AC Milan will make the trip to face Udinese tomorrow night and Stefano Pioli is likely to stick with the formula that worked well against Roma last weekend, a report claims.
This morning’s edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport (as seen below) recalls the start of the season when Milan played Bologna, Torino and Roma to start the season and they won all three games, with Pioli picking the same starting XI for each match.
A lot of injuries and other bumps in the road mean plenty has changed since those days in August, and Pioli has been forced to make alterations, so much so that he did not name the same line-up in consecutive games from September to January.
Today the treatment room is still fairly full, but in the meantime Pioli and Milan have found a new, encouraging balance. In Serie A the Rossoneri have won three straight, and the time for emergency experiments may have truly closed.
There is a new starting point: the XI tomorrow will be a photocopy of the one that beat Roma last Sunday. There was one possible exception given Olivier Giroud only returned to training yesterday after battling the flu, but the Frenchman is expected to start.
Logically he is not at his best though and if the decision is made to put him on the bench initially, Luka Jovic is ready to replace him in the centre of the attack after a fantastic December and a good start to January.
For the rest, the team is a formality and it passes through the likes of Tijjani Reijnders in midfield alongside Yacine Adli who was very impressive against Roma, Rafael Leao who wants to end his goal drought, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and of course Christian Pulisic.
And then there is Matteo Gabbia, who earned a spot as the starting centre-back against Roma. The performance of the former Villarreal player convinced everyone, and he seemed to rekindle that chemistry with Kjaer.
This is also thanks to the understanding he has with the Dane, the centre-back with whom Gabbia has played the most since being with the Rossoneri. In the 1,418 minutes that the two played together, Milan lost only twice (Fiorentina in the year of the Scudetto and Inter last February).
Gabbia’s return has a double significance: the inclusion of him in the middle in fact ‘freed’ Theo Hernandez, who returned to being a full-back after almost two months spent as a centre-back.
The result was encouraging too as Theo scored against Roma and looked back to his best, without losing defensive focus. Tomorrow we will see if Pioli has found a truly consistent Milan, in terms of men and results.
