about tactics and just enjoy the remarkable achievement. However, there was one thing that I couldn’t help but realise, and that is we actually beat the Italians using a system they invented and have been adopting for over the last 50 years.

Catenaccio as we know it was introduced to Italian and global football by Argentine coach Helenio Herrera, who led Inter Milan between 1960 and 1968 to a host of domestic and continental titles.

The system mainly emphasises on defence and depends on the presence of a sweeper, whose mission is to clear all lose balls and provide extra coverage behind a four-man back-line.

From the sixties on, Italy have been masters of catenaccio, of course the system was recently subjected to some changes, but watching Egypt beat Marcello Lippi's team, I couldn’t help but recall the same formation Enzo Bearzot used to win the 1982 for the Italians.

Bearzot's line-up consisted of a sweeper behind three solid centre-backs, two wing-backs and three central midfielders, one forward and a second attacker underneath him. The exact formation Shehata deployed on Thursday.

I can't call our first-half display defensive at all, as we had a successful advancing back-line, pushed forward a lot and had good possession in the middle of the pitch.

Nonetheless, our display after the interval was all pure classic catenaccio to defend our lead.

We backtracked to our defensive by-line and for some 20 minutes just kept throwing long balls forward hoping to hit Italy on the break, which we could have done on several occasions.

In a game like this you'd do anything to beat the world champions, and Shehata's plot paid its dividends and we secured the massive result against a better equipped, paid, trained and sponsored Italy team.

What amazes me more is that we don’t often use such system. Whoever watched Egypt's 4-3 loss to Brazil can confirm that we're an attacking side. We played an open game and scored three times against the five-time world champions.

The brilliance of Shehata is that he realizes that even if we narrowly lose to Brazil, we still can't afford to stick to one style of play.

We face every opponent according to the game's needs. And how sweet it is to watch Egypt attack and score three times against Brazil and defend to beat Italy with a one-goal margin.