Rome - The team of defending champions Italy which crashed out in the first round of the World Cup produced the worst performance of any Italian lineup in the history of the competition, the country's press said on Friday.

GALLERY: Italian football's darkest hour

"It's total darkness," said La Gazzetta dello Sport. "The worst Italy we have ever seen go out."

Italy were eliminated after a 3-2 defeat by minnows Slovakia in Johannesburg left coach Marcello Lippi's side bottom of their first-round group with a paltry two points.

"It was the darkest and most terrible day in the history of Italian football," said La Gazzetta's editorial next to a photo of captain Fabio Cannavaro consoling Fabio Quagliarella, one of Italy's scorers in Thursday's match in Rustenburg.

Tutto Sport compared the team to mozzarella cheese, while La Gazzetta said time had caught up with an ageing squad in the end.

"Like Dorian Gray's mirror, on this afternoon in Johannesburg we saw the picture of an old, defeated team without a style of play or any ideas, outclassed technically and physically by a modest Slovak team," the paper said.

It was the first time in 36 years that Italy had failed to progress through the first round of a World Cup and they repeated the feat of France, who fell at the first hurdle as reigning champions in 2002.