During the international break there are always some players who arrive back later than others, but there is a particularly concerning case involving Christian Pulisic and Yunus Musah this time around.
As La Gazzetta dello Sport write, the United States will play against Mexico in a friendly in the early hours of Wednesday morning (European time) in a district of Guadalajara. This means that Pulisic and Musah will have to play, take a plane back to Italy and pretend that time zones do not exist.
They will be able to do a light workout only on Thursday, 48 hours before the game against Udinese at San Siro on the Saturday evening. This is one of the issues encountered with having players that have to travel across continents to represent their national teams.
A year ago, Pulisic returned from the break, found Inter waiting for him and it ended with a poor performance. In September things were better: a goal against Venezia, in a match that started badly but was resolved in a few minutes.
A month later, it is likely that head coach Paulo Fonseca will ask him for overtime because Pulisic is the most in-form player in the squad and leaving him on the bench seems difficult to imagine. However, some calculations will have to be done.
Milan have Udinese, Club Brugge and Bologna in the space of a week, so a bit of management is mandatory. Musah, on the other hand, has a great desire to earn more minutes and for him it shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Almost all of Milan’s starters have been called up to their national teams and, adding up the trips of each, you get to almost 90,000km. Pulisic and Musah beat everyone: 20,000km each, counting the distance as the crow flies between Milan and Austin (USA-Panama), Austin and Zapopan (Mexico-USA), Zapopan and Milan.
Chukwueze, to play with Nigeria, will travel almost 10,000km. Jovic, Pavlovic and Leao will each exceed 4,000km. Things are better for others, like Gabbia (just over 1,000km) and Reijnders (less than 2,000km).
