Youssouf Fofana believes that AC Milan do not have a problem in the striker position and rather just have a problem taking the chances they create.
Fofana has become one of Milan’s most important players since his arrival from AS Monaco during the summer transfer window, starting virtually every game and becoming a crucial balancer in the middle of the park.
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Admittedly, he didn’t have his best game during Saturday’s 1-1 draw against Cagliari as he was partly to blame for the equalising goal in the second half. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Sergio Conceicao will see him as a critical part of the plans he is building at Milan.
On the eve of the game against Como away from home, SportMediaset released an interview they have done with Fofana, and his comments were relayed by MilanNews.
How has it been under Conceicao so far?
“There’s a lot of work to do. Conceiçao arrived on December 30, we immediately got two wins, but we haven’t had much time to work. We have to quickly understand what the coach wants and show it on the pitch as soon as possible.”
Are you scoring too few goals?
“There is no problem with the forwards. We have many players who can score goals like Pulisic, Leao, Morata, Abraham and there is also Reijnders who is scoring a lot. There are no problems with the forwards, we only have a problem with the effectiveness of scoring.”
Our issues is attacking midfielder that’s what we need Acmilan should sign attacking midfielder like 2 to resolve our problem otherwise we get a result that’s not encouraging thanks for conceicao support.
I think our biggest issue is a leaky back line which has prevented many more clean sheets. Walker will immediately shore up the right side. Walker and an engaged Theo (assuming he hustles back more on transition) will be as a good a set of defensive backs as you can find.
Well duh, Fofana isn’t going to throw his teammates under the bus otherwise that will be inviting many locker room problems and next Morata or Abraham might say something like: “we don’t have a striker problem but sometimes we have midfielders that lose the ball in silly fashions and cause us to concede goals”.
Now the question was: “Are you [you as in Milan I guess] scoring too few goals?”. The fact that he immediatly denied that we have a striker problem makes me think that he felt or read that we do have a striker problem.
But that’s just my take.
How people blamed other players apart from the keeper for his blunder on the goal is beyond me. He was 70 per cent, if not more, responsible for the goal being given up (the rest is probably on Mike). He needs to understand he’s in a critical part of the midfield and once they break him based on his position on the field in attack and defence and as the safety net for the defence, it’s a free route to goal..which is what exactly happened.
Anyways, to his point on scoring it seems he recognized that we have an issue with the forwards scoring lol 😂
In Serie A, the primary and biggest factor in the table is defence. It’s always defence first! The attack doesn’t come into play unless your defense is really terrible like last year. Right now Napoli only has 5 goals more than us but their defence is what have them at 1st. In years past our decent defence (top 3 in league) kept us in good positions in the table. When we did badly in both like we are doing this year (5th D, 8th A) we’re most likely to end up on the periphery of UCL spots as happened in the 22-23 season. Granted a goal a game isn’t bad but relative to other teams for this year’s competition, we need to be tighter. And with our defence being relatively ‘bad’ yes the offense needs to pull it’s slack.
100% agree. Defence (or defense if you’re in the US 🙂 first. That’s why we should sign Kyle Walker for an immediate upgrade to the back line vs. signing Rashford. We need 50%+ of our games to be clean sheets.
Maignan hasn’t had a howler in the 3 years that I’ve followed Milan. He gets a pass from me given the dozens of goals his saves (which other GKs wouldn’t have made) have prevented over the years. Imagine what our record would be without a world-class GK like Maignan?
To be honest we may need both of them (Rash and Walker).
I’ll keep my lips sealed on Mike lol 😆 now that I’ve looked at it back again, I might attribute more to him on that goal.
All I’ll say is that there was a discussion a few years back on who to sell instead of Tonali….I went with Mike (due to being injured too often for my liking) and taking De Gea who was a free agent at the time….and also a ‘Moneyball’ approach for those fans who like that sort of thing. Mike’s great nonetheless, happy to have him but I am biased towards shot-stopping over footwork for build up plays.
Walker! Yes! Totally agree.