AC Milan squandered the opportunity to jump above Juventus into second place in the Serie A table after suffering their first ever league defeat to Monza, and the issue of rotation has come to the forefront again.
There were some eyebrows raised regarding the fact that head coach Stefano Pioli chose to make six changes from the team that had quite comprehensively beaten Stade Rennais on the Thursday night prior for the game at the U-Power Stadium.
In particular, the decision was taken to revamp the attack and midfield almost entirely with Luka Jovic leading the line, Samuel Chukwueze on the right and Noah Okafor on the left while Yacine Adli and Ismael Bennacer both came into the double pivot, leaving Ruben Loftus-Cheek on ‘unchanged island’.
Pioli has now been at Milan for four and a half years and he has found himself leading the team in European competitions in the last four, which means by now he should be as experienced as any coach when it comes to managing the workloads of players and the importance of commitments.
However, there are a growing portion of the fanbase who believe that – since the start of last season at least – Pioli has actually gone backwards when it comes to effectively keeping on top of allocating minutes and starts.
The precedents
Since last season, there have been at least 10 cases in which either before or after a European match, Pioli resorted to using what many are now labelling ‘Milan B’. Of these games, on seven occasions the performance and the result were negative.
The first instance was Torino away last season, played between the Champions League group stage games against Dinamo Zagreb and Red Bull Salzburg, and Milan suffered a 2-1 defeat after fielding a line-up with five changes.
Milan also dropped four points in the games against Empoli and Bologna, the latter being the famous game in which the coach decided to change every single player barring Mike Maignan.
The home draw against Cremonese (seven changes) and the away defeat against Spezia (four changes) are two further examples highlighting points lost with the implementation of massive turnover before and/or after a European match.
There could be an argument made that the decision to focus on the Champions League run was worthwhile, given that the team went to the semi-finals while the Scudetto was out of reach, thus finding a way to salvage pride amid domestic disappointment.
There are three further cases this season where Milan ran into difficulties after making changes, such as Genoa-Milan following the trip to Borussia Dortmund, where Pioli made five changes and the Rossoneri won at the end thanks to a goal from Christian Pulisic while Olivier Giroud ended up in net.
The other two are Milan-Udinese – which ended with a dire 1-0 home defeat after the decision was made to field both Giroud and Luka Jovic up front – and of course the most recent loss to Monza in which there were changes in every department.
Looking deeper
In most of the aforementioned cases it was quite a straightforward explanation as to why there were so many alterations from one game to the next: to keep the starters fresh for a more important next game. However, an evening like the one on Sunday deserves a bit more introspection since it remains so fresh in the memory.
Let’s start with the defence, where Malick Thiaw came in for Simon Kjaer. We have to remove hindsight from the equation for this to be a fair analysis, and in doing so we have no complaints about that decision.
Kjaer cannot play multiple games in a week any more, Thiaw was coming back from injury and had 30 minutes under his belt against Rennes, so if that wasn’t the game to give him a first start then when was? Atalanta at home on Sunday, a far more daunting attack?
Looking at the attack, again it is quite clear to see the rationale behind the choices, especially after Pioli explained what the situation was after the game in his post-match press conference.
“Yesterday [the day before the game] Pulisic didn’t train because he was still tired and Rafa was going to play but he stopped during the final session and this morning he kept saying that he didn’t feel free with his calf,” he said.
“Rafa has always played, Pulisic the same. I thought it was right like this. Christian has never played so much in recent years, then he came on and did very well.”
For those who are enraged that neither of the first choice wingers started, the simple answer is that doing so would have been putting them at big risk of getting an injury. The plan was to play Leao, he was far from 100%, so Noah Okafor and Samuel Chukwueze both started.
Then, we cannot act as if there hasn’t been a large amount of supporters clamouring for Luka Jovic to get a start given that Olivier Giroud played the full game against Rennes and the Serbian has been excellent but limited to mostly bench opportunities.
With all those factors in mind, that attack simply picked itself. If anything, it could be argued that Ruben Loftus-Cheek is overdue a rest as well with his injury past, but for the other it is clear there was no real choice: rotation was needed.
There are definitely much greater question marks about the chopping and changing of the midfield. Yunus Musah and Tijjani Reijnders did great against Rennes, but both players were swapped out for Yacine Adli – who was very poor on the night – and Ismael Bennacer.
A lot has been written about how at least part of Milan’s defensive troubles are down to a disorganised and unbalanced midfield that fail to control the game and act as a breakwater in transition, so changing the double pivot entirely three games in a row does not help continuity and familiarity.
The fact is that Pioli was let down by individual mistakes from a number of players, be they lapses in judgement from Thiaw or a complete rush of blood to the head like Jovic had, while Okafor and Chukwueze were anonymous and others flopped too.
A 2-0 half-time deficit was clawed back to 2-2 thanks to the impact from two substitutes – Giroud and Pulisic – but it was all for nought as Warren Bondo and Lorenzo Colombo scored in added time and stole the points back, leaving a bitter taste.
It was a big blow having battled from behind, yet the situation remains the same after the game: Milan have a comfortable cushion to sixth place (it’s highly likely the top five in Serie A will get Champions League qualification) and they are out of the Scudetto race, but remain in a fight for second.
Mitigating factors
There are a couple more things that Pioli will likely point to in defence of his decision to make widespread changes so often during his time at Milan.
The first is the squad depth, or lack thereof. It has been well documented that the coach did not have a wealth of options at his disposal during his first arguably three seasons at the club.
What that meant is that there was often a very clear distinction between the starter-level players and the reserve options. For example, resting Giroud and Leao meant playing Rebic and Origi last season.
The Frenchman and the Portuguese could not play every game, so when the time came to prioritise competitions there was a noticeable drop off due to a lack of squad depth.
Roster construction therefore becomes something that certainly influences the ability to rotate effectively. The main 12-13 players in the squad cannot play 100% of the games, so when they were replaced the performance level obviously dipped
Whether the team that was fielded for the Torino, Empoli, Spezia and Bologna games mentioned above should have been good enough to win is another story, but a lack of genuine quality strength in depth left Pioli’s hands tied a bit.
Then, unavoidably, there is the issue of injuries. There is a whole other debate and discussion about whether the things Pioli can control – like training sessions, rest days and the type of work done at Milanello – could have avoided the various crises that have sprung up.
The staggering numbers have been well reported, with the most recent issue being an adductor problem for Davide Calabria who is still out and will be evaluated in the next few days ahead of a possible return before the weekend.
The full-back picked up the 34th injury of the season that a Milan player has had and the 23rd muscle injury, albeit the first one since January 10th, and with the return to playing twice a week imminent it must be hoped it is not the start of a return to the trend late in 2023.
What injuries produce is a vicious cycle: a player goes down in a particular position which means that the other player in that role has to work overtime until they get back, which in turn increases their risk of picking up a problem from working harder and so on.
It doesn’t quite feel right to label having so many physical problems as an ‘uncontrollable’, but either way it has limited Pioli’s ability to rotate, especially in the attacking department where several players have gone down this season.
Resource management
The Monza game puts Pioli in a difficult position ahead of the next two games. With another big match to come against Atalanta on Sunday at San Siro, what will he do in Rennes on Thursday? The temptation might be to rest players again in midweek, and go all-out against La Dea at the weekend.
With that said, this is where the feeding of alibis and explanations stops and the scrutiny has to begin. The fact is that it should never have to come down to batch rotations, and for an explanation we turn to Alessandro Del Piero.
The Juventus legend was covering the Monza game and on the Sky Sport Club programme he had his say on the questionable decision to make six changes by Pioli.
“It’s easier to have two or three new additions [to the line-up] compared to usual rather than four or five. However, it’s difficult to be a bench player and to then come on from the first minute, and perform great,” he said.
A brilliant example of what Del Piero is referring to is the fact that Pioli fielded the Pulisic-Giroud-Leao trident from the start in 17 out of 24 league matches (before Monza) and for four out of six matches in the Champions League games.
The comparison with the rest of Italy speaks volumes. Sassuolo’s trio of Berardi, Pinamonti and Laurienté are second having played 15 matches together, then Vlasic-Sanabria-Zapata started together 11 times for Torino and the others are under 10.
None of the three started on Sunday, which meant that the Chukwueze-Jovic-Okafor front three had a lot of pressure to produce having been reduced to almost entirely appearances off the bench so far this season.
As Del Piero alluded to, it is very hard to perform in those circumstances. That is why tweaks here and there are so important where possible, like playing Leao and Giroud with Chukwueze, Okafor with Giroud and Pulisic or Leao and Pulisic supporting Jovic.
When it becomes two or three new players in a particular department, it upsets the apple cart too much and eliminates and kind of cohesion and chemistry that has been built up. It leaves the team disjointed, which in turn has an impact on the other parts of the pitch including the defence.
Having the three main central defenders out at once, Bennacer out for a long time, Pobega sidelined, Okafor and Chukwueze absent for periods et cetera has meant it hasn’t always been easy to do that, yet that is where a coach earns their money.
They must know that fielding the strongest possible line-up 90% of the time to then heavily rotate on a couple of occasions in busy periods is not effective squad management. Sometimes pre-made plans come unstuck, but there has to be an ability to adapt and react.
What next?
In truth, the final part of the 2023-24 season feels like a procession. The hopes of getting a second star before Inter have faded into the distance, there is no Coppa Italia to at least hang onto a trophy target, and at the moment the idea of reaching the Europa League final in Dublin seems more like a dream than tangible reality.
There is still a lot to watch out for between now and the end of the season, with players fighting for their future at the club and the chance for Milan to measure themselves in a derby again, though it does seem like the Pioli era is fizzling out.
Rotation is just one of the areas that the manager is in the dock for which makes this a strange situation, because there an acknowledgement that a natural time to part is coming yet with every negative episode a public pile-on occurs.
The Rossoneri are in need of new ideas, that’s for sure, and the new coach will hopefully have a clear tactical identity, will have the summer to mould a squad better suited to their needs, will bring a new staff to help with the condition of the squad and will finally nail the issue of managing it effectively.
