Last night was all about Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s farewell, but on the pitch it was Rafael Leao who showed that the future of AC Milan is all about him.
Calciomercato.com writes how ‘the night of the GodBye to Ibrahimovic became the night of Rafa Leao’ who proved once again that he deserves everything he has, including a new contract with a big pay rise.
There are few players like him in the world and none like him in Italy, with Milan now tasked with building a Scudetto-worthy team around him, such is the talent and potential that he possesses.
The game was played for a long time at the rhythm of a summer preseason game, with a penalty converted by Olivier Giroud at the end of the first half. Faraoni’s header levelled things and looked to steal a point for Verona that would have been enough to keep them up, but then up stepped Leao.
Both of his goals came from surging runs down the middle into space. The first saw him fire into the bottom corner from the edge of the box with a sweeping shot, the second saw him drop a defender and the goalkeeper before slotting into an empty net after a one-two with Alexis Saelemaekers.
The ‘GodBye’ to Zlatan Ibrahimovic took centre-stage then as the Swede was in tears on the San Siro pitch having announced his retirement, but the feeling is that those photos of the hug between Leao and Zlatan after his goal could end up becoming equally iconic in time.
Isn’t this already a Scudetto winning squad?
But hey why focus on reality when we can have wild speculation about what a “Scudetto winning squad” might conceivably in some distant universe look like.
And before someone says “21/22 was years ago”, the tittle winning side to which I’m referring was the side that went toe to toe with Napoli this season until the last 5 mins against Roma.
That’s when we went from being a “Scudetto winning squad” to a squad that couldn’t beat Cremonese (with an entirely different starting eleven having rotated almost the entire starting line up and expected this team that had never played together to beat one of the top 500 teams on the planet).
What does this “Scudetto winning squad” that is not the actual Scudetto winning squad look like? A team of robots who can sit on the bench for most of the season until we play a relegation side a week before a bit champions league tie and suddenly they can switch on?
I mean even an actual robotic team from football manager or fifa would struggle due to a lack of chemistry.
The number one thing we need next season is not to rest the entire first team against so called weaker teams.
We lost Kessie so…not it’s not the same Scudetto winning squad. He’s literally the difference