It turns out there was only one terminal case among the leading powers in the group of death. France flatlined. Italy, the World Cup winners whose European Championship campaign had been given the last rites after one point taken from two games, somehow pulled through and will limp on to a quarter-final reckoning with Spain in Vienna on Sunday.

They will play without Andrea Pirlo and Gennaro Gattuso, two key components of Roberto Donadoni’s midfield, however, after the players collected their second yellow cards of the tournament. Fabio Capello, no less, recently identified Spain as having the best midfield in the tournament and it is not the sort of game to be left short in that area. Italy may have moved out of intensive care, but that does not mean their story has a happy ending.

As for France, they lurched from one crisis to another in Zurich. From pre-match rumours that Lilian Thuram, the veteran defender, had asked to be stood down for the night because he felt unable to cope with the pressure, to a ninth-minute injury that meant Franck Ribéry, France’s greatest attacking threat, took no further part in the game, to the 24th-minute dismissal of Thuram’s replacement, Éric Abidal, who conceded a penalty from which his team did not recover. Abidal had been moved inside from his familiar position at left back, and there was not a moment of the match when it did not look like it.

The formbook and performances of the teams suggested that it would be likelier that Italy had a game to raise and so it proved, with mental and physical frailty combining to undo the French. The Italians, by contrast, responded to the situation by growing in strength. By the time it was known that Romania, who needed to win to qualify and negate any result here, were losing to Holland’s second team, Italy were already a goal up and in control. They had hit a post from a free kick by Fabio Grosso and Luca Toni, the striker, had missed enough chances to have completed a hat-trick before half-time.

Despite this, Italian confidence was unshakeable. When Toni won the penalty in the first half, the television cameras scanned the face of Pirlo, the taker, for dramatic signs of weakness, but found none. The superiority of his team-mates was reflected in his strike, a perfect combination of accuracy and power, buried in the top left corner, with Grégory Coupet a redundant figure in the France goal.

If there is any sympathy for France (and if the rumours of dereliction of duty by Thuram and his fellow defender, Willy Sagnol, turn out to be true there probably will not be), it can come only because the loss of a player as important as Ribéry after nine minutes was a psychological and technical blow too great to overcome. Ribéry was France in this tournament and his departure will have had a savage impact on Raymond Domenech’s game plan. It did not help that Samir Nasri, his replacement, had to make way for another defender, Jean-Alain Boumsong, after Abidal was sent off, but the truth is that France looked to be in trouble even before Ribéry’s exit.

Abidal was a disaster waiting to happen at centre half and the warning lights were flashing as early as the third minute. Giorgio Chiellini hit a long clearance down the middle that any central defender of calibre would have dealt with. Abidal, in a new role and up against one of the most troublesome brutes in Europe in the shape of Toni, was thrown into an instant panic. He made a hash of his clearance and would have been grateful that the occasion got to the Italian, too, leading to a hurried shot from range when there was time for a cooler assessment of the target. It was, however, a sign of the traumas to come for France.

After Ribéry left the field in the wake of a tackle he made on Gianluca Zambrotta, the Italy right back, French spirits were down and Italy could have taken the lead if Christian Panucci’s header from a corner by Pirlo was not cleared off the line by Claude Makelele. Yet, with France struggling against any physical presence or threat in the air, Italy were always likely to take advantage and in the 24th minute, Abidal as good as sealed France’s fate.

He lost Toni from a long ball again and, with the striker one-on-one with Coupet, compounded his error by attempting to retrieve the position from behind, a clumsy tackle that was going to end only one way. As Toni tumbled, Lubos Michel, the Slovakian referee, pointed to the spot to a rare absence of protests.

And so it continued, until the game was settled in the 62nd minute by Daniele De Rossi, who will be Donadoni’s only surviving first-choice midfield player in Vienna. By then it was known that Holland led Romania and, providing Italy could hold on for victory here, the Romanians would need to score two to progress, so the delight when De Rossi’s shot from a short free kick deflected off the toe of Thierry Henry in the French wall, sending Coupet the wrong way and giving Italy breathing space, was quite spectacular.

From France, in response, there was nothing. Henry had a shot go wide in the 33rd minute and Gianluigi Buffon, the Italy goalkeeper, made a great save from Karim Benzema late in the second half, but this was an exit of the whimper variety, not the bang.

Henrythenavigator may have been the toast of Royal Ascot yesterday, but his namesake, and his team-mates, have lost their way in the Alps and will return home chastened, with Domenech’s talk of a bright future filled with more holes than a Swiss cheese.

France (4-4-2): G Coupet — F Clerc, W Gallas, É Abidal, P Evra — S Govou (sub: N Anelka, 66min), J Toulalan, C Makelele, F Ribéry (sub: S Nasri 9; sub: J-A Boumsong, 25) — K Benzema, T Henry. Substitutes not used: S Mandanda, S Frey, P Vieira, F Malouda, L Thuram, S Squillaci, B Gomis, W Sagnol, L Diarra. Booked: Evra, Govou, Boumsong, Henry. Sent off: Abidal.

Italy (4-3-1-2): G Buffon — G Zambrotta, C Panucci, G Chiellini, F Grosso — A Pirlo (sub: M Ambrosini, 55), D De Rossi, G Gattuso (sub: A Aquilani, 81) — S Perrotta (sub: M Camoranesi, 63) — L Toni, A Cassano. Substitutes not used: M Amelia, M De Sanctis, A Gamberini, A Barzagli, A Del Pierro, A Di Natale, M Borriello, F Quagliarella, M Materazzi. Booked: Pirlo, Chiellini, Gattuso.

Referee: L Michel (Slovakia).