AC Milan continued their good start to the 2023/24 Serie A season with an impressive and commanding 4-1 victory over Torino at San Siro on Saturday night.
The Rossoneri were positive from the outset and deservedly took the lead through Christian Pulisic, but Perr Schuurs pegged them back.
That mattered little as Olivier Giroud scored two penalties and Theo Hernandez grabbed a great goal en route to victory.
All of the early pressure was on the Torino goal with Rafael Leao proving particularly dangerous to Ivan Juric’s side.
The Portuguese forward was getting all over the pitch and he clearly didn’t want to wait long for his first goal of the new campaign. Olivier Giroud was also involved a lot early on, with Tijjani Reijnders showing a lot of willingness to get forward.
Despite Milan having all of the ball, it was a Torino attacker who got the first injury of the night. Main goal threat Antonio Sanabria suffered a muscle injury and had to be replaced after 21 minutes by former Milan player Pietro Pellegri.
In the 27th minute, there was a very impressive and powerful run from Christian Pulisic through the middle of the pitch but his attempt to release Leao through on goal was unsuccessful as Perr Schuurs defended well.
It became clear very early that Schuurs had been told by Juric to follow Leao around the pitch. The defender was never far from Leao’s side. Despite that, Leao was often able to isolate and evade Schuurs down the left wing.
Milan found the breakthrough that their play had deserved just after half an hour, as Christian Pulisic stormed through the middle again and found Ruben Loftus-Cheek to his right. He then beat the defender to get into the box and played it across the box, where Pulisic was waiting to score with ease.
That was when everything started happening. Just a minute later, Schuurs had moved away from his battle with Leao and he actually grabbed the equaliser with Torino’s first sight of goal. A shot came in from the edge which Schuurs turned into the back of Maignan’s net with a good finish.
Parity did not last long, as Milan were handed a controversial penalty. A cross came in which clipped Giroud and hit the hands of Riccardo Rodriguez, which were just in front of his chest and in close proximity to Giroud. A VAR review led to the penalty which Giroud tucked away.
That goal may have been dodgy, but the third goal that came just before the break was not dodgy at all. Leao and Hernandez linked up superbly on the left to get the latter into the box, who then lifted the ball over Vanja Milinkovic-Savic to make it 3-1.
The second half started with some of the floodlights at San Siro going down, which almost led to play being stopped. It remained bright enough though and the contest became fairly sloppy for a while. Milan still remained by far the more creative side though.
In the 65th minute, Milan were awarded another penalty and this one was certainly the correct decision. Rafael Leao received a stamp in the box after playing a cross and the ref did not need to look at the monitor for long.
Giroud stepped up again and finished superbly, making it 4-1. That prompted some changes from Stefano Pioli, as three new signings in Noah Okafor, Yunus Musah and Samuel Chukwueze came on for Leao, Loftus-Cheek and Giroud.
Having made a host of changes and with the three points in the bag, attention turned to Friday’s match against AS Roma and Milan started to conserve energy.
There was no need to chase every single ball anymore as Torino were showing no sign of getting back into the contest.
The victory means Milan have got six points from a possible six this season and have already scored six goals, conceding just once.
