The 31-year-old Oddo was part of the Azzurri squad which lifted the World Cup in 2006 and was present throughout qualifying for this summer's European Championships.

However, he has been overlooked by Donadoni for the Austria and Switzerland tournament after undergoing knee surgery three weeks ago.

Oddo claims the injury is just an excuse and says he feels let down to have wasted two years of hard work.

"As is to be expected the bitterness and disappointment I feel at missing out on the squad for the European Championships is quite an obvious thing," he told Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport.

"After putting my own interests aside, and putting in so much effort during two years of hard work together with my team-mates, which led to our qualification, it ends with this exclusion.

"It burns me up inside because I honestly did not expect it."

Oddo added that he believed that he could have been fit in time for the finals had he been selected.

"I'm sure this tough season, which ended in me having an operation on my meniscus has in no small way influenced this decision," he said.

"But I believe that within two weeks of the tournament I would have been able to get myself into satisfactory shape.

"Or the least I would have hoped for would have been to have had my condition tested closer to the time and to have been excluded then.

"Because of all this I would have preferred to have been given a different reason for my exclusion, a more direct one, because I certainly wouldn't have objected if I had been left out as a technical choice."

However, despite his disappointment Oddo still backed his compatriots to build on their World Cup win from 2006.

He said: "I'll still support my team-mates, and I hope they can build on what we achieved two years ago."

Oddo is the second Italian player to voice his upset at being left out of the Azzurri squad for Euro 2008 after his AC Milan team-mate Filippo Inzaghi said on Wednesday that he expected Donadoni to explain his absence from the provisional 24-man squad.