Paulo Fonseca took charge of his first competitive AC Milan game on Saturday, and the performance has drawn some rather unfavourable comparisons.
This morning’s edition of Il Giornale (via MilanNews) has a section with the headline ‘Fonseca debuts in Giampaolo style: dubious roles for Loftus and Saelemaekers’, casting doubt on some of his choices for the starting line-up.
The paper first and foremost criticise the decision to deploy Ruben Loftus-Cheek in the double pivot given his more attacking tendencies, as the Englishman and his partner Ismael Bennacer failed to get much control in the engine room.
In addition to that choice, the one to use Alexis Saelemaekers as a left-back instead of Theo Hernandez was questionable, given that the Belgian was never tried there during preseason and the Frenchman ended up coming on in the second half to try salvage the game anyway.
Finally, the fact that Fonseca preferred Malick Thiaw to Matteo Gabbia in the middle of the defence was a third question mark, because Gabbia was one of the best performers in the second half of last season and Thiaw has shown himself to be error-prone.
Il Giornale continue by adding that ‘these are the mistakes made by Fonseca to the point of reliving in the minds of many fans the disturbing debut made by Giampaolo (1-0 defeat in Udine with a very questionable team selection) at the dawn of the Boban-Maldini management’.
In that particular game, Giampaolo fielded a midfield three of Fabio Borini, Hakan Calhanoglu and Lucas Paqueta, with Suso playing in an unfamiliar playmaker role and Samu Castillejo – normally a winger – joining Krzysztof Piatek up front.