As if the problems with Rafael Leao and Theo Hernandez were not enough, Paulo Fonseca’s Milan have another thing to deal with: the defensive disaster so far in 2024-25.
As La Gazzetta dello Sport write, the two goals per game conceded in the first three league games is worrying in itself and absolutely not good enough for a team that considers themselves as competitors with Inter and Juventus for the Scudetto.
Digging even deeper, the major issue with the Milan defence is that it always lets itself be penetrated in the same way: a cross from the left – be it high or on the ground – to meet a runner in the middle who is unmarked.
The Torino, Parma and Lazio games all featured a film that repeated itself in a disturbing way. In the first game a cross from Zapata from the left met a header from Bellanova at the far post started the sequence, with Zapata, Man, Cancellieri, Castellanos and Dia turning it into an obvious trend.
The right side naturally is put under scrutiny, which was Davide Calabria and Ismael Bennacer against Toro, Calabria and Yunus Musah in Parma then Emerson Royal and Youssouf Fofana in Rome against Lazio.
Then the scorer often appears from the opposite side, the one governed by Theo Hernandez and the left-sided centre-back (Malick Thiaw or Strahinja Pavlovic). The marking is slack, the positioning is wrong and nobody is stopping the supply.
“It’s impossible to win when we defend like this,” said Fonseca after Parma. It is more difficult if you are always beaten in the same way.