In Italy, the girls always reckoned that in his younger days as an elegant defender at Sampdoria, Marcello Lippi was the spit of Paul Newman.

Up in smoke: Marcello Lippi will struggle to stop Italy being repaced as World Cup winners

"Such a good-looking b------ that he makes the rest of us look like Bela Lugosi," as Sir Alex Ferguson would later famously growl.

Now, as a 62 year-old still wearing well enough to look as if he had stepped straight off the set at Cinecitta, the country is calling for him to give his Cool Hand Luke impression just one last time.

All around the Azzurri coach, as he begins Italy's defence of the World Cup in Cape Town on Monday with a match against Paraguay, are the sounds of distant wailing. Yet, in the middle of all the Italian histrionics, Lippi just puffs on his cigar and rather disdainfully and wearily dismisses the idea of any panic.

Key players injured, no stars, the worst set of strikers in a generation, creaking defenders, no inspirational wild cards and a captain who is so far over the hill that he has just been pensioned off to finish his career in Dubai. "What on earth has the team got going for it?" seems to be the general lament.

And the answer always comes back: Lippi. If a nation believes at all, it is because it trusts in the silver fox and the spirit of 2006. They remember that it was on the eve of the tournament that they demanded his resignation as coach after his son, Davide, a football agent, was implicated in the Italian match-fixing scandal.

Yet Lippi stood firm amid the calciopoli drama and, amid widespread disenchantment, used the collective indignation to bond his ordinary-looking outfit together, before telling them: "The whole world is against us but we will show the world that they are all wrong." And he was right.

Italy did not have the best players but Lippi made them the finest team. It is his Clough-like calling card; creating a unit greater than the sum of its parts. He likens the exercise to putting the pieces of a mosaic together and there is no better artist in this field.

His latest creation must be his toughest commission yet, though. He has ignored the brightest pieces, such as Francesco Totti, Mario Balotelli and Antonio Cassano. Too much dazzle, too garish, won't fit in. Instead, he has old trusty bits well over 30 years old, such as his captain Fabio Cannavaro and Gianluca Zambrotta, and lots of indistinct, newer greyish chunks which would be unrecognisable outside Italy.

"We don't have a star, a Ronaldo, Messi or Rooney," Cannavaro concedes. "In this team, there are no stars. But we have the team spirit that we had in Germany four years ago. I believe we can do something important."

The only problem is that many seem to have lost confidence in Cannavaro himself, Lippi's general who lifted the trophy in Berlin. He is 36, a shadow of the man who picked up the Golden Ball in Germany; his pace has gone, Juventus have ditched him and he is off to finish his career with Al Ahli in Dubai.

Once, he and Alessandro Nesta were the twin towers; now, nobody can quite convince themselves of Italian defensive impermeability any more. Except perhaps Cannavaro himself, who suggested last week: "We'll never attack like Brazil or Spain or Portugal – just as they'll never be able to defend like us."

This is an old confidence, bordering on arrogance, which Lippi shares. It is the absolute winning mentality, which even during Serie A's relative decline – remember, Inter's Champions League-winning starting XI did not contain a home-grown player and was coached by a Portuguese – persuades them that the Italian professional is still a cut above others.

Lippi believes it implicitly. "Italian players are the best tactically in the world," he has often said, conceding that the old stereotype that they're not the prettiest to look at but are still the toughest to beat still has plenty of mileage.

So as he has been preoccupied, in the face of an injury to his key playmaker Andrea Pirlo, with finding the best system, Lippi has been able to try out "six or seven formations in practice", quite confident in his players' intelligence and technical versatility to adapt to any.

"We will pick the right one," he says, and no one ever doubts Lippi on that score. At the base of whatever plan he plumps for will be Cannavaro's central defensive partnership with Giorgio Chiellini, with the captain being impressed to see Lippi return, after Roberto Donadoni's brief and unsuccessful interlude as coach, with a feverish effort to restore Italy's "defensive identity".

Not that he is some kind of slave to catenaccio; he's inventive, flexible, tactically brilliant and adaptable. Now, in his last tournament before handing over the reins to his successor Cesare Prandelli, he has the chance of the ultimate reward for his excellence by becoming the only man since his compatriot Vittorio Pozzo, who led the Azzurri to the 1934 and 1938 titles, to coach back-to-back world champions.

Frankly, the idea of him achieving such a feat with this dull 2010 vintage seems about as improbable as that scene where Paul Newman swallows 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour. But this is Cool Hand Lippi we're talking about; no one, as Fergie once said, could ever make the mistake of taking him lightly.