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Have Italy learnt the way of the bully yet?

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Doubts remain over Italy's ability to give the minnows a sound thrashing, say betting experts Chicken Dinner

Italy vs Portugal, Rugby World Cup, Wednesday September 19, Pool C, Paris
Portugal 64.5 points

Current IRB World rankings, as of September 17: Italy 9, Portugal 22

Remember those tentative first days at big school? After the first few years of your education doing nothing more taxing than playing with sand, you're suddenly thrust into a world full of ritual humiliation, hard lessons and giant boys with tattoos and pubic hair. But eventually you find your feet and before you know it, you've turned into the spotty fifth former taking dinner money from the little kids yourself.

Italy now find themselves on the threshold of becoming intimidating. Since the Five Nations became Six, Italy have made steady progress. This past season saw them defeat both Scotland and Wales to take a best ever fourth-placed finish in the competition. With results though, comes expectation and the Italians go into their match with Portugal conceding a 64.5 point handicap. They need a morale boosting win to set up a likely decider against the Scots for a place in the quarter-finals, and this game is the barometer for how far they've come. (You can get Portugal +64.5 points on betfair at 1.18, Italy -64.5 points on betfair at 6.4).

In Italy's favour is the fact that the Portuguese seem to have done something to upset the World Cup organisers. Portugal have the most compressed schedule of any team taking part in the tournament, with their four games being squeezed into just 17 days, possibly because they all have taxis to drive and fish to catch back home. Their match with Italy comes on the back of a slapping from New Zealand, even if they kept the mighty All Blacks from beating the 110.5 point handicap. My! They even got cocky and scored a try towards the end.

In the 11 games between the two, Portugal have won just once, and in 1972 the two hopeless teams somehow conspired to end the game tied 0-0. Their most recent meeting 11 months ago, ended 83-0 to Italy, en-route to qualifying for the World Cup.

So far the Italians have failed to translate their progress to headline-grabbing World Cup results, as they were overcome comprehensively by New Zealand and crawled to a narrow victory over Romania.

Only seven of those that took on Romania are retained by coach Pierre Berbizier, suggesting that they're being kept fresh for the Scotland match. Past World Cup form is also not encouraging, as Italy have never come remotely near to their 64.5 points target. Their greatest haul came in a 36-12 win over Tonga in 2003 and indeed, all of the Italians' six World Cup match wins have been tight affairs.

Scotland, a team not dissimilar to Italy in ability, were also conceding an immense handicap (66.5 points) in their game against Portugal, and even though they put up a score to boast to the village about (56-10), still came nowhere near meeting the point spread. The real grounds for Italian optimism lies in the fact that really big scores tend to come in the later pool games. Just like in school, the little kids get worn out long before the big ones.